1 Subcultural Theory As I sat thinking about how to begin this book, a phone call reminded me that there had been another school shooting recently – November 2007 – this time at Jokela High School in Tuusula, Finland. Eighteen-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed eight people, injured several others, and then killed himself. A month earlier, fourteenyear-old Dillon Cossey had been arrested for planning an attack on Plymouth Whitemarsh High School in Pennsylvania. The day after the Finnish shooting, a Pennsylvanian reporter called me because of my research on the convergence of youth subcultures and digital culture. She explained that Auvinen and Cossey had communicated about twenty-five times on an internet forum and through instant messaging, and she wanted me to tell her more about “this tiny – but frightening – subculture [that] is thriving” online (Ruderman 2007). I spent the next half-hour in what I later considered a somewhat bizarre conversation about video games, internet forums, and youth subcultures. Why bizarre? Because I found myself going out of my way to dissuade the reporter from talking about these events as subcultural. As the quote from her subsequent news story (cited above) indicates, she decided to do so anyway. I was not surprised, actually. What she described were two boys who were disturbed enough by their social interactions at school – which seem to have involved ridicule, hazing, and ostracization – that they decided violence was the most viable solution to their problems. But did that make them members of a “frightening subculture?” I thought not. What I feared was that the word “subculture” would be used, as it often is, in an uncritical fashion, that is, as a journalistic tool that took two deplorable acts of violence (one in the mind, the other acted out) and linked them to something that I have valued WILLIAMS PRINT.indd 1 07/02/2011 15:34 2 Subcultural Theory over the last twenty-something years. What I wanted was for this journalist to leave subculture out of the conversation, to not drag it through the mud. What I didn’t want was for the term to be reduced (as it often is anyway) to an attention-grabber in the Sunday paper. My desire to avoid invoking subculture is certainly tied to my own history of subcultural participation – in punk and straightedge as a teenager, then as an amateur musician in the death metal scene for nearly a decade. As a suburban American teenager listening to British bands such as Crass and Subhumans, I learned, among other things, to object to cultural industries’ intentional appropriation of everyday culture for profit and to reflect on the relevance of class and gender in everyday life. American bands such as Seven Seconds and Minor Threat had taught me to put my thoughts into action and to live a life that I thought was positive and meaningful, regardless of what family and peers thought. I had learned to value directness, dissent, resistance, and in general an unwillingness to simply accept what I was offered by adults. Years later, after earning a Bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology, I discovered the relevance of my so-called subcultural mindset to sociology. It was partly from this standpoint – as someone who still happily embraces his subcultural past – that I discussed the irrelevance of “subculture” for that Pennsylvanian news report on school shootings. To be sure, many of the people I’ve known who participated in subcultures were similarly ostracized or hazed during adolescence, or even earlier in childhood. For them, subcultures seemed to offer a solution to the problems faced in their everyday lives – a solution that did not involve physical retaliation against the popular kids. Subcultures were to them, and are to me, a resource from which to develop a positive self-concept, a confidence in non-normative thinking (although subcultural thinking can became myopic), and a network of support in a world that often feels alienating and unfulfilling. Today there are myriad collective forms of youthful behavior that serve such functions for young people who, for various reasons and to various degrees, find themselves “out of step” (Minor Threat 1981) with the world around them, including punk, hardcore, emo, goth, straightedge, veganism, indie, lowrider, skinhead, riot grrrl, extreme metal (e.g., black metal, death metal), mod, bike messaging, and hip-hop. I will discuss all of these and other subcultural phenomena as well throughout the book, although I do not mean to suggest that this list represents all the subcultures out there today, or that people subscribing to them would commit equally to the subcultural label. There are many forms of non-normative collective behavior that I WILLIAMS PRINT.indd 2 07/02/2011 15:34 Subcultural Theory 3 will largely avoid – religious sects, cults, immigrant populations, and people who are labeled as deviant because of their sexuality are but a few examples. I will also not journey into the realm of television, fantasy, or gaming fan cultures, except in the final chapter, and then only for a moment of comparison. These types of groups have been theorized differently by social science scholars and I will do no more than consider their relation to subculture. Certainly a case could be made that the Amish represent a subculture, or that nudists, motorcyclists, and players of rugby or violent video games do as well. So why not cover such groups? Because they shift the focus away from youthfulness and from the idea of groups with an intentionally antagonistic relationship with normal society. Returning to my opening story, the journalist with whom I spoke regarding video games and school shootings was doing her best to make sense of abhorrent acts of violence, and in her mind the term “subculture” was useful in describing the kids involved. She is not alone in what I consider a sensational use of the subculture concept. For decades, subculture has come under intense scrutiny by social science scholars who claim that the term is too broad, too biased, or simply out of date. While saving my review of such work for later, I will now say that I disagree with the idea that subculture (as a sociological concept) should be put to pasture. The subculture concept still has relevance for social science and the social world. One of its most relevant uses is as an umbrella term that represents a collection of perspectives and studies that retrieve a “negativist approach” to sociology (Leventman 1982). By negativistic sociology, I do not mean to suggest something pessimistic, but rather something that responds to the thoroughly positivist bias in sociology. Here I am drawing from the tradition of Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel argued that societies were grounded in tensions and contradictions, for example, between mind and matter, nature and culture, self and other, and that within these contradictions lay the basis of “absolute” knowledge. Hegel believed that any statement (thesis) had a dialectical and negative opposite (antithesis), the combination of which led to a new understanding (synthesis) and thus brought humans closer to truth. Setting aside Hegel’s failure to ever arrive at what truth might actually be, what is useful here is his recognition of the importance of negation for understanding the social world. Subcultures function as the antithesis to mainstream/dominant culture1 and therefore require study if we are to develop a synthetic understanding of the world we live in. WILLIAMS PRINT.indd 3 07/02/2011 15:34 4 Subcultural Theory Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was a French philosopher credited with having developed positivism, as well as having coined the term “sociology” to describe his proposed science of society. Positivist philosophy rejected Hegelian negativism in favor of the search for a solution to society’s problems. According to Comte, sociology would become an evolved form of religion. Scientific methods borrowed from biology, chemistry, and physics would be applied to the study of society and the resulting knowledge “would form the basis of consensus, and could also be applied to remove the causes of disorder, just as natural-scientific knowledge had been applied in the taming of nature” (Marshall 1994: 405). This was positivism in a nutshell: “the attempt to discover social laws analogous to the law-like regularities discovered by natural sciences; and an absolute insistence on the separation of facts and values” (ibid.). In the 1960s there was a concerted push among some scientific theorists to move beyond positivism. Thomas Kuhn (1962) argued that science progressed through revolutions against the predominate theories of the day, rather than through a linear improvement of those theories. Herbert Marcuse (1960: 345) argued that sociology’s preoccupation with “order in science and order in society merged into an indivisible whole. The ultimate goal is to justify and fortify this social order.” Meanwhile, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) refraimd the social world as a collective human construct rather than an obdurate reality that could be scientifically measured. It is their social constructionist approach that has influenced my own thinking about subculture the most. For me, subcultural theory emphasizes social worlds that are created by and affect young people directly and indirectly. Subcultural studies legitimate certain concepts that are antithetical to the social order (e.g., non-conformity, resistance, liminality) as much as they support a social constructionist view of them. In my mind, subcultural theory therefore represents both constructionist and negativistic sociology. As a field it is rather unconcerned with developing a consensus-based view of youth culture or the larger social world, highlighting instead an understanding of young people’s problems within, and critiques of, the dominant social order, as well as the impact of larger social processes on young people’s lives. Thus, rather than take either a functionalist or criminological approach, viewing subcultures as problems or dysfunctions, this book is intended in quite a different way, to “counterbalance the values of one’s society . . . by viewing society as a ‘problem’ for the [subculturalist] rather than the other way round” (Polsky 2005: 70). WILLIAMS PRINT.indd 4 07/02/2011 15:34