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January 23, 2005

McKenzie: "The Efficacy of Cultural Performance"

McKenzie, Jon. 2001. "The Efficacy of Cultural Performance." In Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance London & New York: Routledge.

Overview: Trapsing through the history of performance studies, this essay frames the discipline through efficacy, liminality and resistance. The goal is to explain the significance of performance studies and to trace its contestations.

Scholars have regularly attributed the following to cultural performance: "1) social and self-reflection through the dramatization or embodiment of symbolic forms, 2) the presentation of alternative arrangements, and 3) the possibility of conservation and/or transformation" (31).

Performance studies inherently challenges, "provokes, contests, stakes a claim" (32). Like cultural studies, it "challenged theory to get real, while also challenging itself with theoretical questions concerning the status of that 'real'" (33). It pulls from a myriad of disciplines ranging from anthropology to cultural studies, linguistics to dance history. Four concepts are often cited as key: "Victor Turner's 'social drama,' Milton Singer's 'cultural performance,' Kenneth Burke's 'dramatistic pentad' and Erving Goffman's 'social psychology of everyday life'" (33).

For Carlson, "With performance as a kind of critical wedge, the metaphor of theatricality has moved out of the arts into almost every aspect of modern attempts to understand our condition and activities, into almost every branch of the human sciences - sociology, anthropology, ethnography, psychology, linguistics" (35).

Schechner: "Performance studies is 'inter' - in between. It is intergenic, interdisciplinary, intercultural - and therefore inherently unstable. Performance studies resists or rejects definition. As a discipline, PS cannot be mapped effectively because it transgresses boundaries, it goes where it is not expected to be. It is inherently 'in between' and therefore cannot be pinned down or located exactly" (50).

One concern: "By focusing on liminal activities, on transgressive and resistant practices, or, more generally, upon socially efficacious performances, we have overlooked the importance of other performances..." (52).

Notes: This framing of performance studies focuses on how the discipline is inherently other, and desirably so. There is contestation over how formal the discipline is and should be, a notable desire to be liminal and marginalized, situated outside of the normal structure of academia. Of course, this desire appears endemic to its self-view as resistant whereby acceptance would mean being a part of hegemonic discourse.

I have no idea how accepted this narrative of performance studies is, but the attempt to describe it is utterly fascinating, revealing many of the quirks of key characters.

Category: performance studies

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January 21, 2005

Sarah Thornton: "Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital"

Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Cover Description: This book is a highly innovative contribution to the study of popular culture. Focusing on youth cultures that revolve around dance clubs and raves, Sarah Thornton highlights the values of authenticity and hipness and explores the complex hierarchies that emerge within the domain of popular culture.

Using a rich combination of methods, Thornton paints a picture of club cultures as 'taste cultures' brought together by micro-media (like flyers and listings), transformed into self-conscious 'subcultures' by niche media (like the music and style press) and sometimes recast as 'movements' with the aid of mass media (like tabloid newspaper front pages). She also analyzes the changing status of the medium of recording, from a marginal second-class entertainment in the 1950's to the much celebrated, dominant form of clubs and raves in the 1990's. Drawing from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Thornton coins the term 'subcultural capital' to make sense of the distinctions made by 'cool' youth, paying particular attention to their disparagement of the 'mainstream' against which they measure their alternative cultural worth.

Synopsis: The book is separated into four distinct chapters:

1. The Distinctions of Cultures Without Distinctions - Thornton sets up the arguments made above using Bourdieu as her primary theoretical foundation. This is the chapter that briefly describes her key arguments. Here is where she describes "taste cultures" - cultures based on shared tastes, usually in music.

She introduces some binaries that have been utilized in discussing subcultures - 'hip' vs. other (a.k.a. mainstream) inverts pop vs. other. She recognizes the "veiled elitism and separatism" (5) involved in this, revealing the similarities and differences between the artworld and subcultures. Both are anti-mass culture, but while the artworld fears 'trickle down', "the problem for underground subcultures is a popularization by a gushing up to the mainstream" (5).

Thornton posits that subcultures work in conjunction with media, not opposed to them, yet the goal is to have disapproval because approval is the kiss of death for a subculture. It is the media's approval that subcultures fear, not the cops. Subcultures aren't defined in anything other than "those taste cultures which are labeled by media as subcultures" (8).

Using Bourdieu, Thornton discusses subcultural capital as an alternative to cultural capital and economic capital. It is subcultural capital that is a marker of 'hipness' and being in the know (10-11). Subcultural capital fuels rebellion against parents and authorities and lives in the fantasy world of being classless (12).

Directly addressing club cultures, Thornton demystifies a few idealistic fantasies, noting that: 1) venues are 'won' when the scene is seen as economically viable; 2) "they tend to duplicate structures of exclusion and stratification seen elsewhere" most notably race, class, gender, sexuality (25-26).

2. Authenticities from Record Hop to Raves (and the History of Disc Culture). This chapter is devoted to the history of records, discotheques and contemporary music scenes. A great deal of attention is paid to the battles between live and recorded music. There is a great slice through about the role of the RIAA and radio in maintaining control over music and music's "aura." A lot of this concerns what makes music authentic.

The issue of classlessness comes up - "Tom Wolfe took a more critical view, suggesting that these youngsters seemed to be classless because they had dropped out of the conventional job system: 'It is the style of life that makes them unique, not money, power, position, talent, intelligence... The clothes have come to symbolize their independence from the idea of a life based on a success of jobs'" (55).

3. Exploring the Meaning of the Mainstream (or why Sharon and Tracy Dance around their Handbags). Here, Thornton deals with the dichotomy between mainstream and subcultures head on.

Club cultures are fundamentally about fantasy, where play and work do not intersect. "It is rude to puncture the bubble of an institution where fantasies of identity are a key pleasure" (91).

"Hebdige's multiple opposition of avant-garde-versus-bourgeois, subordinate-versus-dominant, subculture-versus-mainstream is an orderly ideal which crumbles when applied to historically specific groups of youth" (93). She argus that there are three main dichotomies in academia that constitute the mainstreams versus the alternatives: 1) Dominant culture, bourgeois ideology vs. subculture, deviant guard; 2) Mass culture & commercial ideology vs. student culture, educated vanguard; 3) Dominant culture, bourgeois ideology vs. student culture, educated vanguard. She continues on to argue that these binaries are flawed from the getgo and do not reveal the nuances of subcultural participation.

From here, she talks about the "social logic of subcultural capital." Class and Bourdieu are essential to this. "'Bourgeois adolescents,' he writes, 'who are economically privileged and (temporarily) excluded from the reality of economic power, sometimes express their distance from the bourgeois world which they cannot really appropriate by a refusal of complicity whose most refined expression is a propensity towards aesthetics and aestheticism'" (102). Youth culture is appealing because "it acts as a buffer against social aging - not against the dread of getting older, but of resigning oneself to one's position in a highly stratified society" (102).

While mainstream is only identified through quantifiable measures, subcultures are always measured in qualitative terms (107).

4. The Media Development of 'Subcultures' (or the Sensational Story of 'Acid House'). Thornton follows the popularization of acid house in Britain - how it became cool and uncool, showing the role of the media in this process. In this chapter, she shows the complex relationship between media and subcultures, revealing how subcultures are not at all removed from media or commercialization, although they purport to be. A great deal of attention is paid to the importance of perceived 'moral panic' in solidifying a subculture - "'Every sub-culture breeds its own moral panic, every moral panic is stereotyped by its own devil drug'" (134).

"While subcultural studies have tended to argue that youth subcultures are subversive until the very moment they are represented by the mass media (Hebdige 1979 and 1987), here it is argued that these kinds of taste cultures (not to be confused with activist organizations) become politically relevant only when they are framed as such. In other words, derogatory media coverage is not the verdict but the essence of their resistance" (137).

"Contrary to the ideologies of both the underground and many subcultural studies, culture industries do not just co-opt and incorporate; they generate ideas and incite culture" (157).

....

I should note that Thornton's entire book is wrapped around her ethnographic study of British club cultures 1988-1992, piecing together extensive interviews with promoters and participants, media bits, and critiquing Hebdige through Bourdieu. She focuses mostly on what was considered 'rave' culture, stemming out of 'acid house.' As such, she followed mostly white, middle class (or middle-class presenting), straight groups from 14-22. The culture she is concerned with is heavily ecstasy dominated even with an 18 drinking age in Britain.

Towards the end, Thornton notes that the Internet has come about just after her research and while she does not know the effects it will play on club cultures, Brian Behlendorf's hyperreal is already suggesting that it will be important.

Contribution: The most significant contribution of this book is complicating the Birmingham's fantastical approach of subcultures that rests solely on a class argument and a divisive binary between us and them. Using Bourdieu to challenge Hebdige allows the emergence of subcultural capital even if subculture and its capital cannot be fully bounded. This book is also a great historical overview to the kinds of cultures that took us from the 60s, through the conservative 80s.

Other notes on the same book:

Category: subcultures

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