Rock Music and the State: Dissonance or Counterpoint?Author(s): Katrina IrvingReviewed work(s):Source: Cultural Critique, No. 10, Popular Narrative, Popular Images (Autumn, 1988), pp. 151-170Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354111 .Accessed: 08/05/2012 23:46

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Rock Music and the State: Dissonance or Counterpoint?

Katrina Irving

Culture does not try to reach down to the level of the inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own ...; it seeks to do away with classes.'

-Matthew Arnold'

he important question concerning counterculture in general, and rock music in particular, is the extent to which its initial, undenia-

bly antagonistic impulse is co-opted by the dominant culture and neu- tralized by being incorporated as mere difference. For George Melly, the issue is clear: rock's undoing lies in its inevitable movement from "private emotion to public entertainment ..., from an inner clique speaking a closed language toward a whole generation enthusing with shallow hysteria over a fashion."2 It is commercialization which serves to "civilize" rock. Yet even so pessimistic a critic as Theodor Adono admits that "there is still some bad, good music.... Under the pressure

I am grateful to William Spanos for providing helpful criticism and suggestions. I would also like to thank Poonam Arora for her careful reading of earlier drafts and for her insightful comments.

1. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1883), 38. 2. George Melly, Revolt into Style (London: Penguin Press, 1970), 39.

l 1988 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Fall 1988). All rights reserved.

151

152 Katrina Irving

of the marketplace, much genuine talent is absorbed by popular music and cannot entirely be crushed even then."3 Thus recent critics have shifted their focus to the site of rock's reception, where they see a strug- gle between the meaning endowed by the rock industry and the "re- contextualization" of it by specific groups and its incorporation into a counter-hegemonic discourse.

It is essentially the same question that currently rages around the lit- erary text. As Jameson asks, "Is the text a freefloating object in its own right, or does it 'reflect' some context or ground, and in that case, does it simply replicate the latter ideologically, or does it possess some au- tonomous force in which it could also be seen as negating that con- text?"4 I believe it is initially more productive to ask this question in the domain of popular culture, since the latter's commercialization in- validates any claims to transcendence. Rock is paradigmatic in this re- spect-its ineluctable rootedness in the culture industry throws into re- lief the issue of autonomy within the cultural artefact. We are enabled, in other words, to ask if the emergence of the punk movement was genuinely subversive without having to parry humanistic claims about Sid Vicious's "genius," which enabled him to rise above his social and historical context and to address truly "universal" issues. The music of Vicious manifestly was a political response to British working-class de- spair in the mid 70s, yet this response was also manifestly one manipu- lated by that bastion of commercialism, the rock industry. To repeat, we are left free to consider whether, despite hegemony, some gesture of dissent is possible through the medium of cultural objects.

Given the variety of rock's manifestations, any attempt to apply a

particular theory to the exclusion of others is fruitless. Adhesion to the optimism of say, a Raymond Williams, as against the pessimism of an Adomo, or vice versa, serves to obscure the crucial differences in the role of rock in different societies. Not that I am advocating a theoretical free-for-all or a relapse into benign pluralism. Rather, I would see the differences in theories produced in different societies as being sympto- matic of the different roles available to rock, depending on its context.

Taking Britain and the U.S. as my examples, I propose to examine the

3. Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 32.

4. FredricJameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 38.

Rock Music and the State 153

theories produced by observers of both scenes in an attempt to eluci- date the divergence in rock's function. However, of the two models I discuss, I am not at all suggesting that one is applicable solely to the U.S. and the other to Britain. It is a matter of major tendencies.

Before proceeding, I want to look briefly at Emesto Laclau's theory of populism in order to provide a framework for discussion. For Ladau, any society that has a preponderance of the middle class, which is by definition separated from the dominant relations of production, will tend to see ideological struggle rather than class struggle. In the mid- dle class, "identity as a people plays a much more important role than the identity as a class."5 What constitutes this identity as "people" is what Laclau calls populist ideology. Taking his cue from Althusser, Laclau believes the basic function of all ideology is to interpellate/con- stitute individuals as subjects:

Individuals, who are simply bearers of structures, are transformed by ideology into subjects, that is to say, they live their real condi- tions of existence as if they themselves were the autonomous principle of determination of that relation. The mechanism of this charac- teristic inversion is interpellation. (PIM, 100)

Obviously, there are many different types of interpellation (religious, political, familial), but what interests Laclau is popular-democratic in-

terpellations, which constitute populist theory. Such interpellations are

present in every society and imply "a set of symbols or values . . .

through which the people grow aware of its identity through its con- frontations with the power-bloc.... Such interpellations only become

populism ... when these symbols or values are synthesized as an an- tagonistic complex with respect to the dominant ideology" (PIM, 113). Populism is therefore the ideological crystallization of resistance to op- pression, "that is, to the very form of the state" (PIM, 113). Dealing with such notions as "the people" and "the national interest," popu- lism as a popular tradition is always longer lasting than class ideolo-

gies. It is an inter-class ideology, and the extent to which any group succeeds in creating and maintaining hegemony depends on the extent to which it can arrogate to itself and identify itself with these elements

5. Emesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: New Left Books, 1977), 114. Cited hereafter in the text as PIM.

154 Katrina Irving

of popular and democratic culture. Ideological struggle, therefore, in a

predominantly middle-class society such as America and, to a much lesser extent, Britain, will be focused on popular-democratic elements. It seems evident that rock music is such an element. The extent to which it can function as a counter-hegemonic element is intimately bound up with how far the popular-democratic elements in any socie- ty are identified with the dominant culture and to what extent an alter- native discourse (and culture) exists which struggles to arrogate popu- lar culture, such as rock, to itself.

David Morley, writing in a British context, has carried out at a practi- cal level an investigation of this need for an alternative discourse which challenges the identification of populist elements with the dominant culture.6 In his essay it becomes clear that media audiences are not an undifferentiated mass of individuals always already constituted by the dominant culture, but a complex of socially organized individuals be- longing to a number of overlapping cultures. Morley analyzes the ef- fect of a current-affairs type program (Nationwide) on three different sectors of the working class. Each showed very different reactions to it, indicating that there is a potential disjunction between the codes of those sending and those receiving messages through the circuit of mass communications. For us, the crucial point is that "whether or not a programme succeeds in transmitting the dominant meaning will de- pend on whether it encounters readers who inhabit codes and ideolo- gies derived from other ... areas."7 Of the three groups monitored (Trade Union officials, young apprentice electricians, and young black college students), the Trade Union officials generated the most oppositional reading, with their commitment to Trade Unionism aid- ing them in rejecting the program's attempt to create a Nation, a Com- munity of Great Britain. They resented, in other words, the appropria- tion of popular-democratic elements by the dominant culture. The id-

eology of the young electricians most closely corresponded to the dominant meaning of the program, while the blacks made very little connection at all with it, being so alienated from its mores that their re- sponse was silence. The Trade Unionists' dissent was in large measure

6. David Morley, "Cultural Transformations: The Politics of Resistance," in Lan- guage, Image, Media, ed. Howard Davis, et al. (London: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 104-20.

7. Ibid., 107.

Rock Music and the State 155

a class antagonism, and it was the existence of a sharply delineated class system which provided the opportunity for an alternative reading of the discourse of the dominant culture. Trade Unionism merely gave form and direction to that pre-existing cass feeling. Although to deny that an oppositional discourse can be generated from somewhere other than a class antagonism would be a crass economism, it appears evident that the almost completely successful elision of class difference in the U.S. has meant that a major site for the production of counter-hegemonic dis- course is lacking. To that extent, the phenomenon of rock music is more

likely to be identified with, and expressive of, the dominant culture. This theory is born out in the work ofJohn Pattison, one of the most

recent observers of the American rock scene. If, for Foucault, society's impulse is to break up sites of resistance to the dominant culture-to "neutralize any effect of a counter-power that springs in [these sites], and which forms a resistance ... to the power that wishes to dominate it; agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, anything that might organize horizontal conjunctions"8-Pattison, in The Triumph of Vulgari- ty,9 argues that such an oppositional model is redundant in the U.S. context. "Ours is a much more homogenous culture than we generally allow, in which elite and popular culture subscribe to a single set of ideas" (TV, xi). For Pattison, counterculture, and specifically rock, is in- different to traditional politics and is "a radical departure that dis-

penses of the debilitating class conflict and substitutes for it a form of action closer to human need" (TV, 155). What this latter turns out to be is "a replacement of the city of the world with the city of the self' (TV, 159). He sees rock's "transcendence" of class politics as being true to the American situation: both rock and American politics subvert the

existing class structure (American politics being seen as a permanent reaction against European politics) by ignoring it. Here we see the ca-

pitulation of the theorist to the myth perpetuated by the dominant cul- ture. Rock's transformation into an agency of solipsism serves the dom- inant culture, and the identification of rock's impetus with that of the American state is an indication of the extent to which the power-bloc has arrogated popular elements into its own ideology. Pattison's refusal

8. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 220. 9. John Pattison, The Triumph of Vulgarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Cited hereafter in the text as TV.

156 Katrina Iruing

to consider the European rock manifestation is a reduction which is

necessary if his theory is to have any semblance of coherence, but it contributes to his blindness. He states, "Both rock and rock's new class order of feeling had to arise in America, where repugnance to the Eu-

ropean class-struggle had always been strong" (TV, 155). Pattson identifies rock with the philosophy of the American Revolution:

The essential points stressed again and again in rock are the grow- ing, healthy self, the corrupt and inhibiting nature of the world's social organization, [and] aversion to ... class and political institu- tions.... These are the same values praised in the American revo- lutionary myth, under the names democracy, pluralism. (TV, 171)

Pattison's acuity in identifying the populism inherent in rock is paral- leled by an incredible blindness to the extent to which such mytholo- gies diverge from reality. His elision of the very real class differences in the U.S. leads him to affirm both rock and the existing power structure as manifestations of the same impulse: "Rock is not a force in opposi- tion to, but completely in accord with, the prevailing system. It can have no impact on it, because it is the prevailing system" (TV, 173). In the absence of any other articulating complex of dissent, rock is identified with the ethos of the dominant culture.

If, as Laclau indicates, on the level of ideological struggle it is the

people/power-bloc contradiction that is paramount, it becomes clear

why the generation of an oppositional discourse in America is so diffi- cult, for the historical foundations of the U.S. are precisely those which

emphasized "the people" as a community of Americans rebelling against British rule. The state from its inception was inseparably linked

up with "the people." Thus Crevecoeur, in his essay "What is an American?"0l states that America

is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess every- thing, and of a herd of people who have nothing. This fair country alone is settled by freeholders, the possessors of the soil they culti- vate, members of the government they obey, and the framers of their own laws."

10. Michel Guillaume St. John De Crevecoeur, "What is an American?" in Letters from an American Farmer (London: J. M. Dent, 1945), 39-87.

11. Ibid., 55.

Rock Music and the State 157

Rock as a populist discourse is much more easily identifiable with the state than in England. Pattison's assertion that the "rocker would say that 'mine is an ideology that grows out of the American Revolution..., I will do away with classes ..., I am the line of descent from Whitman, and the embodiment of U.S. democracy' " (TV, 188) correctly identifies rock's populism, but his failure to realize the extent to which this dis- course is produced by and serves the hegemony entails a capitulation to the elisions of the dominant culture.

I turn now to FredricJameson, perhaps the most influential Marxist critic in America. Although he does not deal directly with popular mu- sic, his intervention in the realm of popular culture is too important to be ignored. ForJameson, Laclau's interpretation is outmoded; so suc- cessfully has the state arrogated popular-democratic elements to itself that the development of alternate ideologies is well-nigh impossible. The totalizing nature of ideology under late capitalism both constitutes and benefits from the fragmentation of individuals. The subject no

longer possesses the perceptual equipment to connect with the emer-

gence of what he calls "hyperspace," and our dilemma is the "incapac- ity of our minds ... to map the great global multinational and decent- red communicational network in which we find ourselves caught."'2 This induces paralysis, and a condition in which

[we] feel that not only punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerilla warfare, but also even overtly polit- ical interventions like those of "The Clash" are somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no dis- tance from it.13

For Jameson, the typical rock song is one which works to produce in the listener a momentary euphoria which is simultaneously recontain- ed. Such songs as the B52's "Planet Claire" evoke a fabulous other world via surreal gesturing, but have no social referent, working rather to induce a solipsistic fantasy in the consumer. Discordant shrieks and

abrupt rhythmic switches serve to mimic just that schizophrenia which

12. Jameson, "Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984): 57.

13. Ibid., 87.

158 Katrina Irving

Jameson sees as characteristic of postmodern culture. Such music fits in well with Christopher Lasch's view of contemporary U.S. culture as one characterized by the logic of individualism and a narcissistic pre- occupation with the self.14

By now the crucial divergence between Pattison's theory and that of

Jameson should be apparent. On the one hand, they concur in the es- sential features of rock's philosophy: individualist, in its Rousseauistic affirmation of the free subject rebelling against institutional restriction; and populist, in its denial of class distinctions. On the other hand, they disagree in the implications of this for rock's subversive potential. The

philosophy of rock is for both critics congruent with that promulgated by the state, but whereas for Pattison, that congruency is the outcome of collusion, for Jameson it is a question of co-optation. Thus Pattison sees rock as a product of the same thrust that brought the American state into being: individualist, anti-European, and hence subversive. For Jameson, the corporatist, hegemonic state encourages just such populist art-forms (be they architecture, literature, or rock music) as

proof of its individualist ethos. Thus, does it efficiently disguise its own normalizing and totalitarian nature? In the light of this analysis, Pattison's view that rock's anti-institutional philosophy aligns it with the American state would be, for Jameson, testimony to the latter's ef- ficacy in disguising its true hegemonic and totalitarian thrust.

For Jameson, the most characteristic feature of our culture is the ef- facement of the "older, essentially high-modernist frontier between high culture and the so-called mass or commercial culture."'5 Thus our postmoder culture, logically enough, presents itself as a kind of aes- thetic populism. Not just rock music, but "serious" music now colludes in America's attempted elision of class tensions. All types of music-in- deed, all culture-come together with the ideological mission of dem- onstrating "that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism ... the omnipresence of class struggle."16 The opposition of highbrow and lowbrow with its in-built notion of hi- erarchy is eliminated, and yet another site of difference around which a counter-hegemonic discourse might have been articulated is removed.

14. See his The Culture of Narcissism: American Culture in the Age of Diminishing Expecta- tions (New York: Warner, 1979).

15. Jameson, "Postmodernism," 54. 16. Ibid., 55.

Rock Music and the State 159

YetJameson's theory, no less than Pattison's, suffers from an exclusive concentration on the American scene. He too easily extends affairs in the U.S. to the rest of the Western world. Thus he asserts that "this whole

global type of postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural ex-

pression of a whole new wave of American military and cultural domina- tion."17 On the one hand, it is clear that this totalizing approach is a po- litical strategy, an attempt to combat the current state of the atomization of theories. Against the totalization of the state, he opposes a totalizing theory: an attempt to provide us with a "cognitive mapping." Yet his im-

pulse to construct a cultural dominant serves to imprison him by its very success; no counter-hegemonic gestures seem possible.

To be fair, this is a risk thatJameson knows he is running. Far more serious is his treatment of the class system. On the one hand, he sees that the major function of ideology today is to convince the subject that s/he really does

inhabit a postindustrial society from which traditional production has disappeared, and in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist ... -a conviction that has immediate effects on

political praxis.'8

Yet throughout his essay Jameson, like Pattison, is consistently prey to this same illusion. For if, as he admits, classes do indeed still exist, then that monolithism of ideology which he talks about is, in practice, im-

possible to achieve. The existence of the working class provides at least a potential site for the elaboration of a counter-hegemonic discourse

through the existence of class antagonism and consequent political formations. The middle classes might find it possible to succumb to that illusion of classlessness of which he speaks: the lower classes would find it considerably harder. Jameson is, in fact, writing out the lower classes in the very gesture of including them. His immersion in the American context, which places him paradoxically in the same camp as Pattison, is also a product, as Edward W. Said has pointed out, of "his cloistral seclusion from the inhospitable world of real politics."19

17. Ibid., 57. 18. Ibid., 91. 19. Edward W. Said, "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community," in

The Antiaesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), 149.

160 Katrina Irving

The discourse of Theodor Adoro, the first major Marxist critic to focus his attention on popular music in America, is by contrast debili- tated by a preoccupation with the class system. His major thoughts on the subject (in his Dialectic of Enlightenment20) were completed just after his lengthy stay in the U.S. In 1932 he had been offered a post with Paul Lazerfeld's Princeton Office of Radio Research. Although his first contribution to the subject of jazz was written in Britain, its over- whelming critical tone is mitigated by his attribution of liberatory possibilities to the music. Upon his arrival in America, he began to re- gret even those liberatory elements. His first piece written in the U.S., "On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Hearing,"21 was new in its analysis of fetishism as an inevitable element of capital- istic culture, where men worshipped their own objects. Music's reifica- tion was almost complete, given its invasion by the capitalist ethos and a regression to a passive, infantile state inevitable on the part of the lis- tener. Popular music is then seen by Adorno as doubly regressive, both inherently and through its co-optation by the consumer industry.

In his history of the Frankfurt school, Martin Jay touches slightly on the emigre status of its members, asserting that this status provided an invaluable critical distance from the culture, preventing Adorno and the others from equating mass culture with true democracy:

Having known an alternative cultural milieu, they [Adorno, Hork- heimer, etc.] were unwilling to trade its prommesse de bonheur for the debased coin offered by the culture industry.22

What Jay fails to see is that concentration on the American scene led the Frankfurt school, like Jameson, to overemphasize the totalitarian nature of the culture industry and to play down what sometimes ap- pears to them as its revolutionary potential.

Despite their bias against the culture industry, it is they, nonetheless, who first touch on the notion of "recontextualization," well in advance of the Birmingham school of culturalism. Thus, in Dialectic of Enlighten- ment, Adoro talks of the housewife who,

20. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1987).

21. Cited in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), 189.

22. Ibid., 216.

Rock Music and the State 161

in spite of the films which are intended to complete her integra- ton .. ., finds in the darkness of the movie theater a place where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she used to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the great cities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these temperature-controlled lo- cations.23

Then too, he finds optimism in the dilemma facing the culture indus- try: "The rate at which they [the people] are reduced to stupidity must not fall behind the rate at which their intelligence is increasing."24 But these glimmers of independence on the part of the masses are not em- phasized, for Adoro prefers to dwell on that aspect of mass culture that seems to him most prevalent in America, the fact that it is a "train- ing course in passivity."25

However, there is evidence that Adomo realized that jazz functioned differently in America than in Britain: in "Jazz-Perennial Fashion" he states that "the element of excess, of insubordination in jazz which is still to be felt in Europe is entirely missing here in the U.S."26 It is in ef- fect Adoro's failure to appreciate the existence and durability of popu- lar-democratic elements which leads him to see ideology as a monolith- ic, standardizing phenomenon. In the absence of any such conception, he assumes the opposite extreme from Pattison and dwells on the eli- sion of classes which the dominant culture effects. In this, of course, he

pre-empts Jameson. However, his emphasis is different: whereas

Jameson almost succumbs to this ideology, Adorno never forgets the existence of classes. Rather, he gives too little credit to the masses' inde-

pendence of mind. Instead of concentrating on what he sees as the uneven development of homogenized culture in America and Europe due to the unequal growth in technology, he bases his theory almost ex-

clusively on an examination of the American scene. He is thus led to

neglect crucial elements of opposition within the mass media more

readily perceivable elsewhere. He arrives at a notion of ideology mono- lithic in form: "The need which might resist central control has already

23. Adomo, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 139. 24. Ibid., 145. 25. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 31. 26. Adomo, "Jazz-Perennial Fashion," in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry We-

ber (London: Neville Spearman Ltd., 1967), 128.

162 Katrina Irving

been suppressed by control of the individual consciousness."27 Here the consciousness lies like raw material which is then, through a variety of insidious means (chief of which are the mass media), seized upon and indoctrinated without resistance. Failure to take into account the existence of non-class specific ideological elements available for appro- priation by counter-hegemonic groups gives his theory a lopsidedness.

A brief consideration of the very different roles performed by one particular rock group, the Beatles, in Britain and in America, shows how a comparative viewpoint could have mitigated both Jameson and Adorno's almost unrelieved pessimism. The significance of the Beatles' songs did not inhere in their lyrics. Such titles as "She Loves You," "Twist and Shout," and "I Saw Her Standing There" were sufficiently non-specific to allow them to cross the Atlantic with ease and to per- form very different functions in both contexts.

To understand that, in Britain, listening to this music was an anti-es- tablishment act requires knowledge of the social context from which the Beates emerged and in which their music was played. They came from Liverpool in Northern England, home of coalminers, steelwork- ers, and D. H. Lawrence. Initially, they consciously foregrounded their origins, and their first album sleeve shows them standing on the porch of a block of council flats (low-cost, government housing). Moreover, as Jim Curtis points out in his book, Rock Eras,28 the very fact that the Beates drew on black American music entailed a counter-hegemonic act. The Beades started out by listening to Elvis, then were influenced by Chuck Berry and Motown groups. The British establishment, how- ever, was at this time in violent reaction against the democratization of British society caused, in their view, by America's influence. It was per- haps natural for the working class youth, in their attempt at self-defini- tion and assertion, eagerly to seize, in reaction, on this brash American culture. Listening to the Beades became, not least, a gesture of cass solidarity, and that solidarity coalesced around all things American.

The conditions in which this music was played further increased

27. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 139. 28. Jim Curtis, Rock Eras: Interpretations of Music and Society, 1954-1984 (Ohio: Bowling

Green State University Popular Press, 1987). Much of my analysis of the divergent im- pact of the Beatles on America and Britain is drawn from Curtis's book, especially his chapter "On Beatlemania," 132-43.

Rock Music and the State 163

class awareness. At this time there was, in contrast to America, no Top 40 radio station: all broadcasting was in the hands of that ultra-estab- lishment body, the BBC. Pop music was, in effect, live music, and working class kids gathered all over England in clubs like the Cavern to hear their favorite groups play.

The impact of the Beatles in America could not have been more dif- ferent. As Philip Norman puts it, their emergence comprised "a mo- ment simultaneously gratifying America's need for a new ideal, a new toy, a painkilling drug and a laugh."29 He is here referring to the wide- spread notion that the Beatles served as a catharsis after the assassina- tion of President Kennedy, which occurred the day after the release of the Beatles album, "With the Beates." Like Kennedy, the Beades, says Curtis, were "young, handsome, witty, poised, self-assured, and above all successful."30 Like Kennedy, they had a slightly exotic quality, and

ironically, an aristocratic air, since the Americans could not distinguish their accent as working class.31 Rather, they appeared merely British and, to that extent, slightly alien. Whether or not this Kennedy cathar- sis theory is valid, the very fact that it has gained currency is sympto- matic of the divergent role of rock in both countries. In both cases, the

phenomenon of the Beatles was populist, but in the first case that

populism was arrogated to the cause of the working class, while in the U.S. populist ideology was so completely arrogated to hegemony that a rock group could become a surrogate head-of-state.

I turn now to the theorists of the British scene. Much work has been done recently by the British critics centered on the Contemporary Cul- tural Studies Centre at the University of Birmingham. Many of these are Marxists of the "Williams" school, whom Stuart Hall has termed "The Culturalists."32 As opposed to Adorno or Jameson, these theo- rists tend not to see the rock audience as always already inscribed by the dominant culture, but rather, such critics as Paul Willis and Dick

Hebdige focus on what they term the "recontextualization" of com- mercial products by subcultures. Here, for example, is Paul Willis:

29. Cited in Curtis, Rock Eras, 141. 30. Ibid., 142. 31. Ibid. 32. See his "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," in Culture, Ideology and Social Process:

A Reader, ed. Tony Bennet (Batsford: Open University Press, 1981).

164 Katrina Irving

Oppressed, subordinate or minority groups can have a hand in the construction of their own vibrant cultures and are not merely dupes; the fall-guys in a social system stacked overwhelmingly against them and dominated by capitalist media and commercialism.33

Rock is capable of generating an oppositional culture from within it- self, for such appropriation of commercial objects leads to an attrition, from within, of the control of the dominant culture. The optimism of these culturalists may be seen as stemming from one fundamental point, drawn from Raymond Williams. As Stuart Hall indicates,

For the culturalist . . , experience was the ground, the terrain of the "lived," where consciousness and conditions intersected. The structuralists on the other hand, insisted that "experience" could not be the ground of anything, since one could only live and expe- rience one's conditions in and through the categories, classifica- tions and frameworks of the culture.34

Because of the culturalists' separation of consciousness and condi- tions, they can insist that subcultures exploit aspects of their surround- ings in order to express and thus partially change their own conditions of existence. The structuralists, Adorno amongst them, would find this untenable, since "categories of culture were not merely collective rath- er than individual productions, they were unconscious structures."35 Althusser and Foucault would take this a step further, the former in- sisting that we are all "produced as subjects by dominant ideology, we are inscribed even before birth."36 For Foucault, this inscribing does not cease at consciousness but extends eventually even to our bodily gestures.37

Considering Williams's strong influence on the British theorists, it is necessary to investigate his theories, despite the fact that he deals nei- ther with popular music nor with rock. The basis for his optimism concerning the production of counter-hegemonic discourse lies in his

33. Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1978), 2. 34. Hall, "Cultural Studies," 27. 35. Ibid., 2. 36. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New

York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 103. 37. See his Discipline and Punish.

Rock Music and the State 165

analysis of what he designates "structures of feeling." These latter are noticeable in

the contrasts between generations, who never talk quite the same language, or in the small differences of style, of speech or behav- iour, in someone who has learned our ways, yet was not bred in them.... [The] new generation responds in its own way to the unique world it is inheriting, taking up many continuities, repro- ducing many aspects of the organization .. ., yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently and shaping its creative response into a structure of feeling.38

Such a thoroughly nebulous concept-perhaps intuition would be a better word-constitutes for Williams sufficient proof to reject more deterministic theories of culture. I would suggest that his insistence on the notion of a developing society is at least partly a product of his working-class background and his experiences as part of a class which strongly contested the dominant culture's appropriation of populist ideology. From this experience stems his insistence on the difference between practical consciousness and official consciousness.39 It is not this insistence which is questionable but his formulation of the tenu- ous concept of "structures of feeling" to express his idea of subcultural resistance. There is, finally, no reason why we should adhere to his ver- sion of power as opposed to that of, say, Foucault.

Foucault's version, like Williams's, deals with the synaptic, almost intangible, level of power in society. For Foucault, power has invaded the gestures, actions, and everyday knowledge of our lives, and the

body itself is invested by power relations.40 Both critics are then deal-

ing with the synaptic level of society, but where Williams sees re- sistance, Foucault sees that at this microphysical level power is exer- cised in, and not just on, the social body, because since the eighteenth century power has taken on a capillary existence. Both would agree that

power is shifting and fluid. Thus Williams argues that to talk of ideology

38. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

39. Ibid., 130. 40. SeeJohn Tagg's essay, "Power and Photography, Part One: A Means of Surveil-

lance, the Photograph as Evidence in Law," in Culture, Ideology and Social Process, 286. 41. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132.

166 Katrina Irving

is to reduce it to a fixed form, negating all known "complexities, experienced tensions, shifts and uncertainties,"41 while Foucault insists that power is not a structure or force, but a strategic situation at a given time, in a given society.42 They differ, of course, in the extent to which they emphasize possibilities of dissent within that shifting structure. While conducting their investigation of power in society, then, both analyze the same site but end up with diametrically opposed views on subversion. It is not the task of this paper to evaluate the relative validi-

ty of these views. Rather, treating each theory as symptomatic, I would like to point out that the current lionization of Foucault in America and the comparative disregard of Williams are indicative of a wide- spread intuition of power in America which is more in line with the analysis of the French critic.

Concurrently, as I have already indicated, the majority of the impor- tant work on cultural studies in Britain carries on the tradition of Wil- liams. Thus Clarke and Hall, in their essay "Subcultures, Cultures and Class," see every existing cultural pattern as forming a kind of"histori- cal residue, a preconstituted field of the possibles, which groups take

up and develop."43 They pinpoint affluence as the key factor leading to the uncontestedness of the dominant ideology. Thus, they assert about Britain in the postwar period that

changes in the intricate mechanisms and balances of working class life and cultures, [which should have led to disaffection] were overlaid by the spectacular ideology of affluence as an ideological scenario ... aimed to give the working classes a stake in a future which had not yet arrived, and thus to bind them to the hegemonic order ... the myth provided for a time, the ideological basis of the political hegemony of the fifties.44

The thirties, by contrast, although a time when the dominant class was massively in command, was not truly hegemonic, since

economic crisis and unemployment disciplined rather than led the working class during this period.... By contrast, the fifties

42. Tagg, "Power and Photography," 300. 43. John Clark, Stuart Hall, TonyJefferson, Brian Roberts, "Subcultures, Cultures

and Class," in Culture, Ideology and Social Process, 55. 44. Ibid., 61.

Rock Music and the State 167

seem to us a period of true hegemonic domination, it being precise- ly the role of affluence which dismanted working class resistance.45

The sixties and seventies saw a return to a polarized society, with mas- sive inflation and a depression, and the final disappearance of the

myth of affluence for all. It seems evident that in Britain, a key factor

leading to the contestation of the dominant culture is the existence of a disaffected working class, whose articulation of populist themes pro- vides an alternative discourse to which the middle class can also ad- here. Oppositional themes can be shared in rock music, which is in

large part produced by members of the working and lower middle classes. Popular culture-and primarily rock-then, becomes a place where oppositional ideas can be expressed and shared, and in this sense it becomes a forum for the spread of subversion.

The implications of this for the U.S. context are evident. If, as Althusser claims, capitalism essentially brings together around pro- duction two fundamentally different classes, capital and labor,46 then late capitalism, as seen in America, obscures this fact. Continuing afflu- ence has made a situation like the fifties in Britain the dominant mode in the U.S. From the mid-fifties on, as Geoffrey Hodgson puts it,

no tenet of the consensus was more widely held than the idea that

revolutionary American capitalism had abolished the working class ..., that everybody in America was middle class now, or that American society was rapidly approaching economic equality.47

Hodgson is at pains to point out that the reason this tenet was so wide-

ly held was not because the condition of people left little to be desired, but because a number of historical factors had weakened the political unity of the working class and deprived it of the means to perceive its own interests and to defend them. The "left," in effect, had collapsed. The myth of affluence was powerfully buttressed by an older one, be-

queathed by Puritanism: the American dream, which indicated that

45. Ibid., 65. 46. Althusser, "Ideology-Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy,

144-86. 47. Geoffrey Hodgson, "The Ideology of the Liberal Consensus," inA History of Our

Time: Readings on Postwar America, ed. William Chafe and Harvard Sitkoff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 102-26.

168 Katrina Irving

anyone who tried could get ahead, and if you didn't, it was your own fault, not that of society. Such myths serve to solidify the dominant cul- ture and to identify further popular-democratic elements with the he-

gemony. In such a situation, the role of rock can only be to perpetuate the ideology of the dominant culture.

Again, at this point, I should like to offer a comparison of the differ- ent roles played by a particular rock movement-punk-in Britain and America, by way of illustration.48 British punk developed out of that earlier working-class subculture, the "skinheads," who in the late sixties and seventies asserted, by way of their dress and music, a work- ing class machismo. Punks, like the Beates, borrowed from the black movement and theirs was, from the beginning, a genuine social pro- test. Their provocative clothing, with its chains and safety pins, was paradoxically expressive of their position in the class system. As Hebdige puts it,

The blank generation, classified null by society, described itself in bondage through an assortment of darkly comic signifiers ... straps and chains, strait jackets and rigid postures ... [and it] was obsessed with class and relevance.49

Hebdige also points out that the rhetoric of punks was also a reaction against the intellectual posturings of earlier rock musicians, and punk at its best was, before its co-optation by big business, essentially a live phe- nomenon, played in garages and small dubs. Punk had a huge impact on all levels of British society, making people feel rage, fear, guilt, and compassion simultaneously. As novelist Alison Lurie indicates, it was music and fashion moving toward political protest, and the very outrage it provoked was a measure of its counter-hegemonic effectiveness.50

The contrast with American punk could not have been more strik- ing, and it is important to remember that punk initially was an Ameri- can phenomenon. But punk in America was never genuinely popular. The protest of groups like the New York Dolls was one of style, an am- biguous playing with sexuality, reminiscent of the Rolling Stones at

48. I am again indebted toJim Curtis's analysis of the punk movement in the chap- ter "The Other Side of Disco: Punk," in Rock Eras, 307-16.

49. Dick Hebdige, Subculture, the Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), 63. 50. Cited in Curtis, Rock Eras, 311.

Rock Music and the State 169

their androgynous best. Its obsession with style was merely narcissistic and had no socio-political overtones. Rather, punk was intimately con- nected to that high priest of narcissism, Andy Warhol, and flirted with the high-art world of Manhattan. The New York Dolls played gigs at the Mercer Arts Centre, while Patt Smith quoted Genet on her albums and called herself "an American artist."51 Nothing could be further from British punk, with its violent eschewal of all such elitism. Isabelle Anscome sums up the difference succinctly: "American punk has more to do with boredom than with unemployment; it bears a closer

allegiance to comic books than to politics."52 But to concentrate on the role of affluence and the lack of a self-

aware and articulate working class and the consequent non-contested- ness of populist ideology is to ignore one important historical junc- ture: the phenomenon of the late sixties when, at the height of afflu- ence, an alternative discourse was provided. A populist ideology was formed which apparently constituted itself in opposition to the state. Rock music was paramount in providing a medium for this message; as Ralph Gleason, rock critic for Rolling Stone, wrote in 1967: "At no time in American history has youth possessed the strength it has now...; trained by music it has the power for good to change the world."53 It

appears that the sixties, as the one time when populist ideology in America became separated from the state, merits investigation by crit- ics interested in hegemony and its potential subversion.

Yet on closer inspection, the extent to which this populist ideology was contrary to the ideals of the state appears minimal. As opposed to the thirties, which saw a number of agriculture and labor upheavals, the

protest of the sixties was not economic, but rather it dealt with issues of

inequality: the second-class status of blacks, U.S. intervention against colonial revolutions (particularly Vietnam), and issues of student rights. It was a concern about control of one's life, the right of autonomy for

neighbors and groups. Individualism remained at the core of the ideol-

ogy of the counterculture that sprang up, and its dogmatic unwilling- ness to subordinate the whims of the individual to the needs of the

group, its refusal to see the inherent conservatism of that viewpoint,

51. Cited in ibid., 308. 52. Cited in ibid., 310. 53. Ralph Gleason, "Rise and Fall of a Counterculture," in A History of Our Time, 325.

170 Katrina Irving

contributed to make its collapse inevitable. The limitations of the sixties sprang from the rebels' backgrounds.

Excepting the black contingent, the "rebels" came from comfortable, professional, middle-class families. Once the Vietnam issue was re- solved, these products of affluence were reduced to seeking targets of attack within, what was for them, a generally benevolent society. Thus such groups as Students for a Democratic Society remained totally blind to the existence of poverty in the U.S. and were-reduced to for-

mulating their discourse around the existence of external groups. Thus in the statement, "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows," the students pointed out that "the rela- tive affluence existing in the U.S. is directly dependent on the labor and natural resources of the Vietnamese, the Angolans, the Bolivians, and the rest of the people in the world."54 Such blindness to internal conditions was partly a result of the lack of a strong tradition of social- ism in America. The activists of the new left were unable to forge con- nections with oppressed groups within the U.S. This was graphically il- lustrated in 1970 when several thousand construction workers broke up an antiwar rally outside New York's City Hall.

The sixties was fundamentally, therefore, a protest against the mid- dle class by the middle cass. Thus the hegemony was easily able to co- opt it, primarily through the marketing of dissent. Radical spokesmen found themselves on television talk-shows; protesters found them- selves not in political exile, but collecting royalties and answering invi- tations to speak on various campuses. The protesters' actual continuity with American ideals, embodied for most Americans by the state, meant that the phenomenon of the counterculture did not pose any revolutionary situation. The sixties merely picked up themes latent or dormant in the old culture and magnified them. Given its failure to en- list classes outside the middle sector, it could never, therefore, have been truly anti-hegemonic.

54. Karin Ashley, et al., "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know which Way the Wind Blows," in A History of Our Time, 295-318.