Structure, Agency, Subculture: The CCCS, Resistance through Rituals, and ‘Post-Subcultural’ Studies

Post-subcultural studies has emerged as a critical response to perceived difficulties with the previously dominant approach to subcultures associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Alternative terms such as scene and tribe have been suggested in light of the supposedly more amorphous nature of contemporary formations. Others have defended the CCCS approach, or argued for a revised understanding of subculture which attends to difficulties with the CCCS framework whilst implying greater stability than other more recent terms. The following outlines these debates before focusing specifically on Hall and Jefferson's (2006) own response. Whilst agreeing with the argument that subcultural studies needs to be properly contextualised, it suggests that post-subcultural studies reminds us also of the need properly to attend to subcultures in practice. It then interrogates the claim that the CCCS did both, noting not just the lack of ethnography in Resistance through Rituals , but the bias against ethnography implicit in the Centre's Marxist-realist approach, and the unresolved tension between their culturalist and structuralist leanings, to which semiotic analysis came to the rescue by allowing agency to be read-off from subcultural assemblages rather than explored in practice. It also addresses some of the problems with this. It concludes by suggesting how the concept might be reformulated to address lacunae in the CCCS project and shifts in the nature of contemporary ‘subcultures’, whilst retaining a sense of their importance and not reducing them to the status of either youth-culture in general or any-other-lifestyle.