How does culture thrive in a lawless liminal space?
The haunting of these histories in King’s Cross within the now. What can we learn about now from that time? What is our relationship with these histories except to nostalgiafy
What’s missing now these spaces are gone? What have we lost? Why does that matter?
Cultural production and consumption in that area and time, an ability to occupy space and partake in culture that allows you physically take the space in a way we can’t afford to now?
Not so much interested in the political situation or organisation of specifically political groups. But acknowledge that politics is a thread in art, communities and subcultures and importantly that people – their bodies, their identities, their lifestyles – become politicised regardless of their level of political engagement. But research is always political.
Junk ensemble
Using the city as a text, and you read that text through walking through it witnessing art created there and creating art in response (speaking back?). How did the city become a person to those who came here to create? A member of their community. Queer, feminist, migrant histories. Look at the layers – maps Borges – of this city. What is considered heritage? What is at risk of being forgotten. What could we learn from what is at risk of being forgotten? Deep mapping
Foucault heterotopia
Living London university of London
Art as put on a pedestal not experiential
Use a critical theory and literary criticism approach. CT in the sense of understanding the cultural production and consumption in the 80s/90s and comparisons with now. LC in the sense of using the city, of locality of KX, as a text rich with chapters, characters (read: subcultures) and themes for analysis. There is a historical element to this, in the openness to uncovering new ground or insights about less documented aspects of the area’s creative history.
The deuce
Maybe pyschogeographic wandering with a playlist of content form that period, making artistic
But I think I’m also really interested in how subculture allows one to transgress their “human” self and become something else, that intersects with place, music, other non-humans. That’s why the mutoids. That’s why rave. That’s why scala
I like going out. I like soaking up the city as it opens up. But I don’t mind walking home either. Waiting. Watching. People going home. Nights winding down. The empty bustop you circle while you wait for a night bus, noticing things. Don’t you think every street could be cinematic. When you’re not from here? I still believe in possibility, it’s not a tired dried up thought lodged in the back of a walnut brain. That a native dublonder would have
Affect and the city: the role of the KX urban space in subculture, art and community
Hillview estate: pogues and Peter doig (painter) lived there
Traffic nightclub as well as the bell
The buildings themselves are like mutoids. Changing from one thing to another.
Focusing on nightlife? Rather the squats
The role of buildings in subcultural activity. The need for physical space.
P3: How can one do justice to the lived experience of people, while, at the same time, critically analyse discourses, which form the very stuff out of which our experiences are made?
P4: How can one criticize discourses, which constitute ‘reality’, such as anorexia, while, at the same time, make statements about historical and political reality?
“the British variant of cultural studies interest in ‘resistance'”.
P6: “Resistance underlined the creative potential of popular cultural forms, such as youth cultures and movements, to challenge dominant ideologies and society, even if this potential was not necessarily interpreted to lead to radical, social, change. “
P7: “If one wants to capture and convert the uniqueness of and nuances of a life-story of an anorexic woman, one needs to carefully consult and apply the new ethnographic body of work on ways of studying and writing about different lived worlds. […] Experience is also shaped by social discourses and by the historical and social context in which it is located. In order to capture these other dimensions of the experience, one needs different methodological approaches and methods, such as discourse analysis or historical research.
P: 11 The trademark of the cultural studies approach to empirical research has been an interest in the interplay between lived experience, texts or discourses, and the social context. [Bingo? This is essentially what I have been trained to do? ] […] However is our interest in cultures that are different to our own warranted and can we do justice to those cultures? How can we critically analyse culture in a situation where we as scholars, and research as an institution, are an integral part of this culture an its struggles?
Classical Birmingham period works on media audiences (Morley), subcultures (Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige) and cultures of working class boys and girls. (Angela McRobbie)
Tensions: one cannot bring together a phenomenological/hermeneutic desire to ‘understand’ the creative lived world of another person/group and the distanced, critical structuralist interest in analysing linguistic tropes which guide peoples’ perceptions and understandings. Also realist tendency to find out how the world of reality ‘is’. In the 60s women, black people, postcolonial thinkers and so on have accused researchers and institutions of not depicting their realities but using them to back up their political/scholarly projects.
P.14: “We have awakened to the early 21st century, structured by a new division between exhilarated talk about multiculturalism and possibilities of creating and disseminating alternative, previously silenced knowledges and cultures, and steep inequalities and mistrust and feuding between different groups of people.
P.18: “The positivist criterion of truthfulness or validity is understood to be universal. This means the same rules of truthfulness apply whether the research wants to capture ‘objective reality’ (social facts, economic developments) or people’s subjective or intersubjective experiences (the meanings people give to their lives and actions)”
Validities > validity. Being aware of multiple validities asks us to be more critically aware of what drives our research. Acknowledging that there are many ways of making sense of social phenomena requires one to create multidimensional, nuanced and tentative ways of understanding one’s object of study. Rather than there being one universal rule of of research there are multiple rules and we need to be aware of how they make us relate to reality differently.
Hermeneutic: how well the research ‘captures’ the lived realities of others. ie. a true account of samoan life.
Poststructuralist approach says there is no unbiased way of comprehending the world. Good research exposes historicity, political investments, omissions, blind spots and social truths. Good researchers also have an awareness of their own historical, political and social investments and continually reflect on these.
Situating the phenomenon of study within wider social, political, global contexts. Committed to a form of realism as it must make statements about how the world ‘really is’. Criteria for this research:
There are newer approaches though.
Triangulation when understood as a method for discovering truth is not useful for combining these methodologies because their basic premise in each case is to problematise simple ideas of truth. Dialogism tries to find the true realities for the people studied, and not whether those people spoke the ‘truth’. Genealogy would be sceptical of the ability to find “truth” within institutions such as archives as these reproduce colonial/patriarchal power etc. Contextualists believe that research can never be objective as it is always part of and shapes the social landscapes, such as colonialism, that is studies.
Positivism, whereby there is considered to be a fixed reality that research can attempt to get closer to, has widely been questioned. Research and ideas not only describe phenomena but transform them, ie Marxism. Research is also inherently political, so thinking about methodology (rather than simply methods that get you closer to ‘the truth’) helps us to become aware of the politics and worldviews embedded in our research approaches so that we can do better and more egalitarian research.
Thinking of research as a prism means viewing reality as fluid (ontology – what exists?) and that research constructs the realities that it studies (epistemology – how can we know about the existence of a thing). Prismatic research argues for multiple realities rather than there being a singular way of looking at reality. Scholars working in this field often work to present alternative realities that contradict accepted scientific truths. They challenge white, male, western scholarship and write for and from different perspectives.
A prismatic approach could see a combination of dialogic validity and deconstructive validity. However, it doesn’t work for constructivist methodology because there is a stubbornly real dimension to the social, economic and political forces experienced by people. Whether or not we experience these differently, they all still effect us so in that sense there can’t be multiple realities there. Prismatic approach can therefore help to enhance understandings of different realities, but it is not well suited to analysing how political contexts for example effect us similarly or differently.
And if the problem with positivism is its belief in there being one truth, prismatic research has the opposite problem of there being endless amounts of truths.
Derrida V Foucault: D said that enlightenment era “rationality” legitimised itself though a definition of madness or “irrationality”. F said that it wasn’t just a linguistic operation, as it had real life effects on those deemed “mad”.
The material semiotic view sees the nature of reality (ontology) and the way in which we can know it (epistemology) is different from the positivist and prismatic views. It doesn’t see the see reality as fixed entity that can be described (positivist) nor does it see reality as a fluid symbolic clay to be moulded into different views (prismatic) – it understands the relationship between research and reality to be interactive. So research can create worlds, but it reality also exists beyond the research and it can ‘fight back’. Research is always facilitated and constrained by the social and material environment and needs to understand these before it can change them.
Like the prismatic view, the material semiotic view seeks to include a wide variety of perspectives but not simply to allow allow voices/realities to be heard but to enhance more equal, scientific, social and economic structures. Research is always political and so we need to be aware of the realities we are creating, out of whom and for whom. This avoids narrow-minded research, that perpetuates inequality. It requires the researcher to use a rigorous and systematic method that facilitates taking into account and critically evaluating different views of the phenomena being studied. This systematic collecting and assessing of perspectives helps to produce research that is rigorous and more aware of its political and ethical implications.
Material semiotics’s goal is to combine different methodologies and their respective validities to produce better and more inclusive accounts of the world. Dialogic allows us to tune into specific perspectives of different groups. Deconstruction helps to critically analyse discourses. Contextualism allows us to understand how phenomena are intertwined with social, political, and economic structures. Combining these fosters ‘strong objectivity’ and more accurate and egalitarian knowledge.
However Saukko points out that this approach has a commitment to being scientific and adheres to a traditional synthesising research style that translates other perspectives into a scientific view that obeys a logic of detachment and control. In this sense it’s a little at odds with the notion of inclusiveness and is weaker than prismatic research that allows for an appreciation of texture and nuance of different worlds. ‘Strong objectivity’ requires an encompassing view, whereas prismatic research underlines the importance of capturing the particular.
Delueze and Guatarri A thousand plateaus p. 530 – 550 writings about rhytmns
A sound (and jazz) based analogy for how the different methodological and political perspectives can be brought into dialogue with each other to create multidimensional research that is capable of attending to the complexity of social phenomena. This research strategy does not try to come up with an enlightened view (positivism) or to acknowledge that there are multiple view (prisms). Rather multi perspectival research aims to hold different perspectives in creative tension with one another. A dialogic or multi perspectival standpoint considers things as not being good or bad but complicated. It helps to avoid research with one-dimensional judgements.
Cultural studies is concerned with the three pronged interest in lived experience, discourses/texts, and the social context. The challenge is that these areas have different methodological approaches: hermeneutic/phenomenological, (post)structuralist, and contextualist. These approach may complement but also undermine each other. Each has an associated validity, and together creates a set of validities. We have seen how triangulation is not an appropriate way of combining these, because it’s rooted in the need to create “the truth” whereas each of these views has a different stance on what that means. Prisms doesn’t entirely work either. Saukko therefore favours a dialogic approach to combine them, as this would be attentive to the lived, cultural as well as social and material aspects of our realities, and acknowledge that there may be disjunctures between them. It would aim to cultivate modes of social and cultural analysis that would be both sensitive to different realities and capable of building bridges between them. It would also encourage a politics that brings different groups, concerns and views together to build a more common, egalitarian and pluralist world.
NW: On club cultures I would add:
Redhead, S., ed. (2009) The clubcultures reader: Readings in popular cultural studies. Oxford: Blackwell.
McRobbie, A. (2015) ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded-Up Creative Worlds’, in McRobbie, A. (ed.) Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. Chicester: Polity Press, pp. 17–32.
McRobbie, A. (2013) In the Culture Society [Online]: Routledge.
Redhead, S. (1990) The end-of-the-century party: Youth and pop towards 2000. Manchester, New York, New York: Manchester University Press
NW: On space/gentrification/symbolic aura/gentrification I recommend:
Harvey, D. (1989) The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lloyd, R. D. (2010) Neo-Bohemia: Art and commerce in the postindustrial city, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge.
Benjamin, W. (2002) ‘Paris: Capital of the nineteenth century’, in Benjamin, W. (ed.) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Shields, R. (1992) ‘Spaces for the Subject of Consumption’, in Shields, R. (ed.) Lifestyle shopping: The subject of consumption. London: Routledge, pp. 1–20.
Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of signs and space. London: Sage.
Featherstone, M. (2007) Consumer culture and postmodernism [Online], 2nd edn. London: Sage Publications.
Zukin, S. (1989) Loft living: Culture and capital in urban change. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press.
O’Connor, J. and Wynne, D., eds. (op. 1996) From the margins to the centre: Cultural production and consumption in the post-industrial city. Aldershot: Arena.
Chambers, I. (1986) Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience. London: Routledge.
Pratt, A. C. (2004) ‘The Cultural Economy: A Call for Spatialized ‘Production of Culture’ Perspectives’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 117–128.
[some of this may be only relevant if you are going to look at KX in relation to the contemporary]
NW: Disregard as you are going the historical route, but on method I like:
Alasuutari, P. (1995) Researching culture: Qualitative method and cultural studies. London, Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
Saukko, P. (2010) Doing research in cultural studies: An introduction to classical and new methodological approaches. London: Sage. [READING]
BB: Might be worth reading Anna Minton (2009) Ground Control on privatised public space (of which Argent’s Kings Cross development is an example).
Also Laura Oldfield Ford (2011) Savage Messiah (and/or the original zines in various UAL libraries) – not KX, but an artist/psychogeographer’s response to post-industrial/hedonistic spaces.
Plus, for a sense of London in the late 90s – i.e., towards the end of 18 years of Tory rule, and on the cusp of an unanticipated revival as a 21st-century ‘world city’ – I sometimes ask students to read the intro to Roy Porter (1996) London: A Social History, which is quite eye-opening. Equally, Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film London (The View from the Train, his 2013 volume of collected essays from the period is also worth a look). For what happened after that, see Doreen Massey (2007) World City.
On London generally, see Jerry White (2001) London in the Twentieth Century – and/or Owen Hatherley’s (2020) Red Metropolis is very good, esp. on housing.
And you can see pre-redevelopment KX in Mike Leigh’s 1988 movie High Hopes (esp. the final scene)
On subculture, start with the canon:
Hall, S. and Jefferson, T., eds. (1976) Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain. London: Hutchinson.
Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge.
If you want to go deeper you might want to pick and choose from the following:
Brake, M. (1985) Comparative youth culture: The sociology of youth cultures and youth subcultures in America, Britain, and Canada. London, Boston: Routledge & K. Paul.
Waters, C. (1981) ‘Badges of Half-Formed, Inarticulate Radicalism: A Critique of Recent Trends in the Study of Working Class Youth Culture’, International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 19, pp. 23–37 [Online].
McRobbie, A. (1991) Feminism and youth culture: From ʻJackieʼ to ʻJust Seventeenʼ. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Willis, P. (1978) Profane culture. London, Boston: Routledge & K. Paul.
Cohen, S. (1980) Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the Mods and Rockers. New York: St. Martin’s Press. [1980 edition’s intro]
Clarke, G. (1990) ‘Defending Ski-Jumpers; A Critique of Theories of Youth Subcultures’, in Frith, S. and Goodwin, A. (eds.) On record: Rock, pop, and the written word. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 68–80.
Calluori, R. A. (1985) ‘The Kids Are Alright: New Wave Subcultural Theory’, Social Text, no. 12, p. 43.
Frith, S. and Horne, H. (1987) Art into Pop. London: Methuen.
Gilroy, P. (1991) ‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’: The cultural politics of race and nation. Chicago Ill: University of Chicago Press.
Hebdige, D. (1987) Cut ‘n’ mix: Culture, identity, and Caribbean music. London, New York: Routledge.
Then the 90s developments
Polhemus, T. (1996) Style surfing: What to wear in the 3rd millennium. London: Thames and Hudson.
Polhemus, T. (1994) Streetstyle: From sidewalk to catwalk. New York: Thames and Hudson.
Redhead, S. (1990) The end-of-the-century party: Youth and pop towards 2000. Manchester, New York, New York: Manchester University Press.
Evans, C. (1997) ‘Dreams That Only Money Can Buy . . . Or, The Shy Tribe In Flight from Discourse’, : Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 169–188.
Gelder, K. and Thornton, S., eds. (2005) The subcultures reader, 2nd edn. London, New York: Routledge.
Sabin, R., ed. (1999) Punk rock, so what?: The cultural legacy of punk. London, New York: Routledge.
A bit tangential, but in the post-yuppie 1990s the sociology of consumer culture/identity started to look at subcultures as a model for consumer identity under late modernity (the curated self, freed from old social structure):
Chaney, D. C. (1996) Lifestyles. London, New York: Routledge.
Slater, D. (1997) Consumer culture and modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Then the aughts debates
Blackman, S. (2005) ‘Youth Subcultural Theory: A Critical Engagement with the Concept, its Origins and Politics, from the Chicago School to Postmodernism’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1–20.
Muggleton, D. (2000) Inside subculture: The postmodern meaning of style. Oxford: Berg.
Hodkinson, P. (2002) Goth: Identity, style, and subculture. Oxford: Berg.
Bennett, A. (1999) ‘Subcultures or Neo-Tribe? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste’, Sociology, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 599–617.
Bennett, A. (2002) ‘Researching youth culture and popular music: a methodological critique’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 451–466.
Bennett, A. (2005) ‘In Defence of Neo-tribes: A Response to Blackman and Hesmondhalgh’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 255–259.
Bennett, A. (2011) ‘The post-subcultural turn: some reflections 10 years on’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 493–506 [Online].
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2005) ‘Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 21–40.
Hodkinson, P. and Deicke, W., eds. (2009) Youth cultures: Scenes, subcultures and tribes. New York: Routledge.
Muggleton, D. and Weinzierl, R., eds. (2003) The post-subcultures reader. Oxford, New York: Berg.
Then the contemporary state of the field:
The Subcultures Network, ed. (2014) Subcultures, popular music and social change. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Gildart, K., ed. (2020) Hebdige and subculture in the twenty-first century: Through the subcultural lens [Online]. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. [Not an intense reading of this but it explores the merits of his approach – a classic piece of scholarship that uses structuralism, marxism and lit theory to understand punk – and merits/failures of his methodology – some love his bricolage approach and some think he wrote about punks he didn’t speak to them. Criticisms also for it being male and white in focus. Also an introduction to the idea of post subcultural theory and style surfing and the idea that subcultures aren’t as strong in convictions of style politics etc.)
[see the lit review of my article attached for summary of these theoretical debates]
for a quick, digestible overview of subculture theory, Ross Haenfler (2013) Subcultures: The Basics is v. useful.
Met with supervisors earlier this week and in preparation for registration I need to revisit my research questions as my current questions presuppose my answer to them. The advice is to formulate straightforward research questions that allow me to discover something about the topic.
I also need to think about the scope and field of the research:
I think fundamentally I am interested in the cultural/creative history of this place and period. I don’t think it’s hugely interesting to me to consider the planning of the new urban redevelopment… in terms of the figures and practicalities of that process. I’m not entirely interested in the planning of housing or amenities, nor the political or economic forces at work. These matters seem contextual to me rather than being the deep dive area of the research.
But within the cultural/creative history I have questions about why any of this is important… did any of this matter both at the time and does it matter now? There is something of a question of legacy, of what has been lost from this time, of what is being repurposed to legitimise the redevelopment work and add to the area’s cultural caché. But also I think there’s something in here about erasure… queer and outsider stories. Contrasts of cultural production and consumption – abilities to physically hold the space but stories of being driven from it.
As well as being a hugely fertile creative scene, the area has a radical and political history with trade unions and Housmans established here – and according to Roger a Neo-nazi community… So do I plunge into this? I don’t think I’m entirely interested in the organisation and history of political groups and activities in the area. Except that I acknowledge that politics is a thread in art, communities and subcultures. And crucially that people – their bodies, identities, lifestyles – become politicised regardless of whether they are politically engaged themselves.
Case studies: the proposal cites Mutoid Waste Company, Cubitt, Bagleys/The Cross as areas for research. Do I want to limit myself to these or leave myself room for other discoveries? Be sure to justify what I focus on, ie I’m not just selecting groups that I like; I am choosing to focus on areas that serve the project.
Make my own working definitions for the registration form ie what is my definition of the King’s Cross area?
Questions to answer (from Churchill and Sanders Getting your PhD)
Campkin, B 2013, Remaking London : Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture, I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited, London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [19 January 2024].
Almost any social, political, cultural, economic or aesthetic phenomenon, issue or problem can be the subject of academic research in the wider social sciences and humanities. The key thing is not what it’s about, but the way that you approach the issue.
p.13
The best question to ask yourself to ensure that you have made this shift is ‘If I do this investigation and somebody then asks me, “So what?” will I be able to give a credible answer?’That is, will the answers you reach be of interest beyond the information you have collected itself and to anyone other than yourself? You must be able to frame your subject in such a way that you move from description to explaining what the data you have found means. In other words, you must be able to theorise your subject.
p.14
Ask yourself:
Strategies for gaining an overview may include: