Now all human beings, whatever their condition, are social animals, and can live with themselves only if they also live with others. There is implanted in us the need to join things, to be a part of some larger and justifying enterprise, which will ennoble our small endeavours and protect us from the sense that we are ultimately alone. The deficit of membership must therefore be made good, but in another way - without the rite of passage to a higher or more responsible condition. Hence new forms of ‘joining in’ arise. Unlike armies, schools, scout troupes, churches and charities, these new forms of joining in need not involve participation - unless of a rough and undemanding kind that imposes no discipline on those who opt for them. They centre on spectacles rather than activities.
The paradigm instance is the fan club. The modern adolescent will follow the actions of his favoured team or group or idol, and adopt those actions as his own. Hence the emergence of professional sport as a central drama in popular culture. Football, for example, has lost its original character as a form of recreation and become instead a spectacle, through which the fans rehearse their social identity, and achieve a kind of substitute form of membership, not as active participants in a real community, but as passive respondents to the virtual community of fans. The fan is, in some sense, a part of the group, in just the way that the football supporter is a part of his team, bound to it by a mystical bond of membership. Nick Hornby has expressed the point in words that deserve to be quoted:
One thing I know for sure about being a fan is this: it is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary, and those who say they would rather do than watch are missing the point. Football is a context where watching becomes doing....when there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us at the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not a watery version of the team’s fun, even though they are the ones that get to score the goals and climb the steps at Wembley to meet Princess Diana. The joy we feel on occasions like this is not a celebration of others’ good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity, and anyone who wishes to understand how football is consumed must realise this above all things. The players are merely our representatives, chosen by the manager rather than elected by us, but our representatives nonetheless, and sometimes if you look hard enough you can see the little poles that join them together, and the handles at the side that enable us to move them. I am a part of the club, just as the club is a part of me... (Fever Pitch)
Of course, the old tribal feelings are there just below the surface, waiting to be activated, and erupting every now and then with their usual tributes to the god of war. Football hooligans are not the peculiar and perverse criminals painted by the press. They are simply the most fully human of football fans - the ones who wish to translate the only experience of membership that has ever been offered to them, into the natural expression of a tribal right. In a sense, the membership offered to the fan - in which a mesmerised passivity neutralizes the desire for action - is the greatest safeguard we have, that modern societies will not fragment into tribal sub-groups, contending for scarce resources in the concrete jungle. And we should therefore be grateful for professional football, and for all the other ways in which an icon of membership is offered to those who might otherwise chase after some adolescent version of the real thing. For when tribal groups emerge in modern conditions, they take the form of teenage gangs, whose initiation ceremonies forbid the transition to the adult world, and are designed to arrest their members in a stage of rebellion. The first concern of such a gang is to establish a right to territory, by violently erasing all rival claims.
The teenage gang is a natural (if destructive) response to a world in which the rites of passage into adulthood are no longer offered or respected. I do not say that such a world is a healthy one. But it is our world, and we have to make the best of it. Pop culture is an attempt to make the best of it - to make oneself at home in a world that is not, in any real sense, a home, since it has ceased to dedicate itself, as a home must dedicate itself, to the task of social reproduction. Home, after all, is the place where parents are. The world displayed in the culture of youth is a world from which the parent have absconded - as these days they generally do. This culture aims to present youth as the goal and fulfilment of human life, rather than a transitional phase which must be cast off as an impediment once the business of social reproduction calls. It promotes experiences which can be obtained without undertaking the burdens of responsibility, work, child-rearing and marriage. Hence sex, and especially sex divorced from any long-term commitment, becomes of paramount importance; so do experiences which involve no cost in terms of education, moral discipline, hardship or love - the paradigm being drug-taking, which has the added advantage that it shuts out the adult world completely, and replaces it with a cloud of wishful dreams. When the adult world is mentioned, it is in order to pour scorn on it as a delusive fiction or a source of tyrannical constraints.
Youth culture is therefore inherently transgressive. It announces itself aways as radical, disconcerting, infuriating, disorienting and lawless. The group Prodigy, currently top of the charts with "Slap My Bitch Up", makes the point explicitly in its techno-slam entitled "Their Law": i.e., the law of adults, which is there to be trampled on. But the explicit incitement contained in such a number should not blind us to the fact that transgression is also institutionalised by pop, so as to become a new conformism. Future Bitch, for example, announcing its debut at the Ministry of Sound, declares its aim "to disorientate its audience, pushing the current cultural scene to its limits and towards the millenium." Future Bitch, it goes on, "is challenging, radical, disconcerting, stimulating, unpredictable, subliminal and unprecedented". And what could be more predictable than that?
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