Talkin' About My Girl

Skylar is spending the afternoon with me in my office at work. I'm reading. She's making art. I've had my work computer's seven-gigabyte music library playing in shuffle mode the whole time. As is typical for her, she has been in a music-enhanced space while working on her project. Turn off the tunes and she'd be more restless and demanding. Leave them playing and she drifts blissfully on the sonic currents. Over the course of the afternoon we've heard Eric Satie, Astrud Gilberto, Richard Buckner, Camper Van Beethoven and The Carpenters, among others. But she didn't comment on any of the selections until a song from The Stooges' album Fun House came on. "Nice music, dad!," she said, looking up and nodding along to the beat. That's my girl.

"I was there, man."

From John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson & Brian Roberts, "Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview" in Stuart Hall & Tony Jefferson, editors, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1975):

At one level, middle class counter-cultures -- like working-class sub-cultures -- also attempted to work out or work through, but at an 'imaginary' level, a contradiction or problematic in their class situation. But, because they inhabit a dominant culture (albeit in a negative way) they are strategically placed (in ways in which working-class sub-cultures are not) to generalise an internal contradiction for the society as a whole. The counter-cultures stemmed from changes in the 'real relations' of their class: they represented a rupture inside the dominant culture which then became linked with the crisis of hegemony, of civil society, and ultimately of the state itself. It is in this sense that middle-class counter-cultures, beginning from a point within the dominant class culture, have become an emergent ruptural force for the whole society. Their thrust is is no longer contained by their point of inception. Rather, by extending and developing their 'practical critique' of the dominant culture from a privileged position inside it, they have come to inhabit, embody and express many of the contradictions of the system itself.

Naturally, society cannot be 'imaginarily' reconstructed from that point. But that does not exhaust their emergent potential. For they also prefigure, anticipate, foreshadow -- though in truncated, diagrammatic and 'Utopian' forms -- emergent social forms. These new forms are rooted in the productive base of the system itself, though when they arise at the level of the 'counter-culture' only, we are correct to estimate that their maturing within the womb of society is, as yet, incomplete. They prefigure, among other things, the increasingly social nature of modern production, and the outdated social, cultural, political and ideological forms in which this is confined. The counter-culture comes, at best, half-way on the road to making manifest this base contradiction.