Us and them in the late space age

Roger Hewitt

Between noise and virtue

Somewhere in Valery’s Aesthetics the French critic Alain is recorded as having remarked that ‘music is a movement between noise and virtue’. What I like about this is that it expresses very succinctly a whole theory of the relation between art objects, their moral and aesthetic cultural milieux, and the unadorned materials which become organised and transformed through them. It reasserts the ancient notion of how the aesthetic ‘sublime’ and moral value are combined in ‘virtue’. Of course the cultural force of this concept has been interrupted dramatically since the remark was made. ‘Noise’ in electronic communication carries a similar meaning to that implied by Alain – ‘unorganised, random transmission’ but ’virtue’ in this moral and aesthetic sense has been put through the 20th century mill of relativism. While ‘moral panics’ and ‘aesthetic panics’ from Pere Ubu to Robert Maplethorpe have often been found together, they are unlikely ever to be perfectly synchronised again.

This connection between our moral being and music is, of course, common. Early European travellers and explorers drew attention to the lack of civilization of distant indicating the ‘hideous sounds’ produced by unfamiliar instruments and the ‘catawailing’ of native voices (sec, for example, Balfour, 1902). But the concepts of civilisation and culture, which include how to act as well as what to like, are not the only places where music and the moral fabric have been equated. Social and cultural divisions across and within nations are often marked by musical boundaries. The common equation of youth cultural styles and musical production and consumption practices are far from generationally special. However, they have provided a cultural glue for one youth culture after another, encoding a series of affinities and oppositions, and placing opposing groups closer to cither noise or virtue, to ‘them’ or to ‘us’.

Some time ago, during the 1980s, I collected the following myth of origins from a south London skinhead who was explaining to me how the current social order carne to be. He described the importance of a dance hall called the Lacarno in Streatham, south London, and a club used by black youth, called the Ram Jam, in nearby Brixton. These music venues were seen as the cultural hubs of their respective social milieux:

 

I go back to ‘69 and I can remember the skinheads that day, right. We had internal squabbles like north London/south London. The ones they reckon was the hardest were the East‑End ones. The Woolwich skins, the Blackheath skins and all that, there was a lot of hard cases, right. We went along and sorted ‘em out. See they had choppers and chains and that, we brought out of the fucking boot the shot‑guns. We done’em up. And then we said to’em, “Right, we’ve had enough. We’re going to stop this fighting amongst each other”. And we formed a great big massive movement. We had control of a place called the Lacarno, it’s up Streatham. There were thousands of skinheads come from all over to that place. And the Old Bill never touched us.

 

And one night the nig‑nogs came up. They were called ‘soul boys’ then, the niggers them days, and they came, about five hundred of them, from a place called the Ram‑jam. Do you know Gino Washington and the Ramjam Band? Well that was their scene – Brixton. And our area was Streatham – a white man’s area. And we run that place, doing the Skinhead Moonstomp and all that. And they carne up and reckoned they wanted to take it over. Our place. So we said, ‘Fair enough’. The word got round London and a thousand skins drove down. By nine o’clock there was a thousand skins, five hundred in. By ten o’clock there were three thousand skins. The nig‑nogs started then and we ran them all the way to Brixton and we walked through Brixton after that. We didn’t touch their area before but we ran through Brixton and you couldn’t see a nig‑nog on the street. Any nig‑nog walked on the street was dead. We could smash ‘em to pieces. That’s the way it should be today.’

 

The bliss of a racially segregated Eden was not to return and Them and Us were to cross paths endlessly from that day on. The role of music is fundamental in this aetiological tale. It is a skinhead narrative of the fall of Man: a state of skinhead perfection which became sullied by the serpent transgressing the boundaries of social orderliness.

Issues of ‘them’ and ‘us’, and of the moral and political apparatus we have for relating to them, are of major concern in contemporary Europe. But we frequently lack sufficiently sensitive measures and research instruments for approaching them and what they mean for youth. The above narrative seems to be clearly ‘political’, yet it is also part of a rather strange personal story. Its teller was ten years older than the other members of his gang. He attempted to hide his age, but also to present himself to the others as a kind of trans‑historical skinhead, ‘rich in legend and life’. He was a mandarin of nazi books and pamphlets. He was a committed racist. He was also Jewish and wrestled with some fierce daemons. ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ were within him as well as without, a syncretism in desperate need of relief.

I chose an unattractive example of the equation of music and moral ontology in order to maintain a distance on exactly what a ‘moral’ engagement might entail. What is of concern is simply the nature of social connectedness. How is the moral glue being produced? What it is that makes the cement and by what means do we learn the routines of how to be? The ‘politics of the personal’ which was once so laced into accounts of counter‑cultural youth movements, is a way of relating moral subjectivity to political subjectivity but ‘morality’ is something cultural theorists have preferred to keep a safe distance from. That has been the business of bourgeois pretence, misrecognition or the panicking hoard. But in the new Europe, with considerable cultural movement, nationalistic politics, and vicious racism horrendously evident, especially amongst some of the young in some countries, it seems important to raise the question, inevitably political, of moral agency and the processes whereby youth is articulating with the new order of things. What kinds of ‘youth’ are our societies producing? What, even before they get to be ‘youth, is in the pipeline of childhood? In a Europe of even greater migratory movement, of cultural hybridity cheek by jowl with ethnic purism. and essentialism, of ‘us’ and ‘them’ as never quite before, what kind of moral agency is being shaped to exist within it? Where does it draw its lessons from?

 

‘Thoughts replaced by moving images’

Younger generations today may be in a somewhat different position to almost any since the post war period if it is true that music is far less a source of identification for youth than it has ever been. The shift in engineering and entrepreneurial talent away from the recording industry and into the much more lucrative domains of computer games, where international profits on a single day of launch can match by many‑fold the more plodding sales from singles and CDs, only serves to reflect the fact that old certainties about youth, identity and music may no longer be reliable. It may be that the ‘self’ graphically articulated in the game ‘Mortal Kombat’ and its array of various and darkly ethnic assailants, is the locus of a more contemporary identification. It is difficult to say, but when watching groups of young people clustered around the monitor, hard also not to be reminded of Dahammel’s famous response to the shock of movie‑film that Walter Benjamin reports to us: ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images’. (Benjamin, 1972, p.231).

If, for the sake of argument, we are to take the smoke of ‘moral panic’ to indicate some serious combustion in the heart of the machine, concerns over the commodification of violence and its retailing to the young through computer games, TV and video distribution have hit a high, even by post war standards (Barker, 1984; Buckingham, 1993). Such a response is unsurprising, even banal, when ‘male aggression’ seems to be both an easily understood form of communication and a commodity that need not be restricted by national boundaries as far as marketing goes. Of the five hundred million dollars that Larry Gordon’s Die Hard Two is expected to have grossed, only a third of it will have come from the domestic market while the rest is from around the world in foreign rights, video sales and rentals. As Gordon puts it: ‘The action genre travels well around the world. Everyone understands an action movie. If you tell a joke you may not get it but if a bullet goes through the window we all know how to hit the floor, no matter the language.’ (Auletta, 1993)

But however much VCR nannies are in charge of children, so far, for better or worse, they constitute only a small part of socialisation. Families, schools and peer groups are more than contexts for the phatic discussion of media products. Furthermore, there is some evidence that young people pick up and drop their interests in, for example, computer magazines, WWF wrestling, collectable cards and movie‑based models with sufficient unpredictability and stubborn waywardness to keep the manufacturers and distributors guessing. All this, however, may be set to change and the world we now know and struggle with may soon seem as sweetly charged with nostalgic poignancy as the village green and the spinning of a painted wooden top.

The whole moral universe may be about to expand through that dramatic upgrading of global connectedness now commonly called the ‘information super highway’ and with a potentially major effect on concepts of social inclusion and exclusion, of responsibility, of community, of centre and periphery, and, possibly, ‘ them’ and ‘us’ (Sreberny‑Mohammadi, 199l). This ‘highway’ is being constructed through the joining together of communication technologies with information technologies. Added into this is a core network of cable systems, especially those employing fibre optic technology. Finally, the shift from analog to digital systems of information storage means that, with the use of high‑capacity cables, many different information and communication services can converge on a common carrier creating a digitalized multi‑media product not only with the capacity to display text, pictures, graphics, voice, music and film etc. but to do so into homes, schools, businesses, across the globe.

What this might mean for the individual home remains speculative. The ability to access the entire corpus of the world’s films, TV programmes, music and computer games at the touch of a switch, may be regarded as amongst its most trivial uses, (though possibly not for an eight year old eager to see Night of the Living Dead) but the ability of fibre to provide anything from five to fifteen hundred channels seems to mean that there is potentially no limit to the range and mixture of services and entertainments available. Conventional home video rental companies, like Block­busters, have already seen the writing on the wall as telephone companies move into video‑on‑demand, but as the technology moves along, regulatory legislation relating to access to horror, sex and violence, may be left staring at the sky.

Beyond the world of entertainment, international video conferencing for businesses and academic institutions, and health diagnosis and consultation, both institutional and domestic are among the highway’s possible uses. Educational uses are also most frequently mentioned as possible unequivocal benefits. With companies such as Bill Gates’ Microsoft producing multi‑media CD ROMs where encyclopedia include text, photographs as well as early historical film footage, for example, a massive new industry in tele‑schooling is opening up. Or, if Gates’ recently announced plan to launch 840 low orbit satellites that will cover 95% of the world’s surface comes to fruition, it may be possible to by‑pass cable and reach every home and meagre hut, in city, desert and savannah that happens to have a satellite receiver, a TV and a set­-top converter to de‑code educational programmes, movies and even Mortal Kombat. (Scho:Field, 1994).

The scale of this transformation may be, however, a mixed benefit – if benefit it is to be. Already it is apparent that present systems of cable, telephone and Internet, in being either privately subscribed or somewhat chaotic, as with Internet, are capable of uses that are less than socially circumspect. There has been, for example, neo‑Nazi propaganda denying the Holocaust placed on Internet via local networks in Germany, and racist abuse directed at blacks at the University of Michigan through the system, reported in the press (Guardian, April 30th, 1994) More of this kind of thing, as well as the kind of private subscription, deregulated cable channels promoting racist propaganda, such as already exist in the United States, is extremely likely with the multiple channels that fibre is capable of sustaining. They will be drops in the ocean’ of available communications and maybe no more significant as voices than they already are in daily life, but their presence on the highway, if indeed it fully materialises, will present moral and political issues that are beyond the scope of national governments to deal with.

Paradoxically this globalisation of entertainment and communication, with its fragmentation and multiplication of service providers and formal and informal communications, may not necessarily produce a simple, two‑tiered social ‘parallel text’, with technological haves on the one hand, and poor, cyber‑vultures, circling round dead and dying technological remains on the other. Politically, morally and culturally, the multiplicity of voices may produce a world‑system as bafflingly complex as, say, contemporary urban life. That is to say, it may actually change nothing in itself. It may merely reflect what is culturally, socially, politically there already. Certainly, as well as the big companies there is already in place an impressive array of subversives, the hackers and crackers, cyber‑punks and ‘data highway robbers’(Scientific American, March 1994) and much of the success of Internet has resided in the resistance to commercial uses displayed by its many thousands of subscribers. These are somewhat homely and reassuring features of a world that looks on the face of it to be dominated by business.

 

‘Any way up’ is the right way up in space

I am primarily concerned with how the moral and political landscape in which young people are now located is constituted. At a different level than that of technological advance, however, are the features of the cultural and communicative environment that organise social meaning in possibly deeper, certainly broader, ways.

 

The supracultural

At one level, the kind of globalisation involved in the link up of communication and information technologies I have described above, fits well with that wider trend towards a concern with ‘effective communication’ that is in fact trans‑cultural: a merging of the principles of public communication with those of face to face transactional communication, ultimately related to the advancement of business, technological, military, bureaucratic and political needs. The universality of advertising imageries, media news formats, graphic instructions on internationally marketed goods, passenger terminals and roadways is all part of a communicative refinement process which extracts pragmatic essentials and creates a form of supra‑cultural communication that pares away all but the utile message. It is, as it were, an instant and crystalline form of ‘skilling’. Supra‑cultural communication siphons off the generalisable modes of universal practical reason so that transactional exchanges can be, like certain foods in the supermarket, ‘the produce of more than one culture’ and, conversely, the product of none.

lf the grammars of individual cultures, or fragments of such cultural grammars, constitute a kind of communicative gravitational field then the ‘ideally’ culture‑free communicative forms ‑ whether they be linguistic or the action‑movie genre that 4travels well around the world’ ‑ may be causing ‘otherness’ to disappear, except, possibly, as a narrative position. And ’any way up’, as astronauts will testify, is the right way up in space.

 

The ethnocentric

What supra‑cultural communication stands in contrast to is the familiar intra form of cultural communication, where values are immediately attached to meanings, not detached and deferred from the moments of communication, and even if social, economic etc. ends are not instantly realised, they are situated in a continuum of evaluated meaning laying between communicative and other socially located activities. I refer primarily to everyday interpersonal communication but the ‘essay’ and ‘style’– as a way of saying, as Sartre argued, many things at once – are also prototypical of ‘high’ cultures, and both have their equivalents in most societies, even (perhaps especially) in non‑literate ones. (I’m thinking here of local religious texts and rituals, myths and narratives structured within social relations, a crafts‑worker’s exposition of her work in socio‑semantic terms ‑ wherever meaning is anchored to specific versions of human subjectivity that are socially, morally and aesthetically located. (Geertz, 1973; Sahlins,1976; Boon,1982))

The political aspect of this communicative form might be described as ‘ethnocentrism’. Although this term has commonly been employed in a negative sense, it is more useful to treat it as covering any form of political and cultural centring on the community (often but not always conceived as ‘organic’), with convergent moral and aesthetic values, and with a potential for extension outward towards the level of the state. Thus it may embrace both repressive or liberationist articulations, or indeed be placed anywhere along a range of political expressions between the two. Here we may find the familiar emphasis on tradition and often on cultural purity and cultural roots (Gellner, 1983; Smith, 1986; Anderson, 1990). It sometimes arrives packaged as a right‑wing, even racist, political project; and sometimes with an oppositional, minority voice, articulated as ‘roots politics’. In these cases some expression I of nationalism or nationalistic sentiments are explicit or latent. Thus ethnocentrism in the political arena is a highly variable commodity associated with minority rights of various kinds in plural societies; independence movements and liberation struggles, or alternatively with ethnic cleansing, and monocultural state controls.

Supracultural and ethnocentric orientations are globally evident and perhaps everywhere the political game is played out through their combination and separation (Arnason, 1990). Nationalisms, for example, in practice have an outward aspect of international economic and political relations, as well as an inner aspect of cultural identities and identifications. The relationship between these two produces a dynamic. The former operates by political control and communicative openness (of this specialised kind) – i.e. the supra‑cultural ideal ‑ the latter by local control and communicative closure (ethno‑centrism).

Countries seeking player status on the international stage need to down‑play internal identities while emphasising international mutualities of interest and communicative openness. Here the supra‑cultural ideal is likely to be evident. On the other hand, in the case of the former Yugoslavia, say, the internal face of identities glows so fiercely that outward‑facing communicative relays and relations are short-circuited or obscured (Seleel, 1994). Then there are those countries whose governments may play off one internal ethnicity against another in a game designed to ensure the success of the external, international face ‑ e.g. Canada playing off tribal native Canadians against Quebec separatists. There are, thus, many ways in which the traditional, community‑based discourses of cultural identity and purity ‑ whether they be of ethnic minority or of right-wing and statist ‑ and modern discourses of internationalism and efficiency, are combined and become related to one another in practice.

 

The syncretic

If these two, orientations may be said to dominate political discursive space, a third orientation, the emergence of the impure, syncretic and hybrid forms of culture and communication, is an effect of de‑emphasising the insulation of one culture‑from another and of loosening the symbolic significance of cultural emblems at the level, in the first instance at least, of the local and even interpersonal. It represents a kind of informal, underlife of culture and cultural mixture seen most vividly in the language of multi‑ethnic, or multi‑cultural urban life. It produces what has been called a ‘creolisation of culture’. Some refer to ‘syncretism’ others prefer ‘hybridity’ (Barth, 1989; Hannerz, 1990; Bhabha, 1990; 1994). It is not associated with oppositional politics as much as ‘cultural roots’/ethnic purist discourses have often been, but it can be said to do considerable work as a kind of cultural trickster figure, playing with and transforming cultural realities and political rigidities.

Like the supra‑cultural, the syncretic or hybrid cultural forms operate as an erosion of the ethnic purism and essentialism. encoded in discourses of tradition, but in a different way. There are many clear examples evident within youth cultures as well as within the adaptations and transformations displayed by, say, diasporic communities and cultures (Hewitt, 1986; 1993; Gilroy, 1993). Linguistic mixture, especially in languages and dialects without a written tradition, provides another obvious example. And although many strange formal conjunctions of cultural elements are generated within local, socially mixed communities, there is also considerable traffic between these and international commercial cultures where hybridity, if it can produce a consumable spectacle, may be writ large and boomed around the world. Cultural fragments cut loose from their point of generation, are free to float, free to be appropriated, free to be subverted and ‘any way up’ may be their right way too.

It seems to me that these three orientations at the level of culture and communication each have some bearing on the political and moral fields in which people, including young people, exist and act. The modern voice of liberal pluralism with its public morality of multiculturalism is one discourse articulated alongside supra‑cultural communicative forms, that is evident in national educational policies, albeit in nagging dispute with majority traditionalist discourses. The skinhead I quoted from at the outset was, despite his own strange hybridity, to some extent able to identify political opponents as ‘commie teachers’ in part at least through the re­articulation of traditionalist right‑wing political arguments over education evident in the tabloid press. The ‘commie teachers’ were, at that time at least, doing something to promote a multicultural educational agenda that sat, perhaps rather awkwardly, between a supra‑cultural ideal and the ‘roots politics’ strategy of some anti‑racist educational activists. Thus the orientations I have drawn attention to are not merely inert facts about communication and culture in contemporary life but provide the ground upon which conceptions of ‘them’ and ’us’ are played out in moral and political behaviour.

Any young individual is inevitably situated at an intersection of some combination of these cultural themes. The family may be the social relay for traditionalist, community closure, and certainly in the case of some white racist youth cultures this may be re‑enforced within the peer group. But this need not be so. Depending on social class and gender, either the family or the peer group may also relay a supracultural orientation whilst the other may be the relay of the traditional or of some syncretic forms. Other sites of cultural relay, such as the school, May give rise to other combinations. Research I conducted into ethnicity and interactional style in group discussion, for example, (Hewitt and Inghilleri, 1993; Hewitt, in press) set out to examine the contrast between the objectives of a public examination of oral performances in group discussion and interactional differences attributable to ethnicity amongst groups of white ’anglo’ English, South Asian English and African‑Caribbean English sixteen year olds. We found very little unambiguous evidence of the kind of ethnically‑based variation generated within families and communities. There was some but not much. What we did find, however, was the clear presence of modes of discussion and interrogation stylistically derived from TV chat shows and news interviews. That is to say, the impact on styles of group discussion made by supra­cultural forms was far more pronounced than any ethnic style. These styles provided a facile competence to what where a kind of school performance of ‘group discussion’. Peer group interactions beyond the classroom may well have been more ethnically determined but in this educational setting the ‘culture’ of interaction was frequently pure TV performance.

As components of a moral and political landscape, these three orientations impinge on youth in many different ways. A Turkish youth in northern Europe may be empowered jointly by a traditional home culture, a syncretic youth culture and an initiation into the supra‑cultural ideals of the education system (Auernheimer, 1990; Berg, 1993). At the same time any of these may be in conflict with the others where, for example, issues of gender are evident. He or she will also be situated in a local culture which may have its own traditionality and community closure, and that may bring its own problems in the form of, say, harassment or any of the other faces of racism. This is the reality of contemporary Europe.

I mention race and racism specifically because it is obviously one important structuring of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ but there are many more. These political realities are lived out through interactions that are cither face to face or mediated in some way by what is close and everyday. At present television, music and to some degree film have both a national and an international aspect. Minority language TV channels exist side by side with majority and with international programming (Drummond, Peterson & Willis, 1993). Musical production and distribution display a similar ability to reflect local, diasporic and international mass‑market interests. The arrival of greater globalisation, by however many ‘information highways’, may mean that the ‘everyday’ is transformed, that the multiplicity of channels with their multiplicity of uses changes many things but the ‘social glue’ providing the basis for moral agency may well be assisted by these developments more than it is eroded by, say, commercialised violence, even on a new scale.

Returning to my skinhead Jewish nazi, his music, and his dancing ’the Skinhead Moonstomp’ deep in the heart of some sub‑cultural forest, whatever complex circumstances lead him to his contradictory identification with racism, the tragedy of his position is unmistakable. If, despite his consciousness of his Jewishness, he could be drawn into racist politics and, as he was, racist violence, there seems little to hope to be had from identity politics as an immunisation against racist beliefs and practices. His world of ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ was actually re‑enforced by the glue of his ‘imagined community’, just as his Jewishness was effaced by it.

In the late space age, the Skinhead Moonstomp’ may become a thing of the past. Between noise and virtue, we do need a different music and I do not believe the dangers to lurk ‘out there’ in cyber‑space. In fact, paradoxically, the Skinhead Moonstomp’ is very terrestrial dance, and tragically it seems that polarisations of Us and Them are far more likely where community is strongest, than where either hybridity’s cultural trickster or modernity’s common communicative currency are to be found.

 

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