The numerous youth subcultures to emerge since the end of World War Two act as what I call “biopolitical cultural apparatuses” that help subjects navigate the discontinuity in values, labour, and material expectations between the Fordist and neoliberal formations. As such, subcultures play a socializing role, helping subjects adapt to an increasingly precarious and austere social sphere; but they also generate new forms of community, and new experiences of personal and collective agency that can contribute to significant social transformation. Responding to the contemporary body of “post-subcultural” studies, I combine Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of biopolitics and Slavoj Žižek’s treatment of the Lacanian symptom to frame a theory that can highlight the politically progressive elements of subculture, while at the same time acknowledging their complicity with elements of the cultural dominant.
Complementing Dick Hebdige’s theory of the incorporation processes to which subcultures are subjected, I offer spatial-temporal incorporation as a predominant way in which subcultural difference is recuperated by patriarchal and capitalist structures. At the same time, the heterotopic spaces subcultures produce enable new solidarities and friendships to develop, and can offer important experiences of alterity within the fluid and individualized regulative structures of late capitalism. I investigate these dynamics through a focus on skateboarding as a subculture that is particularly representative of the kinds of control structures faced by contemporary, Western subjects. My dissertation concludes with a detailed case study of the struggles of skateboarders to maintain and preserve an aging skateboard park in Beasley, a downtown neighbourhood of Hamilton, Ontario. Hamilton’s project to re-brand itself as a post-industrial “hub” for the “creative economy” places the skateboarders in the position of having to manage their (sub)cultural capital in a new way, as developers attempt to gentrify the neighbourhood. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis describes contemporary subcultures as helping subjects navigate the shift from a Fordist to neoliberal society. A combination of Marxian theories about contemporary capitalism, Giorgio Agamben's theories of the apparatus, bare life and the friend, and Jacques Lacan's theories of the symptom are used to understand subcultures as both responding to this shift in values and institutions, and possibly providing forms of community and agency that anticipate a post-capitalist world. A particular focus on skateboarding and the extreme sports industry illustrates these theories. Specific chapters detail the extreme sports industry, the nascent street skateboarding culture in northern Ontario town of Barrie in the nineteen eighties, and the history of Beasley Skateboard Park in downtown Hamilton, Ontario.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16133 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Orpana, Simon |
| Contributors | O'Connor, Mary, English and Cultural Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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