Subcultural Capital and Social Tokens

Fan studies provides a rich, though sometimes discombobulating, seam of material to mine for the social token researcher. Previously we looked at the decentralised phenomenon of BTS fans, known as ARMY. This worldwide assemblage of people juice BTS rankings, sales, radio rotation and donations to social movements.

In this edition of Pacenotes I’m going to centre my reading around Sarah Thornton’s 1996 book ‘Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital’. Thornton conducted ethnography of dance music clubs in the 80s and 90s in the UK. A major feature of her work is to build on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas on cultural capital.

Bourdieu’s insight was that you could be rich but not classy, and vice versa. Markers of taste corresponded with social hierarchies. The canonical example might be accents in Britain, and where someone attended university. Both these things mark a person out as belonging to a particular class. By the same token, it’s possible to be wealthy and lacking in class or sophistication: nouveu riche. This is a situation where financial capital outstrips cultural capital.

Thornton puts her spin on Bourdieu’s cultural capital by interpreting “hipness” as a form of subcultural capital. Just as cultural capital can be embodied in an accent or objectified in certain styles of clothing; so subcultural capital can be embodied in far-our haircuts and objectified in collections of one-off “white label” vinyl.

Subcultural capital also shares another feature with cultural capital: convertibility into financial capital. Having the right accent leads to more lucrative jobs; so does knowing the right clubs, DJs, musical styles and ways to dress lead to new jobs within the subculture, Thornton argues:

Moreover, within club cultures, people in these professions often enjoy a lo tof respect not only because of their high volume of subcultural capital, but also from their role in defining and creating it. In knowing, owning and playing the music, DJs, in particular, are sometimes positioned as the masters of the scene, although they can be overshadowed by club organisers whose job it is to know who’s who and gather the right crowd.

In order for subcultural capital to accrete within a particular subculture, it must first coalesce around something that is deemend authentic. Authenticity is what backs subcultural capital. Common artefacts can be imbued with value thanks to them being deemed ‘authentic’. The process of an artefact, technology or practice becoming authenticated is known as ‘enculturation’.

In the context of club culture, Thornton describes how the medium by which music was consumed or transmitted underwent a process of enculturation: how recorded music came to be viewed as authentic. As she writes:

The ultimate end of a technology’s enculturation is authentication. In other words, a musical form is authentic when it is rendered essential to subculture or integral to community. Equally, technologies are naturalised by enculturation. At first, new technologies seem foreign, artificial, inauthentic. Once absorbed into culture, they seem indigenous and organic.

In Thornton’s telling, popular music’s authenticity, from the ’50s onwards, is first backed up by its liveness. The live gig is the most authentic form of popular music. Magnetic tape and other technologies begin in the ’60s to record these performances, with the goal of transcribing or reproducing them. The ’70s and ’80s saw the advent of synthesisers and other digitally native instruments, making the act of music production one step removed from ‘live’ performances.

In sum, this technological shift represented the authentication of recorded music. DJ culture would bring this to its logical conclusion, where people would play a sequence of recorded music to create its own performance. For Thornton, this is the beginning of ‘disc culture’.

Fast-forward 10 years and we have Danah Boyd’s seminal paper (pdf)on social networks and networked publics. There are a couple of ways in which Thornton’s subcultural capital interacts with the idea of networked publics.

Boyd’s paper is an ethnography of teenaged users of early social networks like Friendster and MySpace. She observes that each user undergoes an “initiation rite” when creating a social network profile:

Building an intricate profile is an initiation rite. In the early days of their infatuation, teens spend innumerable hours tracking down codes, trading tips, and setting up a slick profile. Through this process, they are socialized into MySpace — they learn both technological and social codes. While technological information gives them the wherewithal to craft a profile, the interpretation and evaluation of this performance is dictated by social protocols. MySpace profiles become yet another mechanism by which teens can signal information about their identities and tastes.

This sounds a little bit like the description of enculturation we heard from Thornton. We might interpret the initation rites on social networks to a process of enculturation of social networks as “authentic” among teenagers.

The other observation Boyd makes is around music’s role in subcultures:

Music is cultural glue among youth. As the bands began advertising their presence on MySpace, mid-twenty/thirty-something club goers jumped on board in the hopes of gaining access to VIP passes or acquiring valuable (sub)cultural capital.13 While fans typically have to be twenty-one plus in the United States to get into the venues where bands play (because of alcohol laws), younger audiences are avid consumers of music and the culture that surrounds it. When young music aficionados learned that their favorite bands had profiles on MySpace, they began checking out the site. Music junkies loved the fact that they could listen to and download music for free while celebrity watchers enjoyed writing to musicians who were happy to respond. A symbiotic relationship between bands and fans quickly emerged on the system as bands wanted to gather fans and fans wanted to be connected to their favorite bands. Given the degree to which youth are active participants in music subcultures, it is not surprising that MySpace attracted young fans.

This brings to mind Thornton’s work on dance music as a subculture of its own. It’s interesting to remember that social networks first gained traction among youth using music as a subcultural identifier.

What does all this have to do with social tokens? I think we can analyse social tokens and subcultural capital on two dimensions:

1. Social tokens are themselves a new medium for subcultures that needs to undergo a process of enculturation to become ‘authentic’. Once social tokens are authenticated, subcultural capital becomes more ‘liquid’ and is able to flow between the communities established around these tokens and the value of the token.
2. One promising vector to begin the process of enculturation of social tokens is music. As we’ve seen, musicians and their fans have been at the vanguard of earlier forms of technological enculturation. It stands to reason that music is a vector to start the process of authenticating social tokens as a technological medium.

We can read more into Thornton’s work on subcultures, particularly around social hierarchies and how they are enforced. I think that’s a promising avenue of investigation around how subcultures can be formed around social tokens to begin with. I’ll dive into that next week!