Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles

‘Struggle’ is one of those over-used words we use to evoke a political ‘feel’ to analysis. In Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles, however, Steven Threadgold takes the idea of struggle seriously, and develops a multi-layered understanding of struggle to provide an exciting and insightful analysis of the challenges young people negotiate in everyday life. Drawing together a thoughtful reading of Bourdieu through theories of affect, risk and reflexivity, Threadgold shows that struggle is fundamental to the constitution of young people’s classed and gendered existence in a world shaped by precarity. Through an examination of ‘hipsters’, ‘bogans’ and DIY music, the book argues not only that there are modalities and temporalities to struggle, but that struggle is creative and mundane, agentic and oppressive. It offers an original and thought-provoking contribution to the field of youth studies. Greg Noble, Professor, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia A smart, sensitive and sophisticated analysis of how youth figures in the ways class is produced and contested in conditions of precarity. Centering the concept of struggle, Threadgold incisively addresses the cultural politics and quotidian material realities of new and old class relations through careful attention to the everyday lives of young people. This book is an important contribution to the theorisation of social class today, and a shining example of truly generative scholarship at the intersection of youth transitions and youth cultures research. Anita Harris, Research Professor, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Australia This is an excellent book that pushes the boundaries of theorising in youth studies to another level. By using the notion of ‘struggle’ and other Bourdieusian concepts, Steven Threadgold is able to create a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary forms of class social reproduction and youth reflexivity. As such this book is a must read for all students and scholars interested in the youth question. Alan France, Professor of Sociology, University of Auckland, New Zealand

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Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles

The concept of everyday struggles can enliven our understanding of the lives of young people and how social class is made and remade. This book invokes a Bourdieusian spirit to think about the ways young people are pushed and pulled by the normative demands directed at them from an early age, whilst they reflexively understand that allegedly available incentives for making the ‘right’ choices and working hard – financial and familial security, social status and job satisfaction – are a declining prospect. In Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles, the figures of those classed as ‘hipsters’ and ‘bogans’ are used to analyse how representation works to form a symbolic and moral economy that produces and polices fuzzy class boundaries. Further to this, the practices of young people around DIY cultures are analysed to illustrate struggles to create a satisfying and meaningful existence while negotiating between study, work and creative passions. By thinking through different modalities of struggles, which revolve around meaning making and identity, creativity and authenticity, Threadgold brings Bourdieu’s sociological practice together with theories of affect, emotion, morals and values to broaden our understanding of how young people make choices, adapt, strategise, succeed, fail and make do. Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, of fields including: Youth Studies, Class and Inequality, Work and Careers, Subcultures, Media and Creative Industries, Social Theory and Bourdieusian Theory. Steven Threadgold is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Youth, Young Adulthood and Society

www.routledge.com/Youth-Young-Adulthood-and-Society/book-series/YYAS Series editor: Andy Furlong, University of Glasgow, UK | Andy.Furlong@ glasgow.ac.uk The Youth, Young Adulthood and Society series brings together social scientists from many disciplines to present research monographs and collections, seeking to further research into youth in our changing societies around the world today. The books in this series advance the field of youth studies by presenting original, exciting research, with strongly theoretically- and empirically-grounded analysis. Published: Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles Steven Threadgold Youth Homelessness and Survival Sex Intimate Relationships and Gendered Subjectivities Juliet Watson Forthcoming: Spaces of Youth Identities, Inequalities and Social Change David Farrugia Rethinking Young People’s Marginalisation Beyond Neo-Liberal Futures? Perri Campbell, Lyn Harrison, Chris Hickey and Peter Kelly

Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles

Steven Threadgold

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Steven Threadgold The right of Steven Threadgold to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-84998-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-72507-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

This book is dedicated to Pam Nilan, who has been a huge influence on my life. Pam’s mentorship has provided opportunities for me that I could not have imagined as an apprentice electrician or as nervous mature aged student when I first set foot on a University campus in the late 1990s. Pam’s support and encouragement to finish a PhD, when there were times when it was looking unlikely, is a key ‘sliding doors’ moment. Her continued advice and collaboration are invaluable. For well over a decade Pam has been there for me: from a being lecturer trying to get to the next class while I continued to ask question after question; to a supervisor who, after breezing through Honours, dragged me through the ups and downs of being a lost postgrad; to a colleague and collaborator who has continued to teach me the game of academia; to a close friend and reassuring confidant. Today, I would like to think that there are times when I may even help and comfort Pam, especially when we get together to (mostly) laugh at the various everyday bullshit that all academics face in these in absurd places we call universities. Thanks so much Pam, this book is for you.

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

xii xiii

PART 1

Youth studies and theoretical foundations

1

A mix tape for Part 1

3

1 Youth, class and everyday struggles Introduction 5 Youth 9 Class 19 Bourdieu’s ‘struggles’ 22 Chapter outline 24 2 Sociological practice: Towards a Bourdieusian understanding Introduction: Bourdieu’s thinking tools 28 Bourdieu’s conception of class 30 Struggle, illusio and social gravity 34 Social games and strategy 36 Habitus and field 38 Capitals 43 Trajectory 46 Doxa and misrecognition 47 Symbolic violence 48 Cultural arbitrary 49 Distinction 50 Conclusion 51

5

28

x Contents

3 Bourdieusian prospects and theory in youth studies Introduction 52 Reflexivity and inequality 53 The symbolic, the moral and ‘value’ 58 Affect and emotion 62 Conclusion 69

52

PART 2

Classification struggles in the field of representation

71

A mix tape for Part 2

73

4 Hipsters and bogans: Distinctive figures of classed anxieties Introduction 75 Hipsters and bogans in the news 77 Slippery categories 82 What is a bogan? What is a hipster? 85 Hipsters and bogans as ‘figures’ 95 Classification struggles in the field of representation 96 Conclusion 97 5 Hipsters and bogans in the news media and comedy: Two case studies Introduction 104 Case study 1 105 Case study 2 115 The affective economy of hipsters and bogans 128 Conclusion: Global hipsters and local bogans 130

75

104

PART 3

DIY cultures: Struggles about creativity, identity and meaningful work

135

A mix tape for Part 3

137

6 A DIY scene: Cultural struggles and meaning making Introduction 139 ‘DIY’: From punk to sociology to co-optation and beyond 140 Everyday struggles in a DIY music scene in Australia 145 Conclusion 178

139

Contents

xi

7 A DIY career? Labour and creativity struggles Introduction 181 Class, labour and creativity 181 DIY cultures to DIY careers 187 Subcultural capital and illusio 195 Choice, struggle and making do: Strategic poverty? 197 Conclusion 199

181

8 Coda: Hipsters, bogans and class in the DIY scene

201

9 Conclusion Introduction 209 Modalities of everyday struggle 209 Bourdieu, affect and reflexivity 211 Youth, modalities of struggle and the ‘future’ 213

209

References Index

214 239

Figures

1.1 4.1 4.2

Samuel Davide Haines profile Moo Brew cup: ‘Not suitable for bogans’ Roman Signer’s Engpass, MONA: ‘Sex, Death + Bogans?’

6 84 84

Acknowledgements

In recent years, I have been lucky to part of a burgeoning research cluster at University of Newcastle, now known as the Newcastle Youth Studies Group. It has been invaluable to have like-minded colleagues around to be able to bounce ideas off. Thanks to Julia Coffey, David Farrugia, Akane Kanai and Pam Nilan. Thanks also to Caragh Brosnan and Lisa Adkins for various discussions about Bourdieu over the years, from our abandoned reading group, to the seminar that became Bourdieusian Prospects. Thanks so much to all those who gave me detailed feedback on versions of this manuscript. I particularly want to thank Greg Noble, who told me to be bolder and made me think about the idea of modality of struggle, rather than the more general way I was using the concept before his feedback. His critique and encouragement were invaluable. David Farrugia gave the first five chapters a close read, importantly advising me to cut many sections where I was just putting my 2 cents worth in on a topic, which was not contributing to the argument of the book. Thanks also to Andy Bennett, Matt Bunn, Megan Sharp and Dan Woodman for their feedback on chapters. Pam Nilan forensically went over the complete manuscript of the book, seeing all sorts of things that I had completely missed, helping to edit out most of my usual peccadilloes. The DIY research has been influenced by three projects I have been lucky enough to supervise: Megan Sharp’s PhD research of the queering of hardcore and punk spaces in Brighton (UK), Newcastle and Melbourne; Oki Rahadianto Sutopo’s PhD research on the entrepreneurial activities of young Indonesian musicians; and Ruairi Burns’ Honour’s work on DIY merchandising practices, meaning and identity in Newcastle. Being part of Matthew Bunn’s PhD work on alpine climbers was also a great opportunity to engage Bourdieu in creative ways. Many thanks to Murrie, Knives and the whole crew at The Press Book House where much of this book was written. Still not sure if you guys are hipsters or bogans. I hope you never get Wi-Fi. Most of all, thanks to Emma for all her love and support and putting up with a distracted partner for nearly 2 years.

xiv Acknowledgements

A note on the mix tapes In the spirit of the research on DIY Cultures I have compiled Mix Tape lists for each chapter that are mostly created by artists and bands in and around the scene, with a couple of older but relevantly themed songs thrown in. All should be available to listen to or buy online. Support The Scene!

A note on footnotes and endnotes As this book relies on many media examples, the referencing process became unwieldy, especially where academic sources and media sources were needed in the same sentence or line. Therefore, all media sources are referenced by endnote at the conclusion of each individual chapter. Academic and authorial sources are referenced in-text. Footnotes are used for clarification material.

Part 1

Youth studies and theoretical foundations

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A mix tape for Part 1

‘Evoke the Sleep’ by NUN ‘Uni Break’ by Ciggie Witch ‘University Fiend’ by Bitch Prefect ‘University Narcolepsy’ by Woollen Kits ‘Another Year’ by Tape/Off ‘I Soon Found Out My Lonely Life Wasn’t So Pretty’ by TV Colours ‘Higher Forms’ by Rule of Thirds ‘Systematic Fuck’ by Total Control ‘Manic Saturday’ by The Laurels ‘Goin’ to the Tote’ by Yabbie ‘Scent of my Youth’ by You Beauty ‘Teenage Satellites’ by The Stevens ‘No Fun’ by Bloods ‘Be Yourself ’ by The UV Race ‘Patience is for Waiters’ by A GENDER ‘Falling down the Stairs’ by Blank Realm ‘Bitter Defeat’ by Kitchen’s Floor ‘Expensive Dog’ by Total Control ‘Starter Humanism’ by ScotDrakula ‘Brisbane Town’ by Scrabbled ‘Home’ by Mere Women ‘Better Next Time’ by Bitch Prefect ‘Cheap Education’ by Twerps ‘Shit for Brains’ by Bored Nothing ‘PraktisePraktiseFailure’ by Castings ‘Body Body Body I Need It I need It I Need It’ by Cured Pink ‘Life Park’ by The UV Race ‘The Radicalisation of D’ by Gareth Liddiard ‘We get By’ by The Gooch Palms ‘Boomer Class’ by Dick Diver ‘Work it Out’ by Totally Mild ‘Flat City’ by Thigh Master

4 Youth studies and theoretical foundations

‘Young Drunk’ by The Smith Street Band ‘The Future’ by Taco Leg ‘The Minotaur’ by The Drones ‘We are Now’ by School of Radiant Living ‘What a Silly Day (Australia Day)’ by Eastlink ‘Depersonalisation’ by Ausmuteants ‘I Don’t Mind’ by Day Ravies ‘Bad Attitude’ by The Fighting League ‘Hunter Street Mall’ by The Gooch Palms ‘Eureka’ by Per Purpose ‘Direct Debt’ by Shrapnel ‘Bad Temper’ by Straight Arrows ‘Titty Riot’ by The Sufferjets ‘If We Can’t Get it Together’ by You Am I ‘Down the Lane’ by Royal Headache ‘I Wanna ctrl alt delete my Life’ by Disgusting People

Chapter 1

Youth, class and everyday struggles

Introduction The concept of everyday struggles and strategies can enliven our understanding of the lives of young people and how social class is made and remade. This book invokes a Bourdieusian spirit to think about the ways young people are pushed and pulled by the normative demands directed at them from an early age, while reflexively understanding that the rewards that are meant to be on offer to them for making the ‘right’ choices and working hard – financial and familial security, social status, job satisfaction – are a declining prospect, even for the well-educated. By analysing the media representation of young people through the figures of hipster and bogan, and young people’s engagement and participation in cultural politics, precarious labour markets and their everyday notions of morals and values, by thinking through different modalities of struggle, we will be better placed to understand the means by which young people make choices, adapt, adjust, strategise, succeed, fail, get by and make do. The book is organised into three sections. Part 1 sets up the theoretical lens, situating the study in the field of youth studies; introducing Bourdieu’s thinking tools and developing those tools to help think about morals, emotions and affects. Part 2 presents a case study of cultural politics of class in the media by considering the figures of hipster and bogan. These figures illustrate the ways youth cultural practices are a key resource drawn upon by media and creative industries to distinguish class-imbued moral and taste boundaries, all the while creating online snark and outrage in the ever-present need to attract clicks. Part 3 analyses the practices of young people in an underground DIY music scene who are striving to carve out their own affective space to be creative while trying get by. For these young people, their punk ethos is something that is struggled over and with, while also influencing their decisions about careers and everyday ethics. To begin with, I will use the following anecdote to contextualise some of the everyday struggles that will be the focus of the rest of the book. In 2016 the Melbourne newspaper, The Age ran a profile piece on an apparent überhipster called Samuel Davide (Figure 1.1). It contained glorious quotes like: ‘I am a web developer, mystery blogger and jazz kitten’ and ‘my style is bucolic

6 Youth studies and theoretical foundations

socialist’. The story drew many responses, both in the Australian press and internationally. The Age ran a follow up asking, ‘Is this the most Melbourne man ever?’1 The UK’s Independent interviewed Samuel, where he managed to come up with more gems, such as, ‘I was in Ikea once and I saw a stock painting of Audrey Hepburn and was moved to tears. Since then I’ve only smoked Vogues, so elegant. I’m also really into fridge magnet wisdom and ideology, such as “keep calm and sparkle on”’.2 Comments under various stories on Davide, were not encouraging to put it mildly, with the vitriol ranging from the usual snark to outright misogyny and homophobia: ‘The very definition of a cunt’, ‘#hipsterwanker’, ‘Melbourne hipster scum’, ‘why we need Trump’, someone who ‘deserves to be beaten thoroughly and savagely every single day’, one who ‘must be eradicated’ and the slightly more imaginative ‘pretentious fucking cockwomble of the highest order …’3

Figure 1.1 Samuel Davide Hains profile Source: The Age.

Youth, class and everyday struggles

7

Essentially it seems that this apparent hipster is not why we fought World War II. ‘This man is about as far from the trenches of the western front as a man can be. Just think a whole generation died so he could be a cunt’. The upshot? Davide’s capacity to galvanise the common man: ‘cunts like this can unite the world by giving us all something to hate’.4 But in fact, the whole thing was an ironic hoax, a ‘performance piece’. Talking to Vice5, Sam Hains said ‘Samuel Davide’ ‘is a persona – there are elements of my authentic self in Davide’, but he is a ‘satirical character … when the media took such interest in my half-assed, satirical “street column”, my interest in how life is marketed and mediatised grew’. From there he just went with the flow, giving the media interviewers what they wanted: a hipster clown to be used as a straw man for all the apparent foibles and failures of young people’s, and by extension popular and consumer culture, foibles. Hains felt that everyone was trying to exploit ‘Davide’: He was being contacted, if not harassed by so many publications. It was a really unhealthy relationship between Davide and the media organisations. It felt very manic … the intensity of it. Everyone wanted blood from Davide.6 Davide had ‘this huge PR push – without a material product or a tangible personal brand identity – yet effectively and inadvertently held a mirror up to some of the flaws of the system’.7 The writer of the original profile piece, Tara Kenny, who has a personal relationship with Hains, was sacked by the newspaper because she was in on the hoax, which The Guardian reported under the headline: ‘“Socialist” hipster who fooled The Age is from family worth billions’.8 When announcing the sacking, The Age commented that ‘Fairfax Media expects all journalists to report truthfully and fairly on all subjects in all sections’.9 This is a newspaper that reports what politicians have to say every day, with the obligatory and quite obviously biased opinion pieces doubling down on the constant PR spin. In Kenny’s own words, she was employed as a freelance ‘copywriter through a third party to churn out event listings and lifestyle and entertainment articles in response to briefs such as “lavish children’s birthday parties”, “frozen yoghurt” and “beetroot” (seriously)’. As she put it, she was ‘under no misconception that producing content that exists almost entirely to legitimise advertising makes you a news journalist’10. Kenny then wrote a piece for Overland 11 critically analysing her own experience, the reaction to the hoax and outlining the rather extreme ‘level of hateful vitriol levelled at a clueless but fundamentally harmless young man whose alleged crime against humanity was … wearing his overalls backwards and being a “hipster”’.

8 Youth studies and theoretical foundations

This tale characterises many aspects of the lives of young people, especially relatively middle class young people, that this book proposes are key to understanding their everyday struggles. Firstly, we have the mining and manipulation of youth culture, or more accurately the very concept of youth itself, to sell newspapers and act as clickbait. Outrage is created about the apparent vapidity of what young people get up to, from the usual perspective of ‘back in my day things were better’, or from a more general position of a superior attitude, mixed with general ignorance of young people’s actual lives. Despite the constant negativity towards youth culture, mainstream media is obsessed by it, with stories and analysis appearing nearly every day. Secondly, we have savvy young people working in and with the media, earning money, having fun and, ironically playing with the very medium itself. Samuel Hains revealed some truths about media simulations, while Tara Kenny’s job was to create interest, to garner clicks for paid advertising content, and to generally get attraction to the dying media platform of newspapers. She did this very well and was fired for it. The young people here create the content (as either writers or subject) because they know what is cool, but as soon as it crosses an arbitrary and blurry ethical line, they are persecuted for it. Thirdly, the sacking underscores the precarity of young people’s work. Kenny was working the job while studying: ‘Like many young creatives trying to make it work in a tough economy, I gratefully accepted the pay packet and complimentary champagne and attempted to exercise a level of creativity in return’.12 Kenny is juggling work and study while trying to create a career trajectory. She does exactly what is required in the world of online media and is fired by the corporation to save face, even though her misdeed is unclear in the murky world of clickbait, content farming and advertorials. Here there is no union, she is employed through a third party, and working freelance, and there is no recourse to the sacking. This is paradigmatic of work in the creative industries and more broadly, the youth labour market. Kenny is relatively privileged: attended university, friends with the children of billionaires! For those with less economic, cultural and social capital, the precarity is starker. This anecdote is archetypal of young people’s everyday struggles. They are casualised and underemployed, engaged in immaterial labour, they combine casual work and study, they are involved in cultural politics and generational conflict, yet they have a reflexive understanding of the absurdity of it all. The above example contains factors well known to youth studies researchers. The study of ‘youth cultures’ has had a fluctuating relationship with the concept of class. For example, the figure of the hipster does not really fit previous conceptions of youth consumption practices. In general, foundational studies of subculture – and more recent work continuing that tradition – have been critiqued for (among other things): over-romanticising working class practice; finding ‘resistance’ everywhere; ignoring gender and ethnicity; and having an

Youth, class and everyday struggles

9

unhealthy focus on the ‘spectacular’ while disregarding the ‘mainstream’. Work done under the loose banner of ‘post-subcultural’ studies (including ‘scenes’ and ‘neo-tribes’) has been critiqued for giving too much heed to fluid notions of identity while ignoring structural constraints; and overromanticising ‘choice’ in consumer culture. Meanwhile, studies of ‘youth transitions’ have consistently highlighted how class, family, gender, ethnicity, access to quality education, and geographical location continue to shape the choices and risks that face young people, and that the length of the so-called transition from being a ‘child’ to an ‘adult’ is blurry and extended. Youth transitions though, rarely take into account youth cultural practices. While focusing on ‘youth’ as its object of study, this book uses two case studies to draw out broader implications about class in the cultural politics of a precarious and reflexive world. The first case study employs the figures of hipster and bogan as heuristics to analyse struggles in the field of representation. It includes consideration of opinion pieces and media coverage about young people that both deny and invoke class, and examples of pop cultural parodies and satire that highlight how what we laugh at is imbued with classed anxieties. The second case study analyses the ways some young people deal with a precarious existence. Within a nationally networked DIY music scene, the so-called ‘ugly Australian underground’, these young people invest themselves creatively in forms of DIY Culture, struggling through a complex but now normalised web of study, employment, unemployment and underemployment. They struggle over the very meanings of punk and DIY in their creative endeavours, while at the same time struggling to maintain space in their lives to pursue artistic passions. The title of the book draws direct attention to three difficult and complex concepts: youth, class and struggle. The following will introduce these foci as a lens for both understanding the analysis in the rest of the book and to position this study in the broader field of youth studies.

Youth Media moral panics about young people seem to want it both ways: do they actually grow up too early or too late? Some reports worry about protecting young people from ever-increasing threats: sexualisation at an earlier age and sexual predators; pop culture having a detrimental influence; religious radicalisation and mass shootings; technology’s apparent stupefying effects. The list goes on. On the other hand, there are constant panics that denigrate and scapegoat young people. These stories individualise or even pathologise widespread economic and social changes as individual weaknesses: irresponsibility, laziness, disloyalty, vapidity, molly-coddling, and needing to ‘grow up’. The list here too goes on. These are instances of what Beck has called ‘the biographical solution[s] of systemic contradictions’ (Beck 1992: 137). Youth studies has developed decades of research on the lives of young

10 Youth studies and theoretical foundations

people that work to challenge the assumptions underlying such cultural stereotypes. This book locates itself in the field of youth studies. But it also points to some questions about the limits of this field and how the very research findings in the field over the last few decades mean that the object of study – ‘youth’ – may need to be reconceptualised. ‘Youth’ is a lot of things: a concept, an image, a lifestyle. In the public sphere, youth is evoked in all kinds of moral panics towards whatever current social problems need a scapegoat, as well as being incessantly mined in popular and consumer culture as an image, usually a sexy, cool or rebellious one, to sell products and entertain (Ewen 2001). The concept of ‘youth’, like the invention of ‘adolescence’ before it (Payne 2010), is a social construction and has come to have a normative meaning of a liminal space between being defined as a ‘child’ or an ‘adult’. The actual age demographic of youth as a category varies between different institutions and countries (and, in some cases, different researcher requirements). It has been roughly defined by most institutions as between 15 and about 25 years of age. However, in terms of the endpoint, many people acquire the markers of adulthood both before and after this age, often depending on whether they have continued education or gone straight into work, which problematises the age limits. In this sense, a sociological understanding of the significance of age categories should be considered along the lines of where ‘cultures meet biology’ (Baars 2010), where chronological understandings of time dominate to the detriment of more rounded understandings of how life actually unfolds. Bourdieu has claimed that ‘youth’ is ‘just a word’. The division between young and old is a power division which imposes limits and produces ‘an order to which each person must keep, keeping himself [sic] in his place’ (Bourdieu 1993a: 94). For Bourdieu, the individuals who are labelled ‘youth’ are so different and live under so many various circumstances that it becomes an ‘enormous abuse of language to use the same concept to subsume under the same term social universes that have practically nothing in common’ (Bourdieu 1993a: 95). This is not to say that ‘youth’ is unimportant as a social category, since the term acts as a key disseminator of symbolic violence in myriad ways. While youth may be seen as a social construction, the figure of youth itself is being increasingly embraced and mobilised by neoliberal forces (Sukarieh and Tannock 2015). As the canonical work of Kelly argues, youth is a social and cultural construction immersed in techniques of control (Kelly 2000, 2006). ‘Youth’, therefore may also be considered not just a word, nor just a power division, but something that materialises through the institutionalisation of education, training and labour markets. For the term ‘youth’ to have any sociological meaning, rather than treating young people as an amorphous group, the different experiences of young people pertaining to their different positions in social space need to be emphasised and investigated. This book focuses on class and the concept of struggle to do some aspects of this work.

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11

Youth culture Loosely, there have been two camps in the sociological study of youth: Youth Cultures and Youth Transitionsi (see Macdonald, Banks and Hollands 1993; MacDonald 2011). Youth Culture studies have shone a light on subcultures, consumption, music, media and technologies, fashion, leisure and the like, analysing the politics of pleasure, the expression of subversion, and opposition to the dominant forms of cultural politics. For example, writing against the ghost of the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School (CCCS) drew on Gramsci to rework the idea of popular culture as opaque dominant ideology. They positioned youth subcultures as a negotiation and struggle between the dominant parent culture and resistive youth cultures. Since then, youth culture has been studied as a place of hegemony and resistance; mainstream and subculture; authenticity and commodification; creativity and conformity; identity and ideology. Consumption practices are key to understanding the best and worst of young people’s lives. In this conception, popular culture is identified as a ‘site of struggle’. ‘Resistance’ is symbolic and through ‘rituals’. The resistance is not necessarily revolutionary, threatening the whole ‘system’, but creates degrees of autonomous space to live within it. This work in the Youth Culture field illustrates how popular culture is as much a place of practice as a place of consumption. A key argument of this book is that struggles expressed in subcultures or in wider cultural politics come to colour the affective atmosphere of young people’s lives in general. So, for instance, the young people in Part 3 take their punk morals and values into the labour market to make career decisions. Subcultural studies have explored certain groups taking part in ‘positive mass consumption’ (Frith 1991: 103) – punks, goths, mods, rockers, riot grrrls, raves, culture jamming, Bronies,ii even football hooliganism – where cultural goods can ‘be equated with the value of the groups consuming them – youth, the working class, women, and so forth’ (Frith 1991: 103). One of the most influential early studies was Hebdige’s (1979) work on punk. He drew on Raymond Williams’ conception of culture as ‘ordinary’, the view that popular culture is the lived culture of ordinary men and women (Storey 2008: 48). Using this more anthropological approach rather than the Frankfurt School’s conception of pop culture as ‘mass culture’ produced by the culture industry, subcultural researchers ethnographically examined culture as a wide i This is obviously an over-simplification, but it does represent a general compartmentalisation of the historical development of the field and distinct research focus since the 1970s. There is a third track, ‘policy and practice’, more focused on youth work practice and advocacy perspectives. ii Bronies are a subculture made up usually of young males who are intense fans of the children’s cartoon series, My Little Pony. They celebrate the friendship aspect of the show and are usually seen as a challenge to heteronormative masculinity. See Robertson (2013).

12 Youth studies and theoretical foundations

range of social activities, meanings, values, beliefs, institutions and commodities and considered how these elements were related in a whole way of life. Hebdige stresses (like Bourdieu) that there is not simply one culture – an individual’s social experience and cultural activity is shaped by gender, ethnicity, age and, most importantly, class (see Negus 1996: 15). Hebdige’s analysis draws on semiotics and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. In these terms, popular culture is a site of struggle between dominant and subordinate groups. This will be echoed but critically developed in the chapters to follow. The process of ‘bricolage’, a practice done both individually and collectively, is an important concept for grasping much youth cultural practice. Bricolage involves ‘tinkering’ with everyday things to change or subvert their meaning to create something new (Willis 1990). For instance, punks used safety pins for ear and nose piercings and garbage bags as clothes. Contemporary examples include culture jamming, skateboarding in car parks, graffiti, using Barbie dolls to make porn cartoons, or the hipster act of using mason jars as drinking glasses.iii This kind of remixing and reworking, especially when related to the ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011) of contemporary pop culture, is still an important way of understanding contemporary creative youth cultures. There has been much criticism and development of foundational subcultural studies. McRobbie and Garber (2006) immediately pointed out that these subcultures were predominantly male, located women in a subordinate role,iv and ignored the domestic sphere as a place of cultural practice. Frith argues that it is still elitist, that is, it has moved from the Frankfurt School position of ‘if it is popular it must be bad’, to a position of ‘if it’s popular it must be bad, unless it’s popular with the right people’ (Frith 1991: 103). More recently, the concept of subculture has been used in broader ways to the point where the concept ‘has arguably become little more than a convenient “catchall” term for any aspect of social life in which young people, style and music intersect’ (Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004: 1). The very concept of subculture has been criticised for not being able to account for the fluidity of identity, even for identities built around collectives. Thus, subculture is left meaning everything and nothing (Bennett 1999). This has seen the rise of many new conceptual advances including the notion of post-subcultures (Muggleton 1997), club cultures (Thornton 1995), lifestyles (Miles 2000) and neo-tribes (Bennett 2000). Further, research into online practices of youth has challenged some of the normative assumptions of youth culture, with Lincoln (2012) redrawing the separation of public and private, and Hodkinson (2003) doing the same for the nexus between the global and the local. iii This kind of ‘hipster bricolage’ – jars as glasses; chopping boards as plates – is the source of much of the scorn and mirth about hipsters, explored further in Part 2. See Masterson (2016) for an example. iv This is reflected the analysis in Chapter 6 of the rise of the Listen collective in Melbourne.

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Rather than assuming that there is an easy distinction to be made between offline and online interactions between youth in the post-digital age, such interactions often embody a merging of offline and online qualities and characteristics in a seamless fashion. (Bennett and Robards 2014: 1–2) For the DIY Culture activity studied in Part 3 of this book, the category I employ is ‘scene’, developed by Straw (1991, 2001). Hesmondhalgh (2005) argues the term scene is too ambiguous. Yet it is useful precisely because of its openness. Straw (1991: 273) defines a scene as ‘that cultural space in which a range of musical practices co-exist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization’. Straw analysed indie and dance scenes in North America, showing how they have variable ‘logics’ where participants develop different ways of understanding and engaging with temporal and spatial change (Negus 1996: 22). For example, the indie rock scene was understood by its participants in relation to a ‘canon’ of albums by certain artists that encode a particular sense of historical time and geographical place. Alternatively, the dance scene has a ‘faster temporal logic’, usually organised around single tracks rather than albums, and operates ‘within and across different spaces that connect together urban locations from where important dance music has emerged’ (Negus 1996: 22–23). Unlike subcultural analysis, Straw contends that scenes are not necessarily oppositional, resistive or disruptive in nature. He maintains that the practices of the participants in scenes are not solely shaped by the influences and machinations of the music industry (Straw 1991: 384). Not all kids who participate in scenes are creatively or ‘positively’ consuming, yet they are also not cultural dupes, mindlessly being spoon-fed from multinational corporations. Straw suggests that scenes do not spontaneously appear from a particular group, class or community, but from various coalitions and alliances which are both actively created and actively maintained (Negus 1996: 23). I prefer the concept of scene because it is better for accommodating the notion of struggle. The idea of scene affords more diversity in terms of the people participating. It brings to the fore geographical and virtual links between the local and the global, and emphasises historical aspects such as canons and genres. As discussed in analysis of the DIY practices in Part 3, subcultures, especially punk, have been presented too much as a unified resistant politics that brackets out the debates and conflicts that happen within punk spaces. Punk in this sense is better conceptualised as a form of Bourdieusian practice (O’Connor 2016), where there are struggles in a local scene over the values, morals and meanings of punk as a field. Youth transitions The other track in youth studies is Transitions studies, where there has been a great amount of work tracing the trajectory from ‘child’ to ‘youth’ through to

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‘adult’, highlighting how class, gender, ethnicity, place and the like mediate this process. Historically there are three kinds of traditional youth transitions. Firstly, there are ‘school to work transitions’, the trajectory from educational systems out into the labour market. Secondly, there are ‘domestic transitions’, the relationships that young people form, especially in finding a ‘significant other’. Thirdly, there are the ‘housing transitions’, the ways young people develop independence from their families of origin, especially in terms of getting their own place to live on the way to an apparent ‘independence’. These specific transitions mark the broader ‘transition’ through normative moral dichotomies: irresponsible to responsible; promiscuous to monogamous; minor to citizen; ignorant to wise; apathetic to committed. In the past, it would have been expected that these normative markers of adulthood – full-time work, your own abode, and a marriage – would have been ticked off by the early 20s. But this is not the case now. In fact, as an area of study, the contemporary field of Youth Transitions problematises the assumed linear trajectory of life. The old singular model of youth transitions does not apply for all anymore. There are a multitude of trajectories. Youth transitions research has shown that in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, the so-called transition has extended for many: it has become blurry and fractured, and happens more in a zig zag, or ‘one step forward, two steps back’ way (Wyn and White 1997; see also Brannen and Nilsen 2002; Te Riele 2004; Furlong and Cartmel 2007; Bradley and Devadason 2008). In terms of the school-to-work transition, more people are going into higher education (even while inequality continues to increase) and there has been an upward credentialising of the labour market. At the same time, there is now an acceptance that young people need to have McJobs, ‘jobs with training wheels’, with poor conditions, low pay and uncertain hours, as some kind of disciplinary measure to teach them how to be responsible (see Tannock 2001). Unpaid internships and volunteer work have also become the normal ‘apprenticeship’ towards getting a ‘real’ job that actually pays, even with the possession of a tertiary degree. Young people intensely experience the affective precarity of the global labour market. Research on domestic and housing transitions has shown that due to rapid economic changes, including the labour market, but also due to decreasing welfare support, young people are living at home longer with parents (when they are lucky enough to have this option) and living in rented shared housing much later in life (Schneider 2000; Tosi and Gähler 2016; Hoolachan et al. 2016). Home ownership is also becoming an option for only the relatively wealthy in capital cities. ‘Settling down’ with marriage and having children (if it occurs at all) is happening much later in life. With transitions extending and blurring, shaped by the forces of reflexivity, individualisation and detraditionalisation (Evans 2016; Threadgold and Nilan 2009; Woodman, Threadgold and Possamai-Inesedy 2015), it becomes pertinent to ask: is the transition metaphor still a useful heuristic? It is in this space that I propose ‘struggle’ as a useful conceptual addition to this area of concern, especially as it can bring together aspects of both youth cultures and

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youth transitions. This synthesis is explored in detail in Part 3. In fact, if many of the social factors and experiences that feature in the ‘transition’ period are happening into people’s 40s and beyond, what does this mean for youth studies and the very notion of ‘adult’? If the social factors that make up the ‘transitionary phase’ of life are increasingly normal for apparent adults, is transition still a useful way of thinking about young people? It is in this affective space that young people are faced with an array of everyday struggles. Adulthood? Crawford (2006) has argued that the youth/adult binary is becoming redundant. The very notion of adulthood itself needs to be redefined as the traditional markers of it become further dispersed throughout life due to economic, social and political change. Despite attacks in the media about the rise of the ‘kidult’ or the ‘adultescent’, or psychological categories within youth studies such as ‘arrested adulthood’ (see Côté 2000), Crawford argues that there is nothing intrinsically ‘wrong’ with renting, being in a long-term relationship and not getting married, putting off having kids, or planning to travel rather than planning a career. These changes do not reflect political apathy, commitmentphobia, lack of responsibility, narcissism or a loss of social values. They are a reflection of very real and significant economic, social and political structures that previous generations did not experience, that are emancipatory in some ways and stultifying in others. We might ask what it means for youth studies itself if the following factors originally considered part of the youth transition phase are becoming more normal for many people beyond the age of 30:     

An increasingly precarious and insecure labour market position for many, demanding ‘mobility’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘lifelong learning’. Increased tendency to put off getting married and having kids (or not doing either) and living in the family home later in life. The rise of non-traditional families, lifestyles and sexualities. Finding it increasingly unlikely to own property. Continuing participation in youth-like culture well beyond the age of 30.

These developments mean that our categories of thinking through the trajectory of life – child, youth, adolescent, adult, old, and so on – are challenged because the idea of youth as ‘liminal’ and adult as ‘stable’ no longer holds (Raby 2010).v The romanticised notion of traditional ‘adulthood’ – the early v There has been debate about these processes in developmental psychology, with the claim that there is a new stage called ‘emerging adulthood’. See Arnett (2000, 2004, 2006) and see Bynner (2005) and Côté (2014a) for critique. Hayward (2013) usefully criticises these psychological perspectives from a sociological angle.

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20s marriage, the quarter-acre block, the 2.2 kids, the stable and meritocratic career – has less relevance, and this has been the case for some time. This is not an indication of an increase in lack of morals, political apathy, commitment phobia, rampant consumerism or laziness. Young people are scolded for not taking options that aren’t really there (Crawford 2006). How can you ‘settle down’, get married, buy a house, and have kids when house prices are so high, your work future is so uncertain, and only some people are allowed to get marriedvi anyway? In these conditions, strategising to put these things off until later in life when you can afford it is a responsible and practical decision. What people choose to consume, and whether or not they choose to buy property, is not indicative of lapsed values and irresponsibility, no matter what age or generation. Yet the debates around these issues are laden with specific values and morals, as we shall see in the discussion of hipsters and bogans in Part 2. In Part 3, we will encounter young people who are making responsible and practical decisions to downsize their work time to maximise their creative time, decisions that would seem to be ‘irrational’ from a normative ‘homo economicus’ perspective. With these examples in mind, the very idea of ‘adulthood’ needs to be rethought since the traditional markers of it are increasingly slippery. As Crawford (2006: 3) says in regard to media stereotypes, ‘adultescents are the imposters on the adult stage’. Thus, by denigrating so-called arrested development ‘kidults’ – which is echoed in much criticism of the so-called hipster – new formations of adulthood and the transformation of ‘adult values’ such as maturity and responsibility are easily obfuscated. Adulthood and even citizenship need to be reconfigured. ‘Adult values’ are not being eroded, but simply re-interpreted – which should be the right of every new generation. Crawford’s arguments, like Davis’ (1999) work before her, are examples of Bourdieu’s theorisation of generations as modes of struggle over cultural capital. For example, these kinds of struggles arose in an exchange between Sydney Morning Herald columnist and former Australian Rugby Union player, Peter Fitzsimmons13 and the rather more recent Wallabies player Clyde Rathbone.14 Fitzsimmons’ newspaper piece was on Gen Y and sport. It was a typical ‘kids these days’ rant, lamenting an apparent decline in what it means for young people to play sport for their country, citing the usual litany of drinking incidents, selfies and social media faux pas. It was the kind of diatribe that relies on an over-romanticised memory and partial representation of the past. Fitzsimmons appeared to forget that many members of his own generation partook in very similar activities, at least without the technology to document them. Clyde Rathbone’s response emphasised the absurdity of these kinds of polemics by pointing to a Rugby Union player from his own generation, vi I am referring here to the fact that the legality of marriage in many countries is still only for heteronormative couples.

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David Pocock, who is consistently held up as a beacon of values that are worthy of being a role model: ‘Intelligent, respectful, diligent and selfless to a fault. Dave is everything that Fitzy’s Gen Y is not, and yet, at 25, he is branded by stereotypes reserved for an entire generation. This is worse than wrong, it’s stupid’. Blatterer (2007, 2009, 2010) has analysed these kinds of contradictions, where struggling to live up to a discriminating and distorted image of idealised youth is important for the maximisation of life chances in adulthood (see also Blatterer and Glahn 2010). Yet, like the concept of youth, the meaning of adulthood is increasingly ambiguous. ‘Youthfulness’ is liberated from biological age categories and has been recast as a desirable trait to maximise eudaimoniavii throughout the life course. ‘The normative foundations of contemporary adulthood are ambiguous because the market has appropriated, altered and then sold back to us the dream of eternal youth’ (Blatterer 2010: 63). The changing nature and ‘promise’ of happiness (Ahmed 2010) is discussed in Chapter 5 through the ways that hipster and bogan figure as part of an affective economy for the distribution of happiness. Blatterer’s observations are borne out in the work of Bennett and Hodkinson (2012; see also Bennett 2013) who have asked ‘what happens to participants of “youth cultures” as they move beyond adolescence and also of a growing consensus about the broadening of youth itself as a life course period’ (Hodkinson 2011: 262). For instance, ‘articulations of punk style transgress with age from the visual to the biographical … [as] older punks develop particular discursive practices as a means of legitimating their place within a scene dominated by younger punk fans’ (Bennett 2006: 219).viii Hodkinson (2011: 281) writes about ‘aging youth’, where, rather than seeing older people who continue subcultural practices beyond 30 as some kind of sad quest of eternal youth, it is better considered as a way of adapting, what I would call struggling, to create forms of identity that try to account for all the contradictions outlined above. The cultural politics and labour market conditions faced by contemporary youth create insecurities and contradictions. The notion of struggle and its different modalities are therefore useful, both conceptually and for youth themselves, as a way of addressing and understanding this situation. Bridging the gap Like studies that critically engage with the socially constructed and shifting lines between being ‘young’ and ‘old’, some studies dissolve the transition and vii Eudaimonia is a Greek term that most accurately translates as ‘human flourishing’. See Ahmed (2010). viii Bennett (2006: 233) illustrates the ways that becoming older as a punk is negotiated, where the symbolic resistance is framed as internalising punk, where it is ‘part’ of the person themselves.

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culture divide. Here researchers combine the two, realising that transitions are embedded in cultural practice as much as social practice. For example, Harris’ (2004) now classic book Future Girl, compared the figures of ‘can do’ and ‘at risk’ girls across an array of fields. Many young women in Australia today enjoy an unprecedented measure of autonomy, independence and access to opportunities. Harris points out that ‘the transformations in women’s status throughout the western world have been strongly felt in the sectors of education and employment … Women’s participation in both areas has increased significantly since the 1960s and 1970s’ (2004: 6). As a result, middle-class young women (in particular) now confidently believe they are empowered and can and should do ‘anything’. In contrast, girls from different, less privileged backgrounds are implied as ‘at risk’ and failing in their lives. Advertising and media representation of ‘young, professional career women with glamorous consumer lifestyles’ is prolific (Harris 2004: 8). However, the representation of the young female body as a visible statement of the new consumer lifestyle conceals the political process of remodelling girls as the ideal reflexive subjects of a deregulated labour force. The Australian service and knowledge economy now relies on a supply of young female workers who are flexible enough to adjust to part-time or casual work, to cope with downsizing, irregular hours, retraining, and still have the necessary resilience to negotiate individual rates of pay and conditions without union or award interventions (Harris 2004: 37–9; see also McRobbie 2016). Future Girl outlined how young women have become the poster girls for success in neoliberal times. Yet girls are produced, regulated and divided through the prism of ‘can do/at risk’ in the domains of education, employment, civics, welfare and the culture industries. Class and racial stratification are simultaneously repudiated and entrenched through the constitution of ‘can do’ girls as the newly ‘unencumbered’ subjects of late modernity. In Part 2, I use the figures of hipster and bogan to do similar heuristic work as Harris’ ‘can do’ and ‘at risk’ figures to illustrate the struggles over the way class is represented. In Part 3, I describe some young women (and men) who could be described as ‘can do’, but are opting out of the ‘rat race’ to pursue and concentrate upon creative endeavours, hence rejecting many of the governmental discourses associated with normative definitions of ‘success’, while also rejecting the very image of ‘can do’ promoted as the ideal creative industry worker. Recent work in youth studies has acknowledged and worked towards the need for more critical encounters between the ‘transition’ and ‘culture’ fields (Woodman and Bennett 2015; Hollands 2015; Furlong, Woodman and Wyn 2011). In general, the argument has been that transition studies need to be more ‘culturally rich’ whilst youth culture studies need to be more aware of ‘spatial divisions’ (Skelton and Valentine 1998) and socially segmented consumption patterns among different youth groupings (Hollands 2002: 154). Hollands (2002) and Miles (2002) point out that youth transition studies need to incorporate aspects of youth culture studies because it is ‘young people’s

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cultural experiences [that] represent the actual area within which they seek to cope with and at times defy the ups and downs of structural change’ (Miles 2002: 65). Northcote (2006), for instance, highlights how there are ‘informal rites of passage’ enacted by young people in their leisure time pursuits that are as equally important for understanding the formation of individual adult identity formations as what happen in the fields of school to work, relationships and housing transitions. He examines nightclubbing and shows how alcohol consumption, drug taking and sexual intercourse are all factors through which young people negotiate growing up. The ways young people reflexively manage their lives ‘frequently involve the blending of contexts, the search for new meanings and a changing sense of self in time’ (Furlong, Woodman and Wyn 2011: 355). In Part 3, I look at how young people try to turn their leisure, artistic or subcultural practices into DIY careers, or, at least bring values and ethics from their cultural practices to the way they think about ‘career’. With these developments in mind, the idea of ‘transition’ where children need to ‘become’ adults, has been questioned as to whether it still is relevant (Wyn, Lantz and Harris 2012), and the idea of ‘belonging’ has come to the fore in understanding the challenges facing young people in an ever-increasingly uncertain and ambivalent (Bauman 1990) world. But belonging itself is also considered to have problematic implications, especially when considering the experiences of young immigrants (Colombo and Rebughini 2012; Harris 2015a, 2015b; Noble 2015; Lahdesmaki et al. 2016). I argue that the notion of struggle, developed in detail below, can help us think about the ways young people are impelled to conform to normative expectations – to think of, and perform, the self as an ‘enterprise’ (Kelly 2013) – while also trying to maintain a sense of authentic self. These struggles occur at an array of levels, what I am calling modalities of struggle, that are mediated by the second central framing device of the book: class.

Class Following the classical works of Marx and Weber, class is a foundational sociological concept. Marx gave us the relationship between those that own the means of production and those that do not. Weber showed how status and party create a more complex picture of class relations, where social relations and cultural values are as important as economic relations for understanding class inequalities, interests and struggles. From the latter half of the twentieth century, the concept of class has been debated and critiqued to the point that there were proclamations of its death – the ‘death of class’. Concurrently, debates formed about what is the best way to conceive of class.ix In the ix Very broadly, these included questions such as: should political and economic aspects dominate class analysis or should notions of status and power come to the fore? Is the Weberian ‘Nuffield model’ of Goldthorpe and colleagues a more

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second half of the twentieth century, a period of rapid social, economic and technical change, critiques were mounted from so-called postmodern perspectives that denounced meta-narratives and questioned whether class is useful in an individualised, media-saturated and ‘hyperreal’ culture (Lyotard 1984; Baudrillard 1981, 1983; Jameson 1991). ‘Reflexive modernity’ (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994) theorists saw some of that postmodern critique as excessive, but also pointed towards apparent problems in the utility of class as an essential sociological notion. Ulrich Beck challenged sociologists to jettison the ‘zombie categories’ of class, nation-state and nuclear family as we move towards a reflexive risk society (Beck 1992; see also Giddens 1991; Bauman 2000). In 1996, Pakulski and Waters formally announced ‘the death of class’. Not everyone accepted the claim. These debates and critiques have been valuable. They have ensured those who maintain that class analysis is vital are kept on their toes and must constantly ensure that their theoretical tools are developed in ways that remain germane. It is essential that our theories are dynamic and relevant, but it is also important not to invoke ‘automatic hostility to class simply because it is a concept with a long pedigree’ (Atkinson 2007b: 713). If anything, these challenges have seen a revitalisation of class analysis since the turn of the millennium, especially in the UK, with the work of Bourdieu being especially central.x As Bottero (2004) points out, the tensions between the ‘death of class’ advocates and ‘class traditionalists’ have seen the rise of theories of class that attempt to bring in aspects of individualisation to class identity. But this in turn creates new tensions, especially in work that showcases processes of class dis-identification but still relies on using traditional terms and categories. ‘Within new accounts of “class” as cultural, individualized and implicit, there is still a tendency to look back to older versions of class theory – as collective, explicit and oppositional’ (Bottero 2004: 987). In terms of the resurgence of class analysis, the key question seems to be: ‘stratification or exploitation, domination, dispossession and devaluation?’ (Skeggs 2015). Recently there has been a spate of publications that have worked to buttress a Bourdieusian perspective.xi For instance, Atkinson (2015a) surveys Marxian and Weberian conceptions of class, along with their contemporaries Wright and useful model than E.O. Wright’s Marxian model? How does subjectivity play a role in the formation and maintenance of class? Does the Frankfurt School conception of ‘the culture industry’ account for a lack of revolution, or does the Birmingham School’s analysis of pop and consumer culture as a site of struggle better grasp the way class is made and remade? And so on. x This is especially the case in terms of the many publications from the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) project. See Bennett et al. (2009) for an overview and Silva (2015) for a comparison between the CCSE and the GBCS. xi See special issues and sections in The Sociological Review 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Sociology 2014; Body and Society 2014; Social Epistemology 2013; and Journal of Sociology 2013. See Flemmen for a critique of this turn, arguing that Bourdieusian analysis of class has much to offer but downplays ‘the relations of power and

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Goldthorpe. He argues that both perspectives shine a light on important aspects of class inequalities, but are not as well equipped to account for the everyday practices of people in their day-to-day lives as a Bourdieusian understanding. Framed using Bourdieusian concepts, The Great British Class Survey (GBCS), conducted by Mike Savage and colleagues with the BBC (Savage 2015), has brought class into public conversation in the UK while creating controversy about its methodological shortcomings (Mills 2014, 2015). Largely ignoring Bourdieu, E.O Wright’s (2015) work has recently provided a broad survey of aspects of class analysis from a neo-Marxian perspective.xii All these works, and many more, show the continuing salience of class as an important sociological tool. In this book, I use a Bourdieusian framework, but, importantly, I do not see the different conceptions of class as a zero sum game. They all offer important contributions for understanding the way inequality is produced, maintained and transformed, at individual, regional, national and global levels. Further, youth studies has a long and distinguished history of illustrating how class plays a key role in the life chances of young people. Despite being involved in discussions about the continuing importance of class as a mode of understanding the contours of inequality (Woodman 2009; Roberts 2010a; Threadgold 2011), I do not think class is an underemphasised or overlooked concept. For instance, if one was to conduct a quantitative study of the focus of articles in the Journal of Youth Studies, class and/or economic inequality are the most common concerns in one way or another (see Shildrick, Blackman and MacDonald 2009; Sukarieh and Tannock 2016). There has been much excellent class-based research in youth studies, especially in the UK, where youth researchers interested in class write against the ghost of Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ (Shildrick and MacDonald 2013; Roberts 2011; MacDonald and Marsh 2005; MacDonald 1998). Relatedly, Bourdieu is not underrepresented in youth studies and has become an increasingly significant influence. However, there are aspects of Bourdieu’s work that have been under-utilised, if not ignored, and this may have detrimental effects on our depth of understanding of the affective intensities around experiences of contemporary inequality faced by young people that also work to reproduce traditional contours of inequality. Therefore, in Chapter 2, I define the Bourdieusian conception of class and emphasise oft-overlooked concepts such as

xii

domination founded in the economic institutions of capitalism as a crucial element of what class is’ (Flemmen 2013: 325). Wright critically traverses the work of Marx and Weber; Charles Tilly’s analysis of durable inequalities; Aage Sorensen’s update of the concept of exploitation; Michael Mann’s sources of social power; the Grusky-Weedon occupations of micro-class model; Thomas Piketty’s provocations on income, wealth and the very rich; Pakulski and Water’s ‘death of class’; Guy Standing’s precariat; and Wolfgang Streeck’s Durkheimian notion of beneficial constraints. See Wark 2016 for a critical overview.

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illusio and social gravity before discussing the more well-known concepts like habitus. Chapter 3 develops a Bourdieusian perspective on reflexivity, morals, emotions and affect. Before we get to that, I would like to outline the third concept of the book’s title: the Bourdieusian understanding of social struggle.

Bourdieu’s ‘struggles’ I propose that the multi-faceted notion of ‘struggle’ can enliven analysis of the risks and opportunities that young people have to deal with in their day-to-day lives. The concept of struggle is strongly associated with ‘class struggle’, the Marxian conception of conflict between workers and owners, with some pointing to a ‘struggle without end’, while others see an inevitable violent revolution (see Gorz 1976; Miliband 1991; Harris 1992; O’Lincoln 2005; Kuhn 2005; Wright 2015; King 2016). Following the development of poststructuralism and other critiques of Marxist thought, this notion of class struggle has become unfashionable, even if it still has broad applicability when thinking in political economic terms. It offers much for understanding the operation of power, especially in global terms. For example, Wark (2015a, 2015b) offers a critical overview of contemporary Marxian influenced critiques of capitalism. The notion of struggle developed in this book stems from Bourdieu’s critique of Marxian analysis. It is important then, from the very beginning, to understand that struggle does not have to denote a negative experience. I am conceptualising struggle in this analysis in this way: Struggles can be creative, empowering, stimulating, inspiring and arousing. Struggles can be devastating, depressing, anxious, uncertain, filled with resignation or indignation. Struggles can be routine and boring, and they can be spontaneous and novel. Struggle in this sense represents the day-to-day challenges and choices we all face and deal with along the trajectory of our lives. These include mundane phenomena such as being supportive of loved ones or co-workers, making sure you get enough sleep, trying to consume ethically in a system that makes it difficult to so, or endeavouring to make space in a busy working life to pursue leisure practices (as analysed in Chapter 7). But there are also life changing moments, ‘choice moments’ (Thomsen et al. 2002), such as a parent dying, choosing the right degree, missing out on a dream job, or breaking up with a partner. Some of the struggles we face are mostly in our own control. Other struggles are only to some extent in our control. Many of the struggles we face are neither. Or, to put it another way, the struggles we face are likely to be made up of many strategies along a trajectory of control and constraint. Sometimes we will feel in control when we are not. Sometimes we will feel not in control when we are. More broadly, struggle is about balancing these kinds of considerations in an attempt to maintain a cohesive existence in an ever-fragmenting, entropic world. This is a struggle for ‘ontological security’ (Giddens 1991). Bourdieu developed his approach to analysing social struggle from a vast array of influences, proposing an approach of ‘You get what you can where

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you can’ (Bourdieu 1990a: 29). He drew from a wide range of writers, but was consistently reluctant to align himself with a particular theoretical paradigm. The so-called ‘founding fathers’ of sociology – Marx, Weber and Durkheim – are prominent influences on Bourdieu’s work; but so are Goffman, Mauss, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levi-Strauss and Nietzsche among many others. Broadly, Bourdieu’s sociological theory may be described as an attempt to unite a ‘Marxian programme for a sociology of reproduction with the Durkheimian programme for a genetic sociology of symbolic forms’ with Weber’s ‘conceptual resources for a theory of the social functions of symbolic goods and symbolic practices’ (Brubaker 1985: 747). In short: It retains Marx’s insistence on grounding class in material relations of force but weds it with Durkheim’s teachings on collective representations and with Weber’s concern for the autonomy of cultural forms and the potency of status as perceived social distinctions (Wacquant 2013: 277). Bourdieu is often misdiagnosed as a Marxian theorist and therefore a ‘determinist’. In response to this, Lawler argues, ‘Bourdieu is often (rightly, in my view) characterized as pessimistic; and this pessimism is often (wrongly, in my view) characterized as determinism’ (Lawler 2004: 124–125). Bourdieu’s work is important in this regard because: In reminding us that pessimism is not the same as determinism; that resistance takes many forms; and that, in any case, for many groups of people, change is very difficult to effect, no matter how much they resist. This is what it means to be dominated. (Lawler 2004: 124–125) There is a difference between domination and determinism, and this is especially important when thinking about Bourdieu’s object of study: social struggles. Bourdieu’s treatment of ‘all practices, including those purporting to be disinterested or gratuitous, and hence non-economic, as economic practices directed towards the maximizing of material or symbolic profit’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 183), has been key to the categorisation of determinist. This has been, rather reductively, read as nothing more than neo-Marxism or as ‘structural functionalism’ (Jenkins 1992). For a strong critique of the presentation of Bourdieu as determinist, see also Hage 1994). For Bourdieu, the symbolic forms of capital are subservient to the economic (1998a: 183). His use of class, with its dichotomous relationship between the dominated and the dominant, is also an obvious development from Marxian themes. But his work goes much further than Althusser’s reading of Marx, where in the ‘final analysis’, the economic field is the ultimate determinant of social relations. ‘For Bourdieu humans are symbolizers rather than [just] producers [and his] approach can maintain only

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a weak genetic connection to the original Marxist class project’ (Pakulski and Waters 1996: 44). Bourdieu’s ‘class’ is as reliant on his own meta-theory and empirical work as it is on the development of the work of others. A combination of Marxian and Weberian notions are foundational to Distinction (1984) where Bourdieu studied classes in the form of status groups. He focused not on their external conditions of existence or political economy, but on their shared dispositions and their ‘objectively harmonized’ practices, which are perceived by others as positive or negative signs of ‘natural’ social worth, and which thereby contribute to the legitimation of the social order (Brubaker 1985: 763–764). It will be these relational, representational, symbolic and cultural aspects of class that will be the focus of the analysis of modalities of struggle in this book. Struggle implies not just balancing considerations, but contradictions. In any given social space there are competing logics. We are torn on how to proceed, so must ‘choose’. There are different modalities of struggle, from direct competition with people in your workplace, institution or scene, to more existential quandaries. Struggles can be with or against someone or something else, but struggles are also with one’s reflexive concept of self in relation to ideas, norms, ethics, morals and values. Social struggles are classed, gendered, racial, spatial and temporal. Social struggles occur in an array of modalities including economic, cultural, representational, symbolic, moral, and affective. Struggles are relational because their intensity is affected by social homologies and social distance. Struggles involve reacting and adapting, and strategizing. In these terms, rather than thinking about ‘choice’ as a way of understanding the decisions we make in day-to-day life, we need to recognise that struggles require strategies. This argument is developed further in Chapters 2 and 3.

Chapter outline Part 1, including this introductory chapter, develops the theoretical concepts that provide a lens for the analysis contained in the book. Chapter 2 posits Bourdieu’s work as a robust and adaptive framework to deal with the complexities of class in a global reflexive modernity, where precarity is the normative affective state for an ever-increasing number of young people. Most synopses of Bourdieu’s work focus on the famous triad of habitus, field and capitals. In youth studies, these concepts have been productively used to illustrate inequalities, but the emphasis on these concepts has seen some of Bourdieu’s other interesting and useful concepts mostly ignored. So the explanation of Bourdieu begins with the object of his sociological project: the notion of struggle (introduced above and developed more in Chapter 2), then emphasises the ideas of illusio and social gravity as the key Bourdieusian ideas to foster an understanding of the ways young people face risks, consider opportunities and make choices. I then outline the concepts of trajectory, misrecognition,

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doxa, symbolic violence and distinction that will be used throughout the data analysis. In short, Chapter 2 serves to introduce Bourdieu to readers unfamiliar with his work, and to reconfigure the reception of his work for those who are familiar. Chapter 3 brings Bourdieu’s concepts and the work of some other theorists together to propose ways of thinking about social change, social reproduction and aspects of the world that Bourdieu’s ideas alone only partially address. It begins with discussion of debates in youth studies about inequality and reflexivity. The chapter then moves to consider the ways that Bourdieusian ideas can develop and buttress burgeoning theoretical developments around the symbolic, moral and recognition aspects of class analysis. This discussion includes issues brought about by the so-called ‘affective turn’ to reveal and unravel the nexus between class, affect and emotions. ‘Youth’ here is used as a vehicle for exploring wider issues relating to the cultural manifestations of inequalities. In Part 2 of the book I use the iconic figures of hipster and bogan to analyse how representation works to form a symbolic and moral economy that produces and polices fuzzy class boundaries. These boundaries reflect traditional class anxieties over taste and values, and new class anxieties that stem from economic and labour market developments that have seen precarity become normalised even for the well-educated middle class. I use the figures of hipster and bogan as a heuristic to view how class is something that is both used and produced through struggles over an array of cultural activities, artefacts and values. Chapter 4 traces the history and slippery definitions of hipster and bogan. The hipster crosses borders and is used globally, while bogan is a specifically Australian term that has cousins in other countries (such as chav, redneck and white trash). Chapter 5 contains two case studies in the field of representation: mainstream news and opinion media, and examples of comedic parody and satire. In summary, Part 2 of the book highlights the contradictory ways these figures are used to individualise and even pathologise widespread social, economic and political developments and problems. The ‘Hipster’ provokes (mostly) discussion and debate. The ‘Bogan’ provokes (mostly) disgust and denigration. Following Bourdieu, these figures classify and they classify the classifier (Bourdieu 1984: 6). Part 3 looks at the creative activities of young people around DIY cultures, illustrating how some young people struggle to create a satisfying and meaningful existence while negotiating between study, work and creative forays. Chapter 6 discusses a heavily networked DIY music scene across the Australian cities of Newcastle, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne (see Homan’s (2011, 2014) work on recent history and politics of night-time economies and live music). The chapter sheds a light on the struggles in these scenes around meaning making and identity, especially considering notions of creativity and authenticity. It looks specifically at the ways people in the scene think about the very notions of punk and DIY; the way struggles about genre labels such as ‘dolewave’ work to position and historicise creative practices; and how

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gender and sexuality politics become key mechanisms to disturb the doxa of the scene and produce new social practices and relations. Chapter 7 looks at how young people participating in DIY Culture often accept poverty as a compromise to continue to be able to pursue creative endeavours and live what they see as an ethical life. Here, the multi-faceted notion of ‘struggle’ can help understand how young people make strategic choices and ‘make do’, while at the same time being pushed and pulled by forces they reflexively know are largely beyond their control. In the Coda to Part 3, the brief Chapter 8, hipsters and bogans make a return to analyse how they are invoked in conversation, rather than as media figures. While these iconic figures do affective work in the field of representation that creates a vertical hierarchical positionality (see Bottero 2004), when discussed in person they are often used ironically to reflexively create horizontal positionality. Part 3 is followed by a concluding chapter that brings the findings and analysis together to engage with broader concerns in the field of youth studies and class analysis.

Notes 1 The Age. 2016. Is this the most Melbourne man ever? July 5. Viewed 03/11/16. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/is-this-the-most-melbourne-guy-ever-20160704gpyhmi.html 2 The Independent. 2016. Samuel Davide Hains interview: A few burning questions with Melbourne’s ‘bucolic jazz socialist’. July 5. Viewed 03/11/16. http://www.indep endent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/interviews/samuele-davide-hains-interview-a-fewburning-questions-with-melbournes-bucolic-jazz-socialist-a7119386.html 3 Kenny, T. 2016. Manufacturing hipsterism: behind ‘Melbourne Man-gate’. Overland. Viewed 05/10/16. https://overland.org.au/2016/10/manufacturing-hipsterism -behind-melbourne-man-gate/ 4 Kenny, T. 2016. Manufacturing hipsterism: behind ‘Melbourne Man-gate’. Overland. Viewed 05/10/16. https://overland.org.au/2016/10/manufacturing-hipsterismbehind-melbourne-man-gate/ 5 Vice. 2016. The ‘Most Melbourne Man Ever’ Comes Clean. July 8. Viewed 03/11/16. http://www.vice.com/en_au/read/the-most-melbourne-man-ever-comes-clean 6 Vice. 2016. The ‘Most Melbourne Man Ever’ Comes Clean. July 8. Viewed 03/11/16. http://www.vice.com/en_au/read/the-most-melbourne-man-ever-comes-clean 7 Vice. 2016. The ‘Most Melbourne Man Ever’ Comes Clean. July 8. Viewed 03/11/16. http://www.vice.com/en_au/read/the-most-melbourne-man-ever-comes-clean 8 The Guardian. 2016. ‘Socialist’ hipster who fooled the Age is from family worth billions. Viewed 14/07/16. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/14/socialisthipster-who-fooled-the-age-is-from-family-worth-billions?CMP=soc_567 9 The Guardian. 2016. ‘Socialist’ hipster who fooled the Age is from family worth billions. Viewed 14/07/16. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/14/socialisthipster-who-fooled-the-age-is-from-family-worth-billions?CMP=soc_567 10 Kenny, T. 2016. Manufacturing hipsterism: behind ‘Melbourne Man-gate’. Overland. Viewed 05/10/16. https://overland.org.au/2016/10/manufacturing-hipsterismbehind-melbourne-man-gate/

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11 Kenny, T. 2016. Manufacturing hipsterism: behind ‘Melbourne Man-gate’. Overland. Viewed 05/10/16. https://overland.org.au/2016/10/manufacturing-hipsterismbehind-melbourne-man-gate/ 12 Kenny, T. 2016. Manufacturing hipsterism: behind ‘Melbourne Man-gate’. Overland. Viewed 05/10/16. https://overland.org.au/2016/10/manufacturing-hipsterismbehind-melbourne-man-gate/ 13 Fitzsimmons, P. 2013. Why, oh why, does Gen Y not get it? Sydney Morning Herald. Viewed 05/07/16. http://www.smh.com.au/sport/why-oh-why-does-gen-ynot-get-it-20131016-2vn4u.html 14 Rathbone, C. 2013. What Fitzy doesn’t get about Gen Y. Sydney Morning Herald. Viewed 05/07/16. http://www.smh.com.au/sport/what-fitzy-doesnt-get-about-geny-20131018-2vqfx.html

Chapter 2

Sociological practice Towards a Bourdieusian understanding

Analysis of class should … aim to capture the ambiguity produced through struggle and fuzzy boundaries, rather than to fix it in place to measure and know it. Class formation is dynamic, produced through conflict and fought out at the level of the symbolic. To ignore this is to work uncritically with the categories produced through this struggle, which always (because it is a struggle) exists in the interests of power. Class (as a concept, classification and positioning) must always be the site of continual struggle and re-figuring precisely because it represents the interests of particular groups. (Skeggs 2004: 6)

Introduction: Bourdieu’s thinking tools Tensions between structure and agency have been a key concern of youth studies (Kelly 2015). One of the motivations of this book is to work towards overcoming this. Talk of agency seems to lead to assumptions of freedom of choice, and therefore is deemed to ignore power relations. Talk of structure seems to provoke instant accusations of determinism. I propose that by thinking about different modalities of struggle in young people’s lives, through Bourdieu’s work that attempts to break the object/subject dichotomy, we can move beyond the simplicity of invoking agency and structure. Bourdieu moves beyond the structure-agency debate by maintaining that agents and the social world that they live in are mutually constitutive of each other. Bourdieu emphasises the relational nature of social existence, where our day-to-day lives are constituted by our relations with other people, institutions, material things, as well as norms, laws, ideas, concepts, knowledge, morals and ethics. I argue that youth studies will benefit from paying close attention to these modalities of struggle. This chapter acts as the theoretical lens for the book, especially to inform the next chapter, which uses Bourdieusian tools to think about important issues in the field of youth studies and to bring into the field of youth studies a Bourdieusian analysis of symbols, values, morals and affect. My hope is that those who are unacquainted with Bourdieu will be introduced to him in

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an accessible way, whilst those already familiar with his work may see his tools in a slightly different light. By emphasising struggle, illusio and social gravity, I open space for a theoretical intervention towards a Bourdieusian understanding of affect and emotions, which is developed in Chapter 3. Bourdieu’s ‘theories’ need to be understood as thinking tools that create a broad apparatus for doing social research: they are heuristics for thinking with and through. They are practical devices, not sociological laws. Nor are they theory for theory’s sake. It is useful to think about Bourdieu’s tools more along the lines of ‘theory as method’ (Murphy and Costa 2015) to construct a sociological practice (Hage 1994). Introductions to Bourdieu and secondary sources about his work are numerous and growing (and it seems much of the understanding of his work has been filtered through these). Bourdieu has been influential in youth studies and most of the use of his work in that field has focused on his well-known triad of concepts: habitus, field and capital. This has produced valuable work that continually shows how class, despite immense and myriad social change, is a key driver of educational success, opportunity and life chances. Yet studies that rely on these three key concepts have often overlooked some of the more relational and experiential aspects of his work and this includes some of my own published research. Bourdieu’s work has sometimes been treated inadequately by both ‘servile disciples’ and those wishing to relegate him to the past or downplay his utility (Lahire 2011: viii). This has been quite problematic on several fronts. Firstly, it seems to have led to the general acceptance of the now normative critique that Bourdieu is a ‘determinist’. This ‘glass half-empty’ reading of Bourdieu is strange considering the many times throughout his actual writing he uses terms (translated) like improvisation, immanence, generative, blips, indeterminacy, fuzziness, dangling, plurality and trajectory, all of which one would think could be attractive to those who have turned to, for instance, Deleuzian affect theory. If by ‘determinist’ one means that people are somewhat constrained by the realistic possibilities available to them (Marx 1978: 595), then that would be fine. However, that is not the categorical dismissal of determinist. Bourdieu himself referred to this kind of symbolic violence by categorisation. For example, in regard to his work on symbolic struggle, when asked if he feels more Marxian or Weberian, Bourdieu replied, ‘I’ve never thought in those terms. And I tend to object to those questions. Firstly because, when they are usually asked … it’s almost always with a polemical, classificatory intention behind it, in order to catalogue you’ (Bourdieu 1990a: 27). ‘Bourdieu, basically is a Durkheimian’. From the point of view of the speaker, this is pejorative: it means: he isn’t a Marxist, and that’s bad. Or else ‘Bourdieu is a Marxist’, and that is bad. It’s almost always a way of reducing you, or destroying you. (Bourdieu 1990a: 27)

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In brief, the accusation of determinism is used in a way that caricatures Bourdieu’s work as over-simplistic, functional, and unable to deal with the complexities of a rapidly changing world. Of course, it is notable that Bourdieu’s own work is full of such symbolic violence, from his critiques of phenomenology to his caustic dismissal of Latour and Callon in Science of Science of Reflexivity (Bourdieu 2004). There are parts of his work that are more functional or deterministic than others, and there are inconsistencies throughout his oeuvre where sometimes he does not follow his own argument, talks in too general terms, or is too polemical. Like Hage (1994) I have never really recognised the Bourdieu of introductory texts, compared to the Bourdieu of his own books – and I’m aware that this statement itself is a form of claiming a certain cultural capital. I think this has something to do with the order of how things develop at a particular time, where much writing about French theory at the time of the publication of these introductory texts was writing with or against the ghost of Marxism and existentialism, see Milchman and Rosenberg (2002), for instance, on Foucault in this regard. In terms of my own interpretation of Bourdieu’s ideas, when I started to read social theory as a Politics major, I began by being enamoured by Baudrillard, then Foucault, and to a lesser extent, Deleuze and Guattari, until my tastes became more ‘sociological’. I think I have therefore ‘read’ Bourdieu from that more ‘post-structural’ perspective, rather than in the tradition of a previous generation’s more structural reading, especially that of the authors of the first introductions to Bourdieu in English. That said, it can be readily acknowledged that the Bourdieu of Reproduction in Education, is more ‘determinist’ than the Bourdieu of Pascalian Meditations. There are elements of determinism throughout his work, and its opposite. Secondly, as a result, there has been a relatively shallow reading of Bourdieu’s oeuvre (generally and in youth studies), which has led to the marginalisation of some of the more complex and interesting theoretical tools he developed – illusio, doxa, social gravity, symbolic violence, hysteresis, misrecognition, trajectory – among others. These concepts have much to offer for understanding social phenomena and for developing a lexicon of how forms of inequality mediate experiences and emotions. Those concepts are also useful for grasping how those same experiences and emotions are put to work to reinforce inequalities or transform them. Those concepts resonate with notions of affect, and are pointers to how social change evolves. Young people generate their own everyday reality – their ‘practical sense’ – but they do so contingent upon their position in social space using the very tools that constitute that position.

Bourdieu’s conception of class Writing about Bourdieu and class, Wacquant (2013) highlights four key conceptual shifts to the analysis of class that bring the notion of everyday

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struggle to the fore. These are: from class structure to social space; from class consciousness to habitus; from ideology to symbolic violence; and from ruling class to field of power. The shifts from ‘class structure’ to social space, and from ‘ruling class’ to field of power, emphasise the blurriness of class boundaries, moving beyond the Marxian base/superstructure model and the Weberian considerations of status and party. Field is particularly important. Bourdieu’s ‘field’, as a social space with autonomous and heterogeneous poles, provides a working heuristic for tracing both the mechanisms of domination and the drivers of social change. The shifts from class consciousness to habitus, and ideology to symbolic violence, emphasise humans as thinking, feeling and active beings. Such a move refutes the dry, abstract notions of ideology and its contingent accomplice, ‘false consciousness’. Bourdieu consistently argued against seeing humans as dupes, dopes or sponges (Bourdieu 1985), because the ‘dominated, in any social universe, can always exert a certain force’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 80). This is critical for understanding his shift from class consciousness to habitus. Bourdieu (1985) distanced himself from Marxian concepts of class which mistake classes on paper for ‘real’ class. Such accounts reduce all social world to the economic field alone, and oversimplify the relations between owners and those selling labour power. Following Weber, and similar to other class theorists in the late twentieth century such as Goldthorpe and Wright, Bourdieu’s class analysis elaborates sub-classes within the working and ruling classes. This highlights the complex relationality of everyday struggles, where conflict happens with those in socially homologous positions in social space as much as those that are socially distant. These sub-classes are often based on occupational consortia in his empirical work. For instance, within the ‘ruling class’ there are three clusters contending for the highest rank in social recognition and influence: the intellectuals and artists; professionals; and owners and managers of large-scale industry (Honneth 1986: 62). They are in constant struggle within the ‘field of power’ and are often engaged in forms of struggle within their own occupational fields. This creates ‘dominated dominant’ groups, that is, those high in cultural capital but relatively middling in economic capital (for example, sociologists!). Bourdieu referred to these groups as ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Bourdieu 1984) which others have postulated as the ‘new middle class’ (Betz 1992; Featherstone 1991). Aspects of the work of cultural intermediaries are described later in the book. In terms of work divisions, occupations play a key role in Bourdieu’s conception of class, social space and struggle. They are not classes in and of themselves, but indicate two things. First, properties of individuals are directly shaped by their occupation or their position in the system – which includes the relation to the means of production (class in the Marxian sense), their degree of market power (class in the Weberian sense) and other capacities. Second, there are other properties that, while not intrinsic characteristics of the occupation, shape the access to occupations by selecting or rejecting individuals – level of education, gender, ethnicity, geographical location and so on (Brubaker 1985:

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766). Bourdieu (1984) shows how employment in a specific sector, where different types of capital are prioritised and struggled over, has an influence on how habitus develops as conflicts emerge over different types and definitions of capital. But occupations are not classes in themselves; they are used heuristically as ‘merely “units of analysis”: they do not constitute either classes or strata, and do not necessarily mark class boundaries’ (Pakulski 2004: 110). Bourdieu in effect adds a cultural and symbolic dimension to class struggle and domination, one ‘that is not confined to the narrow sphere of economy’ (Joppke 1986: 54). Importantly: ‘Status groups’ based on ‘lifestyles’ and the ‘stylization of life’ are not, as Weber believes, a sort of group different from classes but denegated classes, or if one prefers, sublimated and thereby legitimated classes. (Bourdieu 2013: 300) Thus, Bourdieusian analysis of class is multi-scalar (Wacquant 2014b) incorporating shared dispositions, shared conditions and membership of multiple groups (Bourdieu 2013; 1985). Struggle occurs within classes as much as between them, especially in terms of lifestyle and taste. We are as likely to struggle with those immediately above and below us, or those alongside us but with different tastes, rather than with those socially and physically far away. The mods fought the rockers; Blur and Oasisi fans directed their contempt at each other (rather than jazz or opera fans); academics struggle with university administrators. When class is conceived as a social position, individuals cannot occupy two positions in one field (Bourdieu 1985: 724). Yet they are perceived as being present and struggling in numerous fields simultaneously. That is not to say that individuals do not have contradictory tastes; to invoke the above example, the Blur fan may also like jazz.ii In short, classes are not sealed or brutal determinants of social life. Rather, it is the result of a work of group-making entailing struggles to impose class as the dominant ‘principle of social vision and division’ over and against competing alternatives (such as locality, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, religion, and so on). (Wacquant 2013: 276) ‘Divisions’ such as gender and ethnicity do not necessarily cut across class divisions; they are divisions within classes that indicate different conditions of i Blur and Oasis were the most popular ‘Britpop’ bands in the 1990s in the UK and were constantly pitted against each other in terms of whose song would go to Number 1, who was ‘better’ or more ‘authentic’ and so on. ii But probably not the Oasis fan…

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existence and different dispositions and opportunities. The boundaries between classes defined in this way are ‘flickering’ (Pakulski 2004: 228n3). This allows the trajectories of individuals to be traced as they move through social space, depending on their possession of capitals in different social fields, the balance between economic and cultural capital and the possibilities of capital conversion (Pakulski 2004: 110–112). Individuals in this sense are not static; they are strategising and struggling their way through the social fields. Importantly, ‘Bourdieu’s approach to class embodies his relentlessly relational conception of social life’ (Wacquant 2013: 275, my emphasis). While his approach has mostly been characterised as useful for understanding social reproduction, it is in fact the notion of struggle, and how individuals and groups relate to each other, that is central to Bourdieu’s work and key to understanding the processes of both social reproduction and social change. The ‘genesis of groups’ (Bourdieu 1985); the work of generating ‘realized categories’ (Bourdieu 1996a); the energy and affect of ‘classification struggles’ (Bourdieu 1984); or the emotional investment in the illusio of a field, is where a Bourdieusian informed sociology of class needs to shine its light. Lastly, it is important to clarify Bourdieu’s distinction between ‘real’ classes and the classes sociologists construct and then study (or, sometimes, vice versa). Before the social scientist casts their empirical gaze, social groups and classes exist in two connected but separate objective orders. Firstly, there is the actual distribution of material properties (objectivity I). Secondly, there are the symbolic classifications, representations and distinctions that individuals produce from their own practical knowledge of, and position in, those material distributions (objectivity II) (Bourdieu 2013: 296). The individual understanding of one’s own position in social space, and, in the Goffman-esque sense, the performance of that position, is the product of habitus, which is itself the embodied product of the distribution of the same material and symbolic properties. This: takes into account, not only the representationsiii (which obey the same laws) that others have of this position and whose aggregation defines symbolic capital (commonly designated as prestige, authority, and so on), but also the position in distributions symbolically retranslated as lifestyle. (Bourdieu 2013: 296–297) The social scientist can never replicate ‘true’ groups or classesiv in their empirical work. The researcher needs to take care in relation to the very construction of their object, and in this sense, Bourdieu outlines what he calls ‘class on paper’. One can ‘separate out’ individuals who occupy similar iii Part 2 on hipsters and bogans looks at a modality of struggle over the very representations Bourdieu is referring to here. iv Or anything really!

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positions in social space, who experience similar conditions and conditioning, and who are likely to have similar practices and stances. ‘Classes on paper’ are comparable to the taxonomies of botanists or zoologists who construct categories to explain the very thing that they are classifying. But, crucially, this is not an actual class in reality, in the sense that it is a group of people who share a ‘consciousness’ and are struggling together on the way to a better life. This can only be thought of as a ‘probable class’. The social scientist should acknowledge that classes that can be separated out in social space do not actually exist as real groups, although they contain the ‘probability of individuals constituting themselves as practical groups’ (Bourdieu 1985: 725). This needs to be remembered in future chapters when I make some broad generalisations or statements using group terms like ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’ to make points about social relations and struggles. I am effectively using these terms as heuristics to make general observations and comparisons between people in relatively homologous social positions, not claiming that they are actually existing classes. What is observable here is a ‘space of relationships’ where one’s trajectory in that space is struggled over, strategies are developed, and positions are paid for by investing effort, emotion and time. As Wacquant argues, Bourdieu’s array of conceptual tools and the four key shifts he makes in class analysis provide: tools for elucidating the broader politics of group-making: the sociosymbolic alchemy whereby a mental construct, existing abstractly in the minds of individual persons, is turned into a concrete social reality acquiring existential veracity as well as historical potency outside of and over them. (Wacquant 2013: 275) I later argue that the ‘classes on paper’ that are the figures of hipster and bogan, are apposite examples of this alchemy, where classes on paper come to affect the ways we think about class in the material sense. This kind of relational thinking reveals how morals and values act as forms of distinction in everyday cultural politics that have implications for the very possibility of happiness. Overall, the book uses Bourdieu to consider the ways meaning is made across an array of lifestyles (Ambrasat et al. 2016).

Struggle, illusio and social gravity What should constitute the object of sociology is not just ‘individuals or groups, which crowd our mundane horizon, but webs of material and symbolic ties’ (Wacquant 2013: 275), in other words, social relationships and the tensions in them. For Bourdieu, the construction of social reality and the fabric of life is relational and consists of struggles. Struggle in this sense is

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multi-scalar and multidimensional: it refers to the ways people try to advance themselves, to accumulate being, in specific fields such as education, career, cultural activities and the like. These struggles are about the ways choices are mediated by social context and how one ‘makes do’ (De Certeau 1984) in day-to-day life. But importantly, modalities of struggle point to philosophical questions in the affective domain: Who am I? What do I want to be? How do I want to be perceived? Why do I feel this way? Why do I act this way? If I make this choice or perform this action, what does it say about me and the wider world? While the concept of habitus, discussed in more detail below, tends to marginalise these questions, the rise of reflexivity in the contemporary era brings these questions to the fore. With this in mind I begin an explanation of Bourdieu’s thinking tools not with the usual triad of habitus, field and capital, but with the oft-overlooked concepts of illusio and social gravity. These concepts are pivotal because they help understand what social struggles are about and open up a different, less functional, deterministic way of thinking about Bourdieu’s more prominent principles. Illusio relies on a double meaning to explain why individuals invest their time, effort and emotions – their practice, themselves – in specific fields. For me, illusio is Bourdieu’s primary engagement with Nietzschean thought, which he cites sporadically throughout his oeuvre. If we are to avoid experiencing life as meaningless, and the tacit existential horrors that meaninglessness insinuates, humans have to create meaning and then invest themselves in those socially constructed meanings to make life liveable. This invention and investment is where the concept of illusio has its genesis. In Bourdieu’s definition, illusio is how we are captivated by things and invest in them without reflecting too much on their actual meaning. Throughout the book I argue that reflexivity challenges Bourdieu’s original framing of this. In current times, illusio are challenged and critically engaged, especially by young people who find the promises of governmentalised norms – work hard, educate, make the right choices – hollow and hypocritical. Social gravity is not developed much as a concept by Bourdieu. Later writers have expanded upon it. For example, it has been claimed that social gravity ‘is nothing other than the forces experienced by the social subject moving along its trajectory as it is exerting the force of its own presence on other subjects’ (Hage 2011: 85). When people have invested in their lives by taking a specific social path (a trajectory), ‘the subject becomes aware of the “gravity” of the situation, at the same time as society’s social forces of gravity pull him or her to become an internalized part of that society’ (Hage 2011: 85). ‘Gravity’ here implies both the literal meaning of seriousness and significance, and the scientific meaning of downward pull. It implies the ‘seriousness’ of life, for instance, when a young person decides to invest themselves in a certain field, and also a magnetic metaphor where people are pushed and pulled by forces beyond their command. As young people make decisions about their

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lives and invest in those choices (with time, effort and emotion), the gravity, the very seriousness of their situation thickens and deepens. A sequence of ‘choices’ accumulates to create a trajectory. Once this trajectory forms it gains a momentum. It is then much more difficult to get off that path just by making different ‘choices’, as we do not want to ‘waste’ previous investment, while at the same time that very investment makes us who we are. Choice here does not imply free will, but implies strategies as one deals with what is realistically possible. The multifaceted concepts of illusio and social gravity move beyond emphasis on structure or agency by showing how choice strategies create trajectories which gather momentum, leaving the young person oriented towards future investment, despite previous ambivalent or even deleterious outcomes. ‘The social world is, to a large extent, what the agents make of it, at each moment; but they have no chance of un-making and re-making it except on the basis of realistic knowledge of what it is and what they can do with it from the position they occupy within it’ (Bourdieu 1985: 734). Regardless of forms of reflexivity (more on this in Chapter 3), illusio and social gravity make radical changes in one’s life rare and difficult, and bring the temporality of relational struggles – their history, the present, their future – to the forefront. The ‘struggle’ that is Bourdieu’s main object of study is for the meaning of life and the making of the world. It is the struggle to accumulate being. If we position these struggles at the centre of a Bourdieusian sociology, it opens the possibility of doing work that reads his other conceptual tools in a ‘glass halffull’ way where social change and heterogeneity can take centre stage along with social reproduction and domination. It can summon up the minute dayto-day thoughts and emotions that are the very ingredients of human life, bringing ‘temporality, depth, and desire to the analytic epicentre’ (Wacquant 2014b: 118) where ‘social agents are … suffering beings collectively engaged in embodied activities staged inside circles of shared commitments’ (Wacquant 2014a: 3). While we all struggle to accumulate our being, the tools for accumulating a ‘successful’, ‘tasteful’ or ‘dignified’ being – a socially sanctified legitimate being – are unevenly distributed and constantly contested. At the same time, while there are processes of hierarchy and distinction central to all modalities of struggle, there are also struggles to connect with and include ourselves with others (see Noble 2004).

Social games and strategy Bourdieu frequently used the metaphor of ‘games’ when explaining the social world (see Noble and Watkins 2003 for a critical appraisal). Echoing the famous Churchill quip about democracy, Bourdieu said that ‘the image of a game is doubtless the least inadequate when it comes to talking about social phenomena’ (Bourdieu 1990: 64; see also Lemieux 2014: 382). In each field, with its own inherent doxa (logic, rules, common sense, more on this

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below), actorsv develop a ‘feel for the game’. Illusio is the belief that entering, practising and competing in the game is worthwhile. This belief comes from an ‘ontological complicity between the habitus and the field’ (Bourdieu 1990a: 194). Illusio describes being caught up in and by the game – that believing in and playing the game is worth the investment of time, effort and emotion. Bourdieu writes that we can make a comparison of a field to a game, with caution. Firstly, there are the stakes of the game which for the most part are the result of previous competition between the players. Secondly: We have an investment in the game, illusio …: players are taken in by the game, they oppose one another, sometimes with ferocity, only to the extent that they concur with the belief (doxa) in the game and its stakes; they grant these a recognition that escapes questioning. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 98) It is valuable to note here that the heuristic and metaphoric use of ‘game’ is not meant to imply leisure or fun (although, in some fields, those things may well be what is at stake). The games that Bourdieu is referring to are serious and profound, concerning deep philosophical questions of being and political outcomes. The result of these ‘games’ establishes who or what gets legitimation, recognition or dignity; which individuals or groups are best placed to take advantage of opportunity and confer status; who or what is normal, tasteful, authentic or cool; and even, who gets to live or die. Illusio is fundamental for understanding the world view of both dominant and dominated classes in Bourdieu’s work. Importantly, illusio is not to be conceptualised in the same way as the traditional Marxist concept of ‘false consciousness’, where the dominated are passive, culturally duped into accepting class inequality. Actions and strategies, which can be seen as the summoning of illusio, are the result of evaluations and decisions where the occupation of a position in social space is not necessarily submissively conceded or accepted. One’s position in social space is a struggle, where necessity may be made into a virtue (Bourdieu 1998a: 77). Bourdieu’s conception of strategy in this regard acknowledges the myriad possibilities we all face. His theorising on this matter avoids passive determinism by highlighting the range of possibilities an individual has, regardless of their position in social space, even if they are ‘dominated’. For example, the stakes and rewards of entering a field of criminal activity may be understood through the notion of illusio, v A note on terminology here. Despite Bourdieu and Wacquant preferring the term agent, I prefer the term actor when referring to the individual in general. The term agent implies agency which, for me, is more problematic (see Kelly 2015; Coffey and Farrugia 2014) than the connotations attached to actor, which alludes to Goffman and Butler.

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where the possible physical risks and probable legal consequences are perceived to be outweighed by the rewards of an economy of ‘making do’ (McRobbie 2002: 135; see also France, Bottrell and Armstrong 2012). Illusio in the ‘sense of investment in the game doesn’t become illusion, in the originary sense of the art of deceiving myself … until the game is apprehended from the outside, from the point of view of the impartial spectator, who invests nothing in the game or its stakes’ (Bourdieu 1990a: 195). The illusio of a field is revealed when one does not have ‘skin in the game’. An atheist sees religious piety as absurd. The rebellious child rejects the alleged benefits of school. Subcultures like Goths or Bronies are ridiculed. But for the invested participant, these practices emote one’s very subjectivity. From a Bourdieusian perspective, rendering these phenomena as people who are ‘duped’ is not only unhelpful for understanding the lives of people, but, ironically, is hypocritical on the part of the social scientist, since they too are caught up in the social games of academic research. The ‘impartial spectator’ is the viewpoint of the reflexive social scientist who needs to do their utmost to understand their own investment in various illusio. But if the researcher can understand the absurdity of grant applications, administrative red tape and student evaluations, while they work in universities, one of the vanguards of neo-liberalism, why can’t the priest, student or Goth have a reflexive understanding of their own struggles? Bourdieu asserts that completely ‘scientific’ or objective social science is impossible, but the uncovering of misrecognition (discussed in more detail below) and illusio is at the heart of what he conceives of as a ‘reflexive sociology’. In terms of the notion of modalities of struggle I develop in this book, I emphasise how these struggles work to create meaning in our day-to-day lives that both reproduce and transform doxic norms. The journalist criticising the hipster or the bogan is not just struggling over someone else’s tastes or morals, but making a claim for their own, as an exercise of distinction. The young punk struggling over whether they should work for a multi-national corporation is trying to negotiate a place for themselves that affords a certain level of material existence but aligns with their own ethical ethos. In Bourdieu’s model, the social relations discussed here exist in two mutually constitutive ways. Firstly, there are the layers of mental schemata known as habitus. Second, there are the sets of positions individuals occupy in social space – fields – that constrain and enable practice and perception (Wacquant 2013: 275). Struggles and strategies are mediated through the mutual constitution of field and habitus.

Habitus and field Bourdieu strives to show how our social reality is mutually co-constituted by an array of things – institutions and economies; systems of categorisations and positions; embodied subjectivities and dispositions – that all work

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symbiotically through ‘social alchemy’vi to fashion mental constructs into social, political and material realities. Field and habitus are not proxy for structure and agency. Habitus itself is constituted in generative dispositions that are acquired early from family, kin, class and immediate social environment. These generative dispositions are inculcated and durable, yet transposable. They operate as organisational principles that allow people to apprehend the active world around them and create social practices that fit. The development of habitus thus enables ‘agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 72). Operating largely below the level of consciousness, habitus constitutes one’s ‘practical sense’ or ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu 1993b: 5) in a given field. Bourdieu developed habitus from its long and numerous historical usages (see Wacquant 2016). While best understood as a ‘feel for the game’, other descriptive axioms include: ‘regulated improvisations’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 78); ‘socialised subjectivity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 126); ‘socialised body’ (Bourdieu 1998b: 81); or a ‘schemes of perception, appreciation and action’ (Bourdieu 1990b: 14). There is a strong element of sedimentation in the concept of habitus – habit – where experiences coalesce as norms, comfort and feelings: what Bourdieu calls dispositions. Thought of in this way, habitus is a way of seeing and sensing the world – a way of being – that we accumulate from infancy and throughout life. Wacquant underscores the need for the stable and coherent habitus because institutions weed out actors: who do not adopt the requisite categories of perception, evaluation, and action; individuals drift away from settings that do not gratify their social libido and gravitate toward settings that do, where they congregate with others more likely to resemble them in their dispositional make-up and therefore reinforce their propensities. (Wacquant 2014b: 128)vii Bourdieu stressed that habitus changes constantly as a function of new experiences (2000: 161). Habitus are under ‘permanent mutation’ (Hilgers 2009). Under specific social conditions, habitus can be affectively manipulated. For instance, multiple and rapid change invokes ‘hysteresis’ – ‘referring to the built-in lag between the time it is forged and the moment it is activated’ (Wacquant 2014b: 126; see also Strand and Lizardo 2016) – that will lead to a vi Bourdieu’s use of ‘social alchemy’ is something of a black box. I argue that this box can be filled by thinking about social alchemy as an affective economy. vii Importantly, this ‘weeding out’ is never complete. For instance, given the increasingly neoliberal nature of universities, they still employ academics who are critical of their management styles. These kinds of academics may well be successful in terms of research or teaching, but are unlikely to move up into higher authorial roles (if they wanted to). This is an example of a struggle involving actors who are socially homologous.

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modulation.viii Habitus ‘reminds us that the social world is not transparent, open-ended, and instantaneous, but endowed with gravity, opacity, and asymmetry’ (Wacquant 2014b: 118). Wacquant’s recent theoretical work (2016, 2014a, 2014b; see Atkinson 2015b for a critique) has done much to elucidate the notion of habitus by gathering together the many developments that Bourdieu made of it throughout his huge and disparate oeuvre, while further enhancing the idea towards making a contribution to analysing carnal and affective phenomena. Habitus itself is multi-scalar consisting of primary, secondary and tertiary levels as well as cognitive, conative and affective aspects. It also works at individual and collective levels. Every individual has a ‘primary’ generalizable habitus which provides the foundation for the development of myriad secondary specific habitus. (Wacquant 2014b: 7) Wacquant also sketches a tertiary habitus where agents may engage in bodily practices that favour a reflexive disposition (see also Bunn 2015a, 2015b), where the ease or difficulty of a newly-adopted practice is in direct correlation to its distance from the primary habitus. At each level, habitus has cognitive, conative and affective components that are forged collectively (Wacquant 2014a). Bourdieu refers to the collective aspects of habitus, the ‘implicit collusion’, as collusio (2000: 145), which adds a collective element to his concept of illusio. This does not imply class consciousness, but a homology of interests resulting from occupying similar positions in social space generally, and in specific fields. As Fowler (2007: 368) puts it: ‘Bourdieu’s theory of practice is linked not just to strategies of reason or survival but to the ways of the “heart”, that sense of the game instilled through solidarity and fidelity to one’s group or honour’. This is an important aspect of Bourdieu’s theoretical conception of class, where individuals in comparable positions have an affiliation of interests that result in similar dispositions and practices, but not a reflexive class membership. Returning to habitus, those in similar positions in general social spaceix will share homologous aspects of habitus, but no two are ever the same. The viii Some examples from The Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al. 1999) of hysteresis are: Immigrants experience hysteresis when they move to a different country with different cultural norms; the experience of redundancy from a job may be the result of one’s skill becoming obsolete in a specific field; a divorcee expresses deep questions about who she is after experiencing the break up and consequent problems with her children. ix It is important to note Bourdieu uses the term social space often in a broad and generic way. See Noble (2013) for a critique of this in terms of challenging the complicit relation between habitus and field, drawing on a micro-sociological language of ‘settings’, where there is a plurality of practices and affects. ‘Many fields can “flip” into other fields because they fold into one another; such as intellectual and political fields. Field-space, then is necessarily multi-dimensional, functioning in many ways at the same time’ (354).

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cognitive components are the patterns of perception and the ways that we classify, inculcated in unison with those around us. Desires are roused and oriented with others that share the illusio of a particular field. The conative (Fuller 2008) aspect ‘consists of proprioceptive capacities, sensorimotor skills, and kinaesthetic dexterities that are honed in and for purposeful action’ (Wacquant 2014a: 8). The affectivex component entails aspects of the cathecticxi and the libido, that is, our emotional investments, attachments and desires which are welded into ‘a coherent working ensemble … collectively in practice through mimesis and osmosis’ (Wacquant 2014b: 126). Essentially, these cognitive, conative and affective aspects of habitus open the concept up to aspects of emotions and affect discussed in detail in Chapter 3, which are underdeveloped or bracketed out in Bourdieu’s own work. Relating to the development of the primary and secondary levels, habitus consists of individual and collective components. The individual habitus evolves from their specific set of life experiences, ‘the idiosyncratic product of a singular social trajectory’ (Wacquant 2014b: 120). The collective elements of habitus relate to the way dispositions are mutually constitutive to habitus and field. ‘These individual experiences are selected and stamped by membership in collectives and attachment to institutions. On the side of collectives, we find the major principles of social vision and division, in particular those that anchor strategies of group-making’ (Wacquant 2014b: 120) – gender, race, ethnicity, class fractions, geographic, national, religious, generational, even civilisational. Depending upon the research question, habitus can be employed across an array of levels of social activity, from the individual to the civilisational, and across an array of social settings, groups and institutions. On the side of institutions, we have bundles of durable dispositions specific to definite organizations (fraternities, prisons, firms, political parties, etc.) and specialized microcosms or fields: academic, artistic, political, pugilistic, juridical, scientific, etc. (Wacquant 2014b: 120) For Wacquant, these: settings that inculcate, cultivate, and reward distinct but transposable sets of categories, skills, and desires among their participants can be fruitfully analyzed as sites of production and operation of habitus. (Wacquant 2014b: 120) x The notion of affect is hotly contested. The definition in this book is that of affect as embodied meaning making (Wetherell 2012: 4). See Chapter 3. xi The cathectic can be defined as the concentration or direction of emotional energy towards an object. It was used by Talcott Parsons and colleagues to construct a general theory of action (see Parsons and Shills 2001, especially chapter 3).

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A habitus does not exist in a vacuum; it cannot by itself produce ‘practice’ and is itself socially beckoned, it is not itself ‘determining’, it consists of dispositions that respond to situational conditions: so ‘habitus is not destiny’ (Bourdieu 2000: 149). Habitus can only be understood in concert with field. It takes the conjunction of disposition and position, subjective capacity and objective possibility, habitus and social space (or field) to produce a given conduct or expression. And this meeting between skilled agent and pregnant world spans the gamut from felicitous to strained, smooth to rough, fertile to futile. (Wacquant 2014a: 6) As individuals, we are drawn by strong and weak forms of social gravity towards specific forms of endeavour to accumulate our being. Fields precipitate specialised ways of being in differentiated societies (Lemieux 2014). Fields can be thought of as leaky containers of social action that germinate shared expectations, common sense norms, classification systems and ‘joint ways of thinking, feeling, and acting’ (Wacquant 2014b: 120): a ‘multi-dimensional space of positions’ (Bourdieu 1985: 724). A further way to imagine the heuristic of field is through the three interlinking metaphors: Farm, Military and Magnetic (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 15–19).xii The Farm field connotes a fenced off space where specific things happen (Wacquant 2012). The Military field, as in a battlefield (Bourdieu 1993b: 148–150), emphasises that actors struggle over its resources and rewards. The Magnetic field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 17) exemplifies the notion of social gravity, where energies and potencies beyond an actor’s ken and control will thrust and tug. Fields are organised ‘around two opposite poles: the protagonists of change and the apostles of law and order, the progressives and the conservatives, the heterodox and the orthodox, or the challengers and the incumbents’ (Kauppi 2003: 778). Bourdieu refers to the two poles of fields as the autonomous pole and the heteronomous pole. The first is where the specific practices of the field happen with relative autonomy from other fields, the second is where influences from other powerful fields leak in (Bourdieu 1993b: 29–72; Hilgers and Mangez 2014). From that perspective, there is a set of power relations ‘that impose themselves on all who enter the field and that are irreducible to the intentions of the individual agents or even to the direct interactions among the agents’xiii (Bourdieu 1985: 72, emphasis in original). xii Thompson (2008) sketches out similar explanatory principles using a football field, science fiction force-fields, and a force field. xiii For example, in the field of higher education, it is still the cleaner who cleans the toilets. The cleaner, who is quite socially distant from the professor in terms of social space, is present in the physical space of the field but beholden to a very different character of doxa and illusio. So, while a professor and a cleaner may interact in an office building, they are immersed in very different power relations with their respective fields.

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Here lies fertile ground to bring in understandings from the affective turn to complement the emotive ways that actors are pushed and pulled, the ways they are affected (see Chapter 3). Fields are multi-scalar echelons of time and space. They do consist of material, physical spaces – offices, houses, schools, hospitals, museums, parks, libraries, stadiums etc. But thinking about fields in this way alone is limiting. It is equally important to think of fields as ontological spaces where one’s presence in a specific physical space does not necessarily imply that someone is exclusively practising in it. You can be lying in bed at home, but thinking about the problem you need to solve at work. So, like Bourdieu’s conception of classes on paper as opposed to ‘real’ classes, the notion of field needs to be thought of as a working heuristic for research purposes, not a representation of the ‘real’ world. As Noble (2013) argues, the heuristic of field may not be well equipped to handle the complexity of everyday situations. Practices occur in real social settings, not abstract fields. A social setting may have several ‘fields’ intersecting or overlapping, or it might even seem relatively removed from a field, like much informal family activity. For Bourdieu (1985: 739), ‘the whole history of the social field is present, at each moment, both in a materialized form, in institutions … and in an embodied form – in the dispositions of agents who operate these institutions or fight against them’. It is within and between fields that young people engage in modalities of struggle, and they do so by drawing upon their available capitals.

Capitals The effectiveness of an actor’s embodied presence to operate with or against the doxa of a field is mediated by their possession of capitals. Bourdieu’s notion of capital can be thought of as ‘active properties’ of a field that are ‘capable of conferring strength [and] power within that universe, on their holder’ (Bourdieu 1985: 724). The ability to compete, but especially to prosper and flourish, in any particular field requires ownership of, or access to, a specific form (or forms) of capital. The distribution of capitals affects ‘the chances of success for practices’ (Bourdieu 1986: 242). When Bourdieu uses the word ‘capital’ it is not necessarily in the traditional Marxian economic form of money or property, yet he maintains that all fields are analogous with the field of economics. He argues that this is because they function in the same way, that is, one requires capital to participate, compete and succeed. Capitals are unequally dispersed between different social groups and are passed down through generations, but they can also be acquired on one’s own classed trajectory. ‘Class as a modality of social grouping, and spring of consciousness and conduct, emerges and obtains in and through the endless competition in which agents engage across the varied realms of life for the acquisition, control, and contestation of diverse species of power or “capital”’ (Wacquant 2013: 275).

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Bourdieu (1986) sketches three forms of capital: economic, cultural and socialxiv – all of which, under the right circumstances, can be transformed into symbolic capital. Economic capital essentially follows the Marxian definition of money and property. Cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalised in the form of educational qualifications; and … social capital, made up of social obligations (connections), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalised in the form of title nobility. (Bourdieu 1986: 243) Bourdieu (1986) sees economic capital as the ‘root’ of all the other capitals. Symbolic capital refers to the ‘degree of accumulated prestige, celebrity, consecration or honour and is founded on a dialectic of knowledge and recognition’ (Johnson in Bourdieu 1993b: 7). When a form of capital is conferred with legitimacy and prestige, it becomes symbolic capital that adds weight to its import and status. Cultural capital covers a wide variety of properties including vocabulary and accents; body language and mannerisms (bodily hexis); awareness of cultural forms; aesthetic tastes, styles and preferences; and educational and occupational credentials. For Bourdieu, cultural capital exists in three states: embodied, objectified and institutionalised. When Bourdieu uses the word ‘state’ here, it needs to be thought of like the different states of water, that is, water can be solid, liquid or gas and can move between states under specific circumstances. There is fluidity between the three states depending on the social atmosphere and temperature. The embodied state refers to long lasting dispositions of body and mind that are developed over a long duration. The objectified state is, quite simply, things: one’s home and what is in it, what one owns and to what one has access – computers and up-to-date software; tools; books; artworks; cars; clothing, equipment. The institutionalised state is official and legitimated qualifications such as diplomas, degrees and titles. Acquiring institutionalised cultural capital can be contingent upon wielding objectified and embodied cultural capital. A working example of how the three states of cultural capital interact will help illustrate the complexity and analytical capacity of the concept. A young male on his way to a job interview will have already drawn upon many forms of cultural capital to make the cut, especially institutionalised forms such as credentials, qualifications, experience and references. The success of the xiv Bourdieu’s social capital is essentially a network of mutual support and opportunity that excludes others. This is against the social capital of Putnam (2001); a kind of ‘neo-liberalism with a heart’. See Adkins (2005a, 2008) and Fine (2002, 2010) for critique of neo-liberal social capital.

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interview will depend on communication skills and body language: forms of embodied cultural capital. A decision needs to be made by him on what to wear: smart casual or a suit? If a suit, what kind? Are skinny or wide ties appropriate or in fashion? Is the suit an expensive designer or a cheap knock off? Further, if the interviewee is not used to wearing a suit, it is likely that he will be sweaty and fidgety, which will exhibit an awkward bodily hexis. If the interviewee is used to wearing a suit, his disposition will be more comfortable and at ease in the interview situation. The example illustrates how cultural capital works across an affective spectrum that intercedes social interactions. There are also three dimensional coordinates of capitals: volume (how much), composition (what assortment of forms and states) and trajectory (the direction one is travelling in a field over time). Capitals are drawn upon in the minutiae of day-to-day judgements in everyday life: in consumer practices and tastes (Bourdieu 1984); in specific fields -– economics (2009), science (2004), cultural production (1993b), art (1997), education systems (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990) and so on. The struggles over capitals are what ‘make’ the social world. In politics and the public sphere – the field of power – ‘The State’ (Bourdieu 2014) is the ‘central bank of symbolic power entrusted with adjudicating disputes over categories and certifying identities’ (Wacquant 2013: 275–76). The field of power is where the ‘social and symbolic relations among the social fractions dominant within the social structure’ play out (Hilgers and Mangez 2014: 185). Bourdieu’s conceptual development from ‘ruling class’ to field of power shows that power itself is never completely stable, it constantly needs to be maintained, legitimated and reproduced through struggles. For instance, what cultural capital is evolves over time, often as a result of technological advancement. Thus, faxes or calculators become obsolete in the world of email and iPhones. Cultural and social progressive developments (feminism, human rights and green movements) changed the doxa of social movement fields. Generational struggles, often expressed through moral panics, change themes over time as technology changes to focus around practices like ‘sexting’. Bourdieu’s ‘class on paper’, which is the conception of class used in this book, is therefore constructed by the volume and composition of cultural capital. Forms of capital are key to the constitution of an actor’s habitus, and therefore affect one’s comfort in a situation; they influence how we recognise and categorise each other; and therefore channel the reactions we have to people in specific contexts and the situational judgements we make on how to communicate and behave. If an individual calls someone else a hipster or a bogan, for instance, it will have much to do with the evaluation of forms of capital of both the accuser and the accused. The same can be said for evaluative judgements of whether something is ‘punk’ or not in DIY scenes. It is these everyday evaluative struggles, and their different modalities, that reproduce and transform the social worlds we inhabit.

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Trajectory Bourdieu’s model of class is not static. Similarly, the idea of trajectory, again an often ignored element of Bourdieu’s theoretical lexicon, takes into account one’s position in a field and the direction that their endeavours are taking them. It therefore brings in aspects of temporality. Social gravity and trajectory informs us that one’s class position is a result of struggle and strategy, not passivity. ‘While class positions, measured in terms of volume of capital accumulated within a field, are important tools of analysis, in themselves they offer a deformed, static, conception of social position and need to be understood in relation to a more dynamic conception of class trajectory’ (Hage 2011: 83). For instance, the ‘maps’ of social space that Bourdieu provides in some of his empirical work must be thought of as ‘snapshots’ of a very specific moment in time (see Bourdieu 1984: 186, 262 and 266 for examples of these maps; see Gayo-Cal, Savage and Warde 2006 for some more recent sketches). They are not permanent structural diagrams. Bourdieu’s map in Distinction (1984: 186) of what each social class eats would certainly have changed since the study was done. For instance, in Australia, it would have been inconceivable just a decade ago that tradesmen on building sites would be eating sushi on their lunch breaks. The inclusion of these maps can be a distraction from the complex nature of Bourdieu’s project, because they seem to illustrate the ‘structural functionalism’ or ‘deterministic’ conception of class of which Bourdieu is sometimes accused. As Hage (2011) argues, while ‘capturing’ of an individual’s or group’s class position in social space is an important aspect of class analysis, it should not be assumed that they then passively occupy the position that their possession of a certain amount of capital corresponds to at any given moment. To see people on a trajectory is to also see them as capable of acting strategically within their class position. That is, along with class position one needs to examine the strategies of ‘position-taking’ … that social subjects engage in. (Hage 2011: 85, my emphasis) An individual in a specific field is impelled and propelled by their inheritance and accumulation of capital. This is not only a volume of capital but an ethos towards its usage and deployment. ‘One also slowly inherits – mainly through the internalization of a familial ethos which is itself determined by class trajectory – a certain disposition towards the accumulation of capital – for instance, whether one is inclined to “furiously” accumulate capital or to “take it easy”. This disposition is an important component of what Bourdieu calls habitus’ (Hage 2011: 86; see also Noble and Watkins 2003). One’s occupation and the everyday practices around it, for instance, influence one’s prioritising of cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu 1984: 101–109).

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Doxa and misrecognition A doxa is a core set of common sense norms, values and knowledge, which tend to be viewed as natural and necessary, that are intrinsic to specific fields. Each field has a doxa – ‘what goes without saying’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 170) – a set of the limits of what can be legitimately thought and said in a field, the ‘universe of possible discourse’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 169). Bourdieu claims that doxa is ‘misrecognised’ as natural and true because it is the result of historical struggles. This is forgotten or not recognised by the participants in the field. Bourdieu proposes that the social world is ‘a universe of presuppositions: the games and the stakes it proposes, the hierarchies and the preferences it imposes’ (Bourdieu 2013: 298) are what is taken for granted: by those who belong to it and which is invested with value in the eyes of those who want to be of it, all of this rests at bottom upon the immediate agreement between the structures of the social world and the categories of perception which constitute the doxa. (Bourdieu 2013: 298) Thus, doxa is a common sense set of shared understandings that carries the weight of history. The historical evolution of doxic knowledge and attitudes is usually forgotten, hiding the political contestation when its apparent normality was originally established, making it appear ‘natural’. ‘Doxa is a particular point of view, the point of view of the dominant, which presents and imposes itself as a universal point of view’ (Bourdieu 1998a: 56–57). These forgotten historical struggles are what establish a cultural arbitrary into a cultural hierarchy. For example, a high culture genre is seen to have more integrity and authenticity than a popular culture genre. The relationship between doxa, habitus and fields involves a form of forgetting that individuals are both produced by and caught up in (see Fowler 2004). When we feel comfortable in our roles within our social world, they seem to us like second nature, and we forget we have actually been produced as particular kinds of people (Webb, Schirato and Danaher 2002: xiv). Bourdieu (1996b, 2001) identifies numerous instances of misrecognition, particularly the valuing of certain forms of competence and knowledge over others. For example, white collar work skills are misrecognised as higher status or more valuable than blue collar work skills, regardless of their actual social utility. Misrecognition is also expressed in taste hierarchies. For instance, the fillet mignon is seen as a ‘better’ cut of meat than a T-bone steak, even if it is cut from the same cow by the same butcher. Single origin coffee is seen as better than instant Nescafe, even if it has done the same air miles. An Armani suit is seen as better than one bought from a chain store, even if it was made in the same kind of sweatshops. On a larger scale, misrecognition can occur where the doxa of one field influences another, via the heteronomous pole. The idea that neoliberal

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economics as a form of ‘progress’ increases human happiness (Bauman 2008; Hamilton 2003; Davies 2015; Ahmed 2010), for instance, is central to the maintenance of illusio in the powerful fields of economics and politics. ‘The misrecognition of the real foundations of differences and of the principles of their perpetuation is what makes for the fact that the social world is perceived not as the site of conflict or competition between groups endowed with antagonistic interests but as a “social order”’ (Bourdieu 2013: 298). To clarify, misrecognition is not to be interpreted as false consciousness and doxa is not ideology. They are about history and temporality. We all live in the present with only a cursory understanding of the past. How can we ever have a complete picture of the history of the way a field has developed its doxic norms, let alone multiple fields? While we may possess reflexivity, we can never be fully a fish out of water. We are social beings immersed in a specific time and place. Misrecognition is an acknowledgement of our spatially and temporally situated being and while unequally distributed, applies to both strong and weak players of the game in each field. It is also pertinent to understand how there are different ‘intensities of consciousness’ (Noble and Watkins 2003) in the ways someone orients themselves towards, and invests in, a field, where it is inevitable that individuals cannot be efficient practical masters of everything.

Symbolic violence For those in devalued, denigrated and dominated positions low in forms of capital, social struggles are often experienced as a form of social suffering called symbolic violence. Symbolic violence is the experience of taking part in social struggles where your capacities and desires never seem to quite fit with the demands and necessities of the field. Since those with more cultural capital have more strength and power within a field, it is likely that the doxa of a specific field is going to reflect the needs and wants of the dominant. The privileged have more capacity to make the world in their own image. For those in dominated positions in social space, they are always playing catch up, always one step behind, always behind the eight ball, no matter how much they try, work and invest. Symbolic violence is the emotional result of the affects of a field. It is experienced when an individual feels that they do not have total control over their own trajectory. Symbolic violence ‘is the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 167) as they take part in the game. Actors recognise (or misrecognise) institutionalised expert knowledge. Symbolic power in operation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in that those who are affected by it consent to it; importantly though, consent does not imply passivity, it implies struggle. Symbolic violence is ‘a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims, exerted for the most part through purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition

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(more precisely misrecognition)’ (Bourdieu 2001: 1–2). A key dissemination of symbolic violence is through language (Bourdieu 1991), where it is not a neutral form of communication but a medium of power, especially in the field of politics where words are in fact actions. Put simply, ‘what matters in talk, in discourse, is not some power inherent in power itself, but the kind of authority or legitimacy with which it is backed’ (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992: 112). For instance, an array of vastly different terms in Australia like ‘single mums’, ‘junkies’, ‘boat people’, ‘cue jumpers’, ‘Islam’ and ‘dole bludgers’, not to mention hipster and bogan, are used to try to secure specific political interventions that shore up vested interests. The myriad of moral panics around young people are also utilised in this way (Davis 1999). Symbolic power is exercised by those with the ability to produce these representations, while those labelled often feel affect of symbolic violence in the form of marginalisation, stigma and lack of status. Symbolic violence may also be experienced as a lack of access to resources, being treated as inferior, or being limited in terms of realistic aspirations (Webb, Schirato and Danaher 2002: xvi). They may be lacking what Adams (2006) refers to as the possibility of a ‘post-reflexive choice’. In The Weight of the World, Bourdieu and colleagues (1999) describe many examples of how people experience ‘social suffering’ while living in positions that lack recognition (see also Couldry 2005; McRobbie 2002; 2004).

Cultural arbitrary As stated above, one of the main outcomes of activities in a field is to transform the cultural arbitrary into cultural hierarchies, which is a central struggle in many fields and the genesis of much symbolic violence. Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) discuss the cultural arbitrary at length in their analysis of education and social reproduction. In terms of educational aptitudes relative to the cultural arbitrary, the embodied cultural capital of privileged parents acts as a head start for their children by: ‘Providing from the outset the example of culture incarnated in familiar models, enabl[ing] the newcomer to start acquiring the basic elements of the legitimate culture, from the beginning, that is, in the most unconscious and impalpable way’ (Bourdieu 1984: 70–71). When those low in cultural capital begin schooling, not only do they have to learn the legitimate culture, they need to begin ‘the labour of deculturation, correction and retraining that is needed to undo the effects of inappropriate learning’ (Bourdieu 1984: 71) that their less privileged position in social space has so far provided. As Willis and others have shown, the dominated then often reject education, refusing what they are refused by rebelling against the educational authority which they do not see as really benefiting them. This creates an anti-school culture and in effect creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of scholastic failure (see Willis 1977; Dolby, Dimitriadis with Willis 2004). Recent UK research has uncovered how the choices that students make

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regarding higher education are also expressions of distinction based on judgements of status (Ball, Davies, David and Reay 2002). Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) maintain that all pedagogic action is symbolic violence because it imposes cultural hierarchies on the arbitrary and constructs a ‘legitimate’ culture pertaining to the interests and affinities of the dominant, marginalising the culture of the dominated. Taste becomes a form of thought ‘terrorism’ (Bourdieu 1984: 511) where symbolic violence is enacted by the condemnation of aesthetic and lifestyle judgements. Cultural capital in this context is the affinity the dominant classes have with their own officially legitimised culture, which they struggle to actively maintain. Bourdieu asserts that hierarchical power relations in culture have no necessary basis and are assembled to echo the concerns of the privileged and powerful. Taste in this sense ‘emerges at once as avenues towards pleasure and as a class phenomenon, as a form of cultural capital’ (Gabriel and Lang 1995: 109). Therefore, while all cultural artefacts are not necessarily relative (T. Bennett 2005), they are what Bourdieu refers to as the ‘cultural arbitrary’. Their ‘worth’ or ‘value’ is in effect a social and cultural creation based on power relations. In different modalities of struggle, it is the very tension between the arbitrary and hierarchies that is at stake. In discussions about hipsters for instance, there is much struggle to create taste hierarchies around coffee, beards or tattoos. The bogan is invoked as the stigmatised ‘other’ to buttress one’s own superior taste. Punks position bands, venues or record labels around the notion of authentic, itself a much-contested notion. The space between the arbitrary and the hierarchical is an affective one where many everyday struggles occur.

Distinction As individuals engage with each other in different fields, or choose different fields over others, they are making what Bourdieu famously referred to as distinctions, particularly in their choice of consumer objects and social practices. The class groups whose reproduction depends on either economic or cultural capital have different attitudes. It has even been claimed that the rich and the poor prefer material pleasures while the middle classes prefer asceticism (Bourdieu 1984: 214–219). Class distinction was originally expressed through an affinity or appreciation of ‘high’, ‘dignified’ or ‘decent’ cultural artefacts (Ostrower 1998; Silva 2006) such as: fine wine and dining (Oygard 2000; Warde, Martens and Olsen 1999), or the ‘great’ works of art, literature and classical music (see Fowler 1994). More recently, distinction happens within popular culture itself, rather than between low culture and so-called high culture. Distinction is also conveyed through ‘disgust’ at the taste of the ‘vulgar’ working class (see Lawler 2005), exemplified in the figure of the bogan. Distinction is also performed in DIY scenes, especially to distinguish between commercial and artistic expression.

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‘With natural distinction, privilege contains its own justification’ (Bourdieu 2013: 300). We might think here of terms such as ‘the great unwashed’. Correspondingly, the less privileged also make distinctions: calling a more privileged person a snob, wanker or tosser, for instance. Central to Bourdieu’s theorising of social reproduction is how habitus instils ‘a sense of one’s place’ (1984: 466) which can manifest, for example, as a reluctance for some individuals to seek employment or cultural experiences outside what is ‘normalised’ for their particular habitus. They are in fact excluding themselves from that which they are already excluded from. For instance, the ‘lower classes’ do not eat at expensive restaurants not only because they probably cannot afford it, but because it’s ‘not for the likes of us’ (Bourdieu 1984: 471, my emphasis). Habitus subtly coerces material and structural conditions into the decisionmaking processes of the individual who succumbs to amor fati and is therefore ‘content with what one is and has’ (Bourdieu 1984: 573–574). These are mechanisms of misrecognising social struggles as inevitable social order. A Bourdieusian understanding of social order needs to be thought of as a socially produced hierarchy, a stability concocted by the dominant that results in incessant struggle. ‘Order’ has connotations of both hierarchy and stability. I argue in Chapter 3 that there are affective elements to the social order.

Conclusion In this chapter I made a case for a Bourdieusian understanding of class and outlined his key tools for doing sociological practice. I emphasised aspects of his work that are often marginalised or overlooked in an attempt to highlight the ways Bourdieu can help us understand social change as much as social reproduction while bringing to the fore the ways our efforts and emotions are situated in shared concerns and activities that ‘make’ the world. Bourdieu’s conception of class is relational and emphasises social struggles between groups in similar positions in social space. ‘Class’ in this sense is ‘on paper’, constructed of an assemblage of forms, states and coordinates of capitals. Class in the Bourdieusian sense of class is never static, but is made, maintained and transformed by everyday struggles between individual interests and the dominant doxa of a field, and between those with more and less capital. These struggles occur in the field specific affective space between the arbitrary and the hierarchical. As individuals strategise and struggle in multiple fields in social space, they create a trajectory that gathers momentum. Through social gravity, people are pushed and pulled towards fields and either invest in their illusio, reject the doxic assumptions, or take a position somewhere in between. This chapter has laid the ground work for the next chapter. There I use and develop Bourdieusian thinking to discuss debates in youth studies. I provide more detail about how the symbolic plays a central role in making class, and I bring a Bourdieusian perspective to contemporary realms of social theory that focus on morals, recognition, emotions and affect.

Chapter 3

Bourdieusian prospects and theory in youth studies

Introduction This chapter theoretically develops a Bourdieusian understanding of emotions and affect. I begin by discussing reflexivity and then move to outline relevant work that uses Bourdieu as a springboard to develop tools that can shed light on the role the symbolic and the moral play in class relations. That work is important for considering inequality in the field of youth studies. There have been several important strands of Bourdieusian inspired theory. For example, under the banner of Feminism after Bourdieu, Adkins and Skeggs (2005) developed his ideas in critical engagements that engage with notions of affect and emotions. The chapter then offers a way of bringing two different perspectives together – Bourdieusian practice theory and the ‘affective turn’ (Clough with Halley 2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010) – to consider how the emotional aspects of everyday life are affectively haunted (Gordon 2008) by classed properties. Work on affect is making an impression in youth studies, especially in relation to gender and sexuality (Coffey 2013, 2016; Renold and Ringrose 2011; Kofoed and Ringrose 2012; Skourtes 2016). I argue that affect happens in specific social circumstances to produce class-inflected emotions (also shaped by gender, ethnicity and so on) that do much to hold together the lives of young people and, at the same time, contribute to experiences of disadvantage, insecurity, uncertainty, precarity, anxiety and ambivalence. Inequality is affective, it goes beyond one’s material possessions. Bourdieu’s work has been vital for understanding symbolically violent social relations, but has had little to say about how an affective economy actually functions. Like many others (see Thatcher et al. 2015), reading Bourdieu’s work as an undergraduate was life changing and investing in it over the last 15 years has been intellectually challenging, stimulating and satisfying to say the least. But, importantly, Bourdieu (2008: 112) asked for what he called ‘sympraxy’. This is an invitation not for uncritical adoption, but an active and challenging engagement. Bourdieu’s tools are to be used to conjure with, to inspire, transform and create. He asked not for fellow travellers, nor disciples (see also Ball 2006) but for academic researchers to take his work further. With this in mind, we now turn to

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see what prospects a Bourdieusian spirit (Adkins, Brosnan and Threadgold 2017) can do to enliven the sociological study of the material, reflexive, symbolic, moral, affective and emotional aspects of class in youth studies. I argue that the nexus between class, affect and emotion and the theoretical tools of struggle, illusio and social gravity can illuminate the ways young people make everyday decisions in their lives, including decisions that from the outside might not always look to be in their economic best interests.

Reflexivity and inequality The perennial problem of ‘structure and agency’ has been a recurrent motif – a struggle, if you will – in ongoing theoretical conversations in the field of youth studies. This tension was well summarised in Kelly’s (2015) not-sosubtle article subtitle: ‘Foucault vs Marx, Tait vs Sercombe; Beck vs Bourdieu, Woodman vs Threadgold vs Roberts’. Recent discussions over class, ‘choice’ and reflexivity have drawn attention to both the transformation of inequality and the continuing existence of long-standing inequalities. Theories of reflexivity in late modernity (Beck 1992, Giddens 1991, Bauman 2000), have become important tools in youth studies to engage with the vexed notion of ‘choice’. Personally, I prefer Beck’s (1992) notion of reflexivity. Beck views the development of reflexivity as a result of the fragmentation of social structures; of globalising economic forces. He points to the contradicting flood of information in the media and from ‘experts’; and the perception of individuals that they need to negotiate risk by themselves. Beck’s ‘reflexivity’ is both a way of being in the world and a way of describing a new epoch of modernity. At an individual level, we now have less trust of experts. We receive contradictory messages from a variety of institutions and we are faced with making constant choices. At a global level, science, that great bastion of Enlightenment ‘progress’, now has to reflexively clean up the mistakes and unforeseen manifestations of previous science (see Woodman, Threadgold and Possamai-Inesedy 2015). This leaves each actor insecure, anxiously left to individually calculate the cost-benefit analysis of every risky choice in their day-to-day lives. Beck’s version of reflexivity therefore contrasts with Giddens’ (1991) more optimistic ‘narrative of the self ’ that sounds a lot like a middle class neo-liberalised subject. It also contrasts with Archer’s (2003, 2007, 2012) version of reflexivity coming out of the critical realist school. This proposed link denies the very possibility of a nexus between habitus and reflexivity, as pointed out by Farrugia and Woodman (2015). Adkins (2003) has developed Bourdieusian engagements with reflexivity. Beck has had a considerable influence in youth studies, with some adopting his ideas for analysis and others critically engaging them. In 2009, Woodman called on youth studies scholars to cease using the work of Beck as a foil to defend structural concerns over the apparent promotion of ‘agency’. He argued this left youth sociology in a state where the ‘middle ground’ is

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incapable of addressing complex youth social problems in global reflexive modernity. Roberts (2010a) responded by claiming Woodman misrepresents ‘choice biography’ and that Beck is guilty of the charges laid against him in terms of promoting agency over structure. My own intervention (Threadgold 2011) in this debate called for moving beyond the false dichotomy created between Bourdieu and Beck in youth sociology, while Farrugia (2013; 2015) has provided a working model for how this could be achieved. Exchanges like this are healthy for a research field because they create a common lexicon and way of seeing social problems and thereby contribute to an improved understanding of the issue at hand. Yet they are unhealthy when they get bogged down in ‘quote wars’ (Woodman 2009) and semantics.i Woodman and I (Woodman and Threadgold 2014) then attempted to move beyond ‘middle ground’ debates with a ‘glass half full’ reading of both Bourdieu’s and Beck’s work to show potentialities for understanding cross-border inequalities. We argued that the notion of the reflexive subject opens up space to think about the ways young people are impelled in everyday struggles, where they constantly need to make decisions about the future while immersed in an insecure, uncertain and precarious world. Bourdieu mostly theorised the habitus as a form of second nature or ‘class unconsciousness’ that seemingly denied the possibility of reflexivity. The idea of misrecognition would seem to refute the notion of reflexivity. Yet reflexivity is not an objective perception of one’s position in social space. One can be reflexive, in the common-sense understanding, and still, in Bourdieusian terms, misrecognise one’s situation. Nevertheless, what is missing in Bourdieu’s work is an account of the ways an individual needs to manage and adjust their dispositions in different settings. There are times where this would be preconscious as Bourdieu theorised with habitus, but also at times one consciously deliberates (Noble and Watkins 2003). Moreover, there are some moments in Bourdieu’s work where he noted the possibility of reflexivity, especially ‘blips’ in the habitus, ‘critical moments where it misfires or is out of phase’ (Bourdieu 2000: 162) where the ‘feel for the game’ can struggle to adapt and cope.ii He also i The same can be said about the debates about generations and France and my (France and Threadgold 2015) exchange with Cotê (2014b) about political economy and false consciousness. Essentially, these debates seem to stem from different motivations about what youth studies itself should be, that is, they are about the doxa and illusio of the very field of youth studies and are struggles over symbolic capital. ii When Bourdieu writes about ‘reflexivity’, he is usually talking about the methodology of research – an ‘epistemic reflexivity’ (Wacquant 1992: 36–46) – and about how sociologists need to conduct themselves when they are doing their research. That is, we need to be fully aware of our own place in the world, how this means we have our own biases (theoretical and from our own place in social space), and how this affects the interaction with people in our research. We need to do a reflexive sociology (see Bourdieu 1999). Bias is inevitable and researchers usually have more cultural capital than the research subjects, which opens up the

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wrote about instances when the habitus is not necessarily ‘unified’ (Bourdieu and Sayad, 2004: 463–64), where people carry within themselves contradictions and ambiguities. He was especially sensitive to this in regard to his own experiences (Bourdieu 2008), which he reflexively described as a ‘habitus clivé’. Wacquant (2014b: 122) has flagged a way forward for those who want to theorise how ‘habitus can guide a form of self-work’. Habitus can be: A source of creativity: whenever it is composed of disparate dispositions in tension or contradiction with one another; whenever it encounters settings that challenge its active proclivities; and when agents enter rationalized worlds that encourage the methodical reshaping of their dispositions in conformity with the dictates of ‘greedy institutions’. (Wacquant 2014b: 122) Habitus, then, ‘is capacious enough to account for both regularity and deviation, conformity and innovation, reproduction and change’ (Wacquant 2014b: 122), a set of ‘dispositions that internalize our social location and which orient our actions’ (Noble and Watkins 2003: 522). There has been work that has developed the notion of habitus to incorporate reflexivity (Adams 2006, 2007; Sweetman 2003) into it or to emphasise the split or nonunitary ways that habitus can be understood (Lahire 2011). Nilan and I have argued that reflexivity can be thought of as a form of cultural capital (Threadgold and Nilan 2009). We argued that Beck’s notion of ‘risk’ provides a useful way of understanding what drives the development of reflexivity in the habitus of young people. The capacity for reflexive negotiation of future risks, both real and perceived, has become another form of what Bourdieu calls embodied cultural capital – which remains inequitably distributed along class lines. We argued that reflexivity is similar to language as a form of cultural capital (see Bourdieu 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). Where most people are literate, those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds possess a greater ability to use language ‘correctly’ in various contexts, by knowing the appropriate terminologies, grammars and the like. So like language, we all have reflexivity and are all reflexive, but some can do it ‘better’ than others due to the access or ownership of more resources to enact one’s choices. I would now take this one step further and argue that reflexivity can be thought of as cultural capital in a similar way that Bourdieu writes of anticipation, or having a feel for what is going to come next in a field, a homology with its immanent tendencies, as a form of cultural capital. The so-called ‘choicebiography’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) then, needs to be understood in possibility of symbolic violence taking place in the research itself, so we need to be as reflexive as possible about itto avoid tainting our data too much and doing damage to people. See Kauppi (1996) for an extended discussion of the genesis of the Bourdieusian ‘craft’ in the context of the academic and political circumstances at the time, situating it in the history of the French intellectual tradition.

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this regard. To rephrase Bauman (1998: 86) – all young people look forward to a life of choices, but not all of them have the means to be choosers, or to choose the things they wish to choose. They have to strategise and struggle. Reflexivity allows for thinking about the way one’s habitus engages with multiple demands while needing to hold it all together. Therefore, I think that is important to maintain a unified version of habitus, rather than those who advocate for plural or split definitions. This is because the call for reflexivity comes from individuals having to engage with a multiplicity of fields and their often-contradictory demands. Symbolic violence and hysteresis is experienced by those who struggle to meet those demands. This does not see multiple habitus form within an individual, rather an individual has to deal with multiple contexts. The habitus needs a centre that holds to make it a useful heuristic for managing everyday life. This is not to say that actors will not have multiple generative dispositions and even contradictory field specific dispositions, or more precisely, setting-specific dispositions. For example, the well-behaved potential employee in a job interview can be the same person as the wild party-monster. The Beck-informed notion of reflexivity can allow for consideration of ‘the kinds of ordinary reflection that social actors engage in constantly’ (Noble and Watkins 2003: 531) that Bourdieu largely ignored. Adkins (2003) problematises the relationship between habit, reflexivity and detraditionalisation in terms of gender: Reflexivity should not be confused with … liberal freedom to question and critically deconstruct the rules and norms which previously governed gender … Rather than detraditionalizing … reflexivity is linked to a reworking or refashioning of gender, indeed that reflexivity is perhaps better conceived as a habit of gender in late modernity. (Adkins 2003: 22) The common interpretation of detraditionalisation has been associated with creating more ‘freedoms’ for previously marginalised groups – women, nonheteronormative sexualities, new formations of family, marginalised ethnicities and so on. Beck and Lau (2005) write about these processes in terms of what they call ‘hierarchical organised pluralism’. Recent social change and political progress has seen an increase in tolerance and legitimacy for some alternative discursive definitions of what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, creating a hierarchical ladder of acceptability. For instance, the nuclear family still maintains top billing as the ‘normal’ family, but other forms, such as single parent, de facto and mixed families, are becoming increasingly acceptable in various institutional settings. This development is part of the detraditionalisation process that seems to create more choice. But, at the same time, it increases uncertainty and puts added intensity into the choices we make as those traditional roles become less central to identity. It is important to also note that the ladder of acceptability is not lying on its side – there is still a hierarchy in place. Some things are still

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more ‘normal’ than others. Some people and institutions still have more power to decide what is normal. Some individuals can achieve normality relatively easily, especially when it is more homologous to their own habitus. It has been argued that so-called detraditionalisation processes have created ambivalent outcomes (see Harris 2004). So while reflexivity is often tied to detraditionalising forces of norms and expectations of gender, it may actually: Be tied into a reworking of gender in late modernity, a reworking characterized by positions of reflexivity and immanence … indeed that reflexivity may be bound up with modes of classification and with specific forms of power and inequality. (Adkins 2003: 34, my emphasis) Therefore, the reflexive subject is closely aligned with the neo-liberal needs (Adkins 2002: 123) and consumer culture spectacle. Below I will draw upon Adkins’ ideas to show how the reflexive and ironical use of gender and race have created new forms of discrimination: hipster sexism and hipster racism. The rise of reflexivity therefore produces contradictory developments. Following Adkins’ (2002) analysis of the reflexive use of gender tropes (see also Boyne 2002), I argue later that the reflexive use of class tropes of hipster and bogan plays a very similar role by working to ‘make class’ (Skeggs 2004) and then re-working into immanent symbolic and moralistic class boundaries. Work on reflexivity does not oppose work on class, despite Beck’s own provocations and objections to the term itself. It does not have to be a zerosum game. Beck’s project seems to be essentially ‘trying to conceptualize and encourage a paradigm dispute within sociology’ (Woodman 2009: 252) even if his own concepts may not always be up to the task themselves (see Atkinson 2007a, 2007b and Beck 2007). A helpful way to think about the nexus between reflexivity and class is Adams’ (2006, 2007) notion of ‘post-reflexive choice’. One can be as reflexive as possible when thinking about what to do, but the resources to put choice into practice are unevenly distributed. Further, Furlong and Cartmel’s (2007) ‘epistemological fallacy’ still has relevance here: young people express feelings of disjunction when faced with the meritocratic rhetoric of classless neo-liberal ‘choice’. This happens because of their actual experience of inequality and disadvantage (and advantage) in everyday life (Threadgold and Nilan 2009), which often takes place in symbolically violent ways. Furlong and Cartmel’s epistemological fallacy does resonate however with the idea of false consciousness (see Cotê 2016), which I do not consider a useful way to think about young people. For instance, they state: Blind to the existence of powerful chains of interdependency, young people frequently attempt to resolve collective problems through individual action and hold themselves responsible for their inevitable failure. (Furlong and Cartmel 2007: 114)

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Rather than thinking about young people as ‘blind’, I would argue that this disjuncture forms an affective space, where reflexivity is required to navigate everyday but contradictory demands. Symbolic violence and hysteresis are experienced by those who struggle to meet those demands. People can be as reflexive as possible, but if they cannot put their choices into action, reflexivity itself becomes an intrinsic part of the reflexive experience of inequality. Being able to put one’s choices into practice, or not, can produce a whole gamut of emotions and feelings, ranging from confidence, joy and satisfaction to frustration, alienation and withdrawal. This is what Reay (2005) refers to as the psychic landscape of class and it needs to be a key consideration in contemporary youth sociology. It emphasises how the reflexive self, central to understanding individualisation, does not replace class but becomes the medium by which it is produced and reproduced (Skeggs 2004: 60). I analyse aspects of this below when discussing hipsters and bogans, and when I consider the reflexive ways young people involved in DIY cultures navigate the boundaries of different fields. Bourdieu’s relational and symbolic notions of social class are most useful here. His formations of classes are not only reliant on position in social space correlating to status and economy, but on the very experiences and emotions produced by relations between and through these positions. ‘Class’ in this model becomes a wide elucidatory principle and is as much a feeling or perspective, a ‘feel for the game’, as a social structure position. But this does not need to be an expression of ‘class consciousness’ and may well be best understood as reflexive experiences on a trajectory of social alchemy or social closure, where morals and values work in the space between the symbolic and the emotional to shape flickering cultural class boundaries.

The symbolic, the moral and ‘value’ The concept of symbolic violence illustrates how the symbolic realm is produced through class relations while reproducing and transforming those very relations. Bourdieu’s concepts here, and the work inspired by them, show how unequal social relations, especially through the immanent morals, ethics and values that are doxic to fields, become to be perceived as ‘natural’ (see Pellandini-Simányi 2014 for critique). For instance, taste in this sense is to be viewed as a ‘generative formula’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 173) of lifestyles. Symbols of distinction, therefore reside because: Given their expressive function, they are, as it were, doubly determined: they are determined, first, by their position in the system of distinctive signs and, second, by the bi-univocal relation of correspondence that obtains between that system and the system of positions in the distribution of goods. (Bourdieu 2013: 297–298)

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What this means is that aspects of the symbolic become grasped as a legitimate way to classify, with those classifications then classifying the classifier (Bourdieu 1984: 6). Symbolic relations – of things, signs, morals, tastes and values – work to create hierarchies based on one’s social distance in relation to their very properties. Bourdieu’s ‘distinction’ (1984) was illustrated through relations in France between high culture (literature, art, and theatre for instance) and popular culture. He argues that what we call pretentious or snobby is the disposition of those in the middle classes ‘forever haunted’ by fears of ‘committing a sin against good taste’ (Bourdieu 2013: 299). This then leaves them dominated by the very recognition they give to the ‘transcendent powers’ of high culture and the ‘arbitrary arbitrators’, the ‘experts’ of style, elegance, and grace where: mere figments of social belief … wield a real power upon the believers, be it the power to consecrate material objects by transferring upon them the collective sacred or the power to transform the representations of those who delegate their power to them. (Bourdieu 2013: 299) Thus figures such as hipster and bogan work as affective disseminators of these forms of class-based emotions. Recent studies have done much to buttress and update Bourdieu’s theorising of symbolic social relations into the contemporary world where distinction does not take place so much between so-called popular and high culture, but within popular culture itself. Whereas Distinction was researched and written in a world where Rock’n’Roll and television seem to barely exist (they did!), recent work that draws on the idea of distinction highlights taste struggles within those realms (Savage 2015). The way one consumes pop culture, not necessarily what one consumes, but how one consumes it is a key form of contemporary distinction (see Daenekindt and Roose 2014), especially via the wielding of irony and social distance. Other important work on recognition of taste, values and morals draws attention to the distinctive nature of lifestyles, such as how one raises their children: to breast feed or not; public vs private schooling; ‘helicopter’ parenting and the like (Nayak and Kehily 2014; Barker 2009). Identity work should be pitched at the right level, not too high or too low, with pretension and obsession at one end of the trajectory and vulgarity and fecklessness at the other. Every agent must, at each moment, take into account the price he [sic] fetches on the market of symbolic goods and which defines what he [sic] can afford himself [sic] (that is, among other things, what he [sic] can lay claim to and what he [sic] can legitimately appropriate in a universe where all goods are themselves hierarchized). (Bourdieu 2013: 301n14)

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‘Cultural intermediaries’ (Bourdieu 1984) such as those who work in the so-called creative industries as well as journalists, academics and politicians, play a key role in making middle class culture and values normative. They have the privilege of being able to make, or at least struggle to make, the world in their own image. By ‘creating’ the media space where struggles over morals and values take place, those morals and values reflect their own. This is demonstrated by the ways young people in DIY cultures struggle against some of the doxic demands in the fields they traverse. Class also has a deeply moral significance (Sayer 2005). Using a combination of Bourdieu and aspects of moral philosophy, Sayer describes how one’s habitus has a moral dimension that not only orientates attitudes towards things in terms of taste. Our commitments, investments and emotions – who and what we value, when and where we feel valued (or not) – are constituted by class. These are key forms of everyday struggle. For instance, scholars that critically engage Bourdieu have used the intersection of class and gender, which deeply affects the lives of young working class women, to develop some of his ideas and to address and alleviate some weaknesses. Across an array of empirical studies with the lives of young disadvantaged women, and through reception studies of reality TV, Skeggs and others demonstrate the classed nature of values and morals. In an apparently class free and ‘reflexive’ society, it is difficult for working class women ‘to tell themselves’ (Skeggs 2004: 119–127). ‘Femininity’ in this sense is always framed from a middle-class perspective, which Lawler (2004) has called the ‘disgusted subject’. What she means here is that middle class women often define themselves as what they are not and show condescending attitudes towards women who don’t have the means to keep up with latest fashions, go to ‘good’ schools, or replicate middle class parenting styles. McRobbie (2004) discussed what she calls ‘post-feminist symbolic violence’ in TV shows like ‘What not to Wear’, where middle class ‘experts’ come into the lives of working class women to tell them all that they are doing ‘wrong’. The programmes I am concerned with actively generate and legitimate forms of class antagonism particularly between women in a way which would have been socially unacceptable until recently … It is now possible, thank goodness, to laugh at less fortunate people once again. (McRobbie 2004: 100) The progression of Bourdieusian thought in Feminism after Bourdieu (Adkins and Skeggs 2005) draws attention to the ways morals and values are central boundaries for the social policing of class. For Bourdieu, there is no characteristics of a particular lifestyle that ‘cannot be given a distinctive value as a function of a socially determined principle of pertinence and thereby express a social position’ (Bourdieu 2013: 297, my emphasis).

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Proof is that the same ‘physical’ or ‘moral’ feature – for instance, a fat or thin body, a light or dark skin, the consumption or rejection of alcohol – can be given opposite (positional) values in the same society at different epochs or in different societies. (Bourdieu 2013: 297, my emphasis) In this regard, Skeggs wants the idea of ‘value’ to be given a sociological dimension missing from the traditional economic and moral philosophy definitions: ‘a dynamic understanding of value as the importance people attribute to action, for putting people into value production in which they are not just carriers of abstract economic value or holders of moral value’ (Skeggs and Loveday 2012: 475). Values and morals in this way of thinking are affective. Skeggs and colleagues research value, class and affect to show how the working-class participants consistently expressed bitterness when describing ‘their reactions to injustice when accompanied by moral judgment’ (Skeggs and Loveday 2012: 483). As outlined below, bitterness is not exclusive to the working class. As work on the so-called ‘Cashed up Bogan’ (Pini and Previte 2013a, 2013b; Pini, MacDonald and Mayes 2012) demonstrates, the middle class express bitterness too, a form of ‘downward envy’ (Everingham 2003) towards the wealthier segments of the working class. As Ahmed (2010: 33) notes: ‘we learn to differentiate between higher and lower objects by learning to discern what tastes good and what is disgusting: delight and disgust are social as well as bodily orientations’. The foundational youth studies work on moral panics indicates how there has always been fear from older generations towards the younger generations about how their practices threaten the ‘moral fabric of society’, whatever that is. The very concept of youth seems bound up with moral imperatives: it seems the cliché of ‘children are the future’ engenders a general attitude towards young people that they need to uphold the previous generation’s moral norms for the good of everyone. The moral imperatives of class have had some impact in youth studies (Barker 2009; Hollingworth 2015; Ravn and Coffey 2016; Farrugia, Smyth and Harrison 2016). Morals and values are key affective structures of classed emotions. As Sayer (2005: 38) argues, ‘emotions are not trivial. At the extreme, emotions such as shame and hatred may concern matters which people value more highly than their lives’. At a more day-to-day level, recent work has pointed to a cultural economy of emotions and formations of affective structures. Emotion had been previously largely written off as ‘irrational’ in sociology as it did not correspond with the post-Enlightenment ‘rational modern man’ [sic]. Recently it has been argued that ignoring emotion in consideration of the social is actually irrational (Sayer 2005; Ahmed 2014), since emotions are ‘central to the things we care about and to the act of caring itself ’ (Archer 2000: 194). For Ahmed, when people say things like ‘How can you like that!’ or, for that matter, ‘how can you not like that?’, they perform their:

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judgment against another by refusing to like what another likes, by suggesting that the object in which another invests his or her happiness is unworthy. This affective differentiation is the basis of an essentially moral economy in which moral distinctions of worth are also social distinctions of value. (Ahmed 2010: 33–34, my emphasis) Like his under-theorised account of the pedagogical imperative in the development of habitus from forms of inheritance and inculcation (Noble 2017), Bourdieu relies on an under-theorised notion of homophilyiii to explain why individuals are likely to want to associate with people and groups like themselves (see Bottero 2009, 2010). The forms of affective differentiation that Ahmed mentions above can contribute to a deeper understanding of homophily. They point to the way one feels in specific social situations – pleasure or pain, comfort or discomfort, stylish or tacky, respectable or vulgar – as the affective basis of social interaction. Bringing in Bourdieu to accentuate the study of emotions and affect can enlighten aspects downplayed or underdeveloped by the so-called ‘affective turn’ and can do much to illuminate the value-laden nature of the ways affect and emotions work to ‘make class’ (Skeggs 2004).

Affect and emotion The very notion of affect is theorised in multiple ways:iv ‘there is no stable definition of affect. It can mean a lot of different things’ (Thrift 2008: 175). Some see ‘affect as excess’ that escapes the discursive (Thrift 2008; Massumi 2002). This version of affect is difficult to reconcile with Bourdieu.v This book uses a discursive understanding of affect: affect as embodied meaning making (Wetherell 2012: 4). According to Thrift (2008: 175) ‘affect is a different kind of intelligence about the world, but it is intelligence nonetheless, and previous attempts to either relegate affect to the irrational or raise it up to the level of the sublime are both equally mistaken’. The ‘affective turn’ (Gregg and Homophily: ‘a pattern of differential association in which agents are more likely to associate with those who are socially similar to themselves’ (Bottero 2009: 400). iv See Thrift (2008: 175–182) for his four interconnected approaches to affect, all of which ‘set aside’ the version used in this book concerned with individualised emotions and feelings. Thrift does state (2008: 175): ‘affect is understood as a form of thinking, often indirect and nonreflective true, but thinking all the same. And, similarly, all manner of the spaces which they generate must be thought of in the same way, as means of thinking and as thought in action’. v I agree with Wetherell’s (2012: 56) line of critique towards that line of thinking, especially: ‘this line of cultural theory is not calling for cleverer, more flexible, and more productive analyses of meaning making practices and their entanglements with bodies but seeks to relegate the discursive almost entirely, and in this way I believe trips itself up. The discursive is defined in the narrowest possible passive sense, not as a verb, or seen as a form of unfolding practical social action’.

iii

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Seigworth 2010; Clough and Halley 2007) has drawn attention to the importance of how moments or situations, and the things we feel in their duration, are permeated with social consequences. The concept of affect is useful for illuminating how emotions are drivers of both the reproduction and transformation of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity (Berlant 2008, 2011; Ahmed 2010, 2014). There have been some prominent sociological developments of the connections between class, emotions and affect (Reay 2015; Skeggs 2004, 2005; Skeggs and Loveday 2012; Wetherell 2012; Lawler 2005; Illouz 2007), but there seems to be a reluctance to connect affect and class for fear of ‘ushering in structuralism through the back door’ (Bissell 2010: 273). Bourdieu, whom I consider a post-structuralist, can help overcome this apparent problem. There are moments in Bourdieu’s work where he points to notions of affect and the productive nature of emotions: ‘the factors which are most influential in the formation of the habitus are transmitted without passing through language’ (Bourdieu 1991: 51). There are constant allusions to being affected, to connections between emotions and practice: the ‘weight of the world’ (Bourdieu et al. 1999); ‘refuse what one is refused’ because ‘that’s not for the likes of us’ (Bourdieu 1984: 471); succumbing to amor fati and being therefore ‘content with what one is and has’ (Bourdieu 1984: 573–575). But these descriptions are mostly left as just that. Probyn (2005) criticised the concept of habitus for including a vague understanding of emotion and excluding affect, where ‘emotion projects the habitus’ tendency to continually frame and adjust between the unlikely (possibility) and the likely (probability)’ (p. 230). Bourdieu did ‘not wax lyrical about emotions’ and his ‘description of emotion could be called affect’ (Probyn 2005: 230–231). Yet there are ways of thinking through distinction as an affective practice. For instance, Adam and Galinsky (2012) describe ‘enclothed cognition’, which occurs through the affective nature of clothes. There is symbiosis between the practical functions of clothing and their social status. Wearing a lab coat described as a doctor’s coat increased sustained attention compared to wearing a lab coat described as a painter’s coat, and compared to simply seeing or even identifying with a lab coat described as a doctor’s coat. Thus, the current research suggests a basic principle of enclothed cognition – it depends on both the symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing the clothes. (Adam and Galinsky 2012: 918) Similarly, aspects of so-called ‘gastrophysics’, where an individual’s rating of the quality of food is affected by the weight of the plate it is served on, for instance, can only be fully understood with a Bourdieusian conception of historical forms of distinction (Brosnan and Threadgold 2017). There is debate about how separate affect and emotion should be. For example, Ahmed (2014: 207–211) has pointed out that much of the semantic

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struggle over keeping affect and emotions separate may actually reproduce gendered binaries where affect is ‘rational’ and emotions are, well, ‘emotional’. Watkins (2010: 269) also problematises this distinction on the basis of not being able to account for the difference between ‘the force of an affecting body and the impact it leaves on the one affected’, in other words, the accumulation of affect and the ways it may sediment into habitus. As Ahmed (2014: 10) puts it: Emotions are not ‘in’ the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects … emotions create the very surfaces and boundaries that allow all kind of objects to be delineated. In the Afterword for the second edition of the influential Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed (2014) notes that she started that project wanting to turn ‘to emotion in order to explain how worlds are reproduced; in particular, I wanted to reflect on how social norms become affective over time’ (204). Ahmed ended up theorising more generally how emotions work, especially around race, sexuality and gender. But throughout her work she has demonstrated how emotions operate in an affective economy to align some subjects with and against others, where emotion circulates between bodies and signs (Ahmed 2004). Ahmed uses the notion of ‘impression’ to think about the way affect can mark or leave a trace, which is a way into thinking about the affected elements of habitus, that is, how habitus is formed and transformed: ‘Not only do I have an impression of others, but they also leave me with an impression; they impress me, and impress upon me’ (Ahmed 2014: 6). In affective economies, ‘emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments’ (Ahmed 2004: 119). Emotions here become ‘intentional’, in that they are directed towards something – a person, a place, an ideal. Ahmed brings together this phenomenological model of intentional emotions with a ‘model of affect as contact: we are affected by “what” we come into contact with. In other words, emotions are directed to what we come in contact with. They move us “toward” and “away” from such objects’ (Ahmed 2006: 2). Ahmed also develops the phenomenological notion of ‘orientation’, where it can illuminate how we register our proximity and distance to objects and others, shaping how we ‘apprehend this world of shared inhabitants, as well as “who” or “what” we direct our energy towards’ (Ahmed 2006: 3). An emotional reaction happens due to how we apprehend an object, where our orientation towards it is dependent on the past, our accumulated history. For an object to make an emotional impression, we need to be orientated towards it in a particular way, which affects what we feel, think and do: ‘Emotions involve such affective forms of (re)orientation’ (Ahmed 2006: 2). Also addressing the impression or trace of an affective

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encounter, Watkins (2010) maintains the importance of Spinoza’s distinction between affectus (the force of an affecting body) and affectio (the impact it leaves on the one affected). Affect can accumulate ‘to form dispositions and thus shape subjectivities’ (Watkins 2010: 269). In this space, I argue that habitus, and Bourdieu’s thinking tools in general, can help understand the way that the affective atmosphere of a specific setting can bring forth emotions that are ‘feeling the past in the present’ (Skourtes 2016: 392). I’m reminded here of a recent visit to the MONA gallery in Hobart, where I was drawn to the artist Gregory Barsamian’s ‘Artist Statement’ on his sculpture Artifact (2010), which is a huge bronze human ‘head’ lying on its side as if asleep, inside of which is a zoetrope that represents imagination, (sub)consciousness and dreaming. It reads in part: What our minds are best at is filtering or throwing away information. We filter out a great deal of … complexity with just the limitation of our senses. But the greatest filter of them all is what we call consciousness … He then uses a computer metaphor to explain why consciousness is ‘capable of remarkable feats of reason’, but ‘in a rather slow, plodding way (fifteen to twenty bits per second)’. The results of this talent are all around in the form of technology, the sciences and philosophy. And yet the senses are bringing in twenty million bits per second. Our minds are actually processing and acting on much of it in ways completely unknown to consciousness. So while we ‘imagine’ what is going on, if the human race ever wants to evolve from the ‘chauvinism of consciousness with its gross over-simplifications and illusions of control’, we will need to: listen a little more closely to this portal into the lost, the feared and the ignored. Here we experience things not through the drip, drip of the conscious mind but rather the full torrent brought to us by all our senses. This latter phrase points to affect as intensity. Being affected often invokes emotions that work to reproduce social norms. Habitus then, is one’s history rolled up into a dispositional ball of immanent affects. As capitals are accumulated they comprise a reservoir of dispositions that constitute the capacity to be affected. Each affective moment is pedagogical, we learn from it, which then shapes our future practice. Social space is made up of people as symbolisers, struggling in specific spaces where the symbols are themselves imbued with affect. Bourdieu’s work can provide an understanding of these very processes. Social norms (symbols, values, morals, tastes and so on) coalesce to become an affective order over

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time: they reproduce themselves and produce emotional responses as forms of social alchemy and/or social closure, and are central to how symbolic violence works to ‘naturalise’ hierarchies that are really the outcome of social struggles. Recently, Wacquant has undertaken definitional work on the notion of habitus that opens it up to consider emotions and affect because habitus ‘is both structu-red (by past social milieus) and structur-ing (of present perceptions, emotions and actions)’ (Wacquant 2016: 67, emphasis in original). Therefore, each actor is a ‘suffering and desiring being at the intersection between historical structures and situated interaction’ (Wacquant 2014b: 123). Between historical structures and situated interaction is where the capacity to be affected takes place. Some would argue that bringing practice theory and affect together is an unsound thing to contemplate: that Bourdieu’s relational, phenomenological, hermeneutic and constructivist approaches (see Susen 2017) are incompatible with the vast array of work grounded in Deleuzian and Spinozian process philosophy. But we can do productive work with different ontologies (Hage 2015). Since affect has been situated as ‘pre-conscious’ and the notion of habitus has habitual pre-conscious elements built in to its many layers, a consideration of habitus can help us understand how affects are differentiated. For instance, using a theory of practice can allow us to see how the figures of hipsters and bogans provoke different emotional responses from different people. Or how TV shows like Benefits Street or Struggle Street can do the same (Threadgold 2015b, see also Shildrick, MacDonald and Furlong 2014). In summary, ‘emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices’ (Ahmed 2014: 8). In this vein, Wetherell (2012: 2–12) proposes a research approach she calls ‘affective practice’ that focuses ‘on the emotional as it appears in social life and tries to follow what participants do’, where practices ‘unfurl, become organised, and effloresce with particular rhythms’. This approach can explore ‘who is affectively privileged, who is able to “bank” large amounts of “emotional capital”, and who “naturally” seems to produce valued affective styles, avoiding abjection and contempt’ (2012: 105). Wetherell also points out that habitus is often used to do analytical work that assumes too much affective order. But I argue in this regard that Bourdieu’s work, as Susen (2017) has recently contended, can be interpreted as a ‘hermeneutics of contingency’. Contingency, uncertainty, ambivalence, ambiguity and doubt are central to our very being and we do considerable emotional work to ‘hold it together’. There is much in Bourdieu’s theoretical tools and empirical studies to illuminate the messiness of the affected social subject and actors’ ‘joint ways of thinking, feeling, and acting’ (Wacquant 2014b: 120). In the following, I propose some ways that a Bourdieusian perspective can enhance understanding of affect, and vice versa. Firstly, we can imagine a field as having its own multi-layered ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson 2014). Thinking about field in this way emphasises that fields are as much ontological spaces as physical spaces, with doxic norms an ever-present affective

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background.vi The series of ‘opposites’ that Anderson sketches out as elements of an affective atmosphere – presence and absence, materiality and ideality, definite and indefinite, singularity and generality – are absorbed, interpreted and negotiated within any situation with forms of capital. In the same manner, we could also see doxic discursive binary norms as affective background: normal and abnormal; right and wrong; masculine and feminine; successful and failing; tasteful and vulgar; cool and lame; moral and immoral; rational and emotional; order and chaos; efficient and inefficient; legal and illegal and the like. A field has its orthodoxies, customs and rituals that make up its historical doxa, but fields also have immanent tendencies which can be useful for thinking about analysing settings, situations and moments. To practice successfully in any given field relies on a tacit understanding of the absent presence of its ‘history’ in each situational setting: what is relevant to a specific situation or moment and what an individual brings to that moment, but also an understanding of how the future is present in any setting, are key to how fields function. Fields have immanent and imminent impressions of what can come next, the possibilities of what can immediately follow an affective moment, the potential trajectory one can then embark. Affect does not emerge and manifest in some kind of socio-temporal vacuum. It always happens in specific circumstances where people bring their histories to that moment and what can happen next is co-constituted ‘between skilled agent and pregnant world’ (Wacquant 2014a: 5). Echoing the notion of social gravity, discussed in Chapter 2, Bissell (2010: 273) notes: ‘Possibly the most effective way of grasping the idea of an affective atmosphere is therefore to think of it as a propensity: a pull or a charge that might emerge in a particular space which might (or might not) generate particular events and actions, feelings and emotions’. The forms of capital that Bourdieu and others have developed – economic, cultural, social, symbolic, subcultural (Thornton 1995), emotional (Reay 2000, 2004; Illouz 2007), gendered (Huppatz 2012) and so on – are themselves ‘affective’. Or, to put it differently, capitals have affective properties and propensities. In terms of Bourdieu’s whole oeuvre, one of his key developments is the theoretical move from ideology to symbolic violence, emphasising that power is most effective when it is least obviously being wielded.vii The material vi For instance, I can be in the specific social setting of my office in the physical space of the ‘field of education’, but I can be remembering a moment about last night’s gig, imagining playing in this weekend’s cricket game, or thinking about something that needs to be done for that night’s club committee meeting. Someone entering my office or the phone ringing is likely to snap me back into the ‘physical’ field, that is I will be affected, and am then likely to ‘perform’ in a way that suits the doxic demands of the field. vii Graeber (2015) disputes this normative ‘post-structural’ understanding of power. He argues that there is a corollary between the increased bureaucratisation of society and the increase in ‘the range and density of social relations that are

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economy aspects of capital are still obviously central to understanding inequality. But those aspects only partially shed light, for instance, on the complicity of the so-called dominated classes and of dominated groups within the field of power (like academics!). Forms of capital work most effectively to reproduce when they are working affectively. It is through the affective composition of the symbolic and the relational that social hierarchies and relations of power are misrecognised as social order. To borrow and bastardise a Foucaultian motif, the middle class possession of cultural capitals, and their struggles over those capitals, engender a technique of being governed through the very ‘freedoms’ those capitals provide. With this in mind, the notion of reflexivity and the idea that capitals have affective properties can be helpful for thinking about affect, especially when treating affect as being ‘more than representational’ (Lorimer 2005), rather than non-representational. Bourdieu acknowledges that anticipation of what comes next in a field is a form of cultural capital, acting as a kind of affective competence. Getting the ‘feel’ of a social setting; the way (and why) someone ‘dominates’ or ‘charms’ in that setting; the anticipation of immanent events or possible utterances in the setting; and the understanding of unsaid and historical ‘absent presences’ in the setting – are all forceful forms of capital. They are emotional homologies with the affective elements of a specific doxic social situation. Another way that a Bourdieusian lens can illuminate aspects of affect and emotion is the way that concepts of symbolic violence and illusio help excavate the ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant 2011) and ‘the promise of happiness’ (Ahmed 2010) of day-to-day life. Why do people strive for things that are actually an obstacle to their own flourishing? How is the very imperative of happiness (like freedom), a moral call to participate in what is deemed ‘tasteful’, ‘moral’, ‘worthy’, ‘productive’ and the like, an impossible duty that precariousness, ambivalence and reflexivity may well preclude? Bourdieu’s notion of illusio, a concept that is used to think about the stakes and rewards of a particular field, can be read as a situated form of affect. It denotes how one emotionally invests in day-to-day struggles within particular fields as the means for making one’s life worthwhile. Therefore, relating to Barsamian’s artistic statement at MONA (see above), a different way of reading Bourdieu here is to think about the way that the notion of illusio is a necessity. As Susen (2017) points out, we cannot be cognisant of everything, both in terms of history and the situational present. We can see in some recent psychological experiments that what is ‘in front’ of us can actually deceive us, with the ‘invisible gorilla’ (Chabris and Simons 2011) experiment being a prime example. Our ‘intuitive beliefs are often ultimately regulated by the threat of violence’. He points to the rise in presence of a variety of uniformed people trained in deploying physical violence at banks, playgrounds, schools, universities, sporting events and beaches. I would add nightclubs, pubs and music venues.

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mistaken ones that mask critically important limitations of our cognitive abilities’ (Chabris and Simons 2011: x). As we go through life, we practice as if we know how our minds work and why we behave the way we do. However, as many psychological experiments show, we do not really have a clue about how our own minds work! According to Chabris and Simons, there are doxic ‘everyday illusions’ that people have about the way the mind functions such as attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause and potential (all of which can be thought of in terms of forms of affective capitals in fields). Even after we realise that something is not quite right – the optical illusion of an image or picture, for instance – it is still very difficult to stop ourselves feeling tricked or taken aback by the fact that we didn’t see it in the first place. ‘Everyday illusions are similarly persistent: Even after we know how beliefs and intuitions are flawed they remain resistant to change’ (Chabris and Simons 2011: x). The authors call these ‘everyday illusions’ because they affect our behaviour literally every day. This supports the concept of illusio and its very necessity, since illusio is not exclusively about common sense doxa, but also speaks to the necessity to be able to exist in day to day life because we need to leave excessive events happening in the background, we cannot actually pay attention to it all. In summary, the concepts of illusio and social gravity can help us think about whether we notice the things in front of us or not, and more importantly, how there is a need for us to be focused on specific things and to blank out what is not specifically important or relevant in any particular social context. Habitus, therefore, is one of the mechanisms that mediates what we notice or not, or, what speaks to us or not. Habitus affectively delineates what we focus upon and what we write out as background, excess or noise. This opens up a way of thinking about what we don’t think about, not just as ideology or even the common sense of doxa, but as a kind of play off between the necessity of needing to focus on specific things; about being physically, mentally, ontologically unable to know everything; alongside a structural analysis of how power is dispersed throughout the fields in which we practice.

Conclusion In this chapter I make several theoretical developments that bring an affective element to some of Bourdieu’s tools while at the same time encouraging us to think about how affective economies function and perform. Habitus operates in multiple ways. In some settings and situations one may react in the instinctual manner that Bourdieu describes, that is, habitus is drawn upon in an unconscious way. At other times, there is room for reflexive deliberation. Bourdieu sketched his model of an actor against the structuralist dupe, the existential voluntarist and the rational actor. That is to say, these reactions are all possible, none should be precluded, but none should be the only way to think about how decisions are made in a young person’s everyday life. If we

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think about these choices along the lines of strategy and struggle in affective atmospheres, the rational and emotional can both be considered. More forcefully, that dichotomy can and should be shattered. Everyday struggles occur in an affective atmosphere coloured by individualisation, insecurity and precarity. To strategise their present and future, young people draw upon their capitals which are both the consequence of their individual history developed from their position in social space, and are affective weapons to confront the future. Illusio can be thought of as an affective property of fields that contributes to the parameters of what we pay attention to. The emergence of reflexivity changes young people’s encounters with the illusio of specific fields, because the doxic promises promoted to them from an early age – study and work hard, make the right choices – are diminished by the very vagaries, inconsistencies and precarity of the social world in which they are immersed. Adkins (2013: 295) has called for a reading that ‘opens out Bourdieu’s oeuvre to currents in the social sciences which question the limits of the sociology of the social in the context of an increasingly ontological life’. Adkins states that ‘any engagement with Bourdieu should be driven by a rather different set of concerns, especially those relating to the question of whether or not Bourdieu’s social theory can contribute to the making of a post-hermeneutic sensate sociology’ (2013: 301). Hage (2015: 207) notes: By offering a conception of politics as a struggle between different realities, Bourdieu opens up a path for us to understand that what he calls symbolic violence is also a form of ontological violence: certain realities come to dominate others so much that they simply become ‘reality’, foreclosing their history as a process of domination and equally foreclosing the very possibility of thinking reality as multiple. Doing this kind of theoretical work can do much to introduce the ‘incarnate agent as suffering and desiring being at the intersection between historical structures and situated interaction’ (Wacquant 2014b: 123). Living within and between multiple ontological realities is the very affective space where young people strategise and struggle.

Part 2

Classification struggles in the field of representation

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A mix tape for Part 2

‘Australiens’ by M.O.B. ‘Carol’ by Peep Tempel ‘Parramatta Man’ by Big Dingo ‘Down at the Dogs’ by Low Life ‘Girt by Dickheads’ by Bottlecock ‘Embracism’ by Kirin J Callinan ‘No Hoper’ by The Stabs ‘West End Girls’ by Ben Salter ‘Hipster Mental Ward’ by Dollar Bar ‘DNA’ by Low Life ‘New Designs for Hip Kids’ by God Bows to Math ‘Sex in the Chill Zone’ by Ooga Boogas ‘Ask an Anthropologist’ by Russell Street Bombings ‘Same for me’ by Cable Ties ‘You ain’t going nowhere’ by The Garbage and the Flowers ‘Mirror Morrir’ by Hi-Tec Emotions ‘No Enter’ by Bushwalking ‘Getting on’ by Unity Floors ‘Lick the Pip’ by Housewives ‘Nothing’ by Primitive Calculators ‘Tug of War’ by Spite House ‘Piles of Lies’ by Batrider ‘Wining & Losing’ by Palm Springs ‘So Long’ by Summer Flake ‘Sprinters of The World Unite’ by Naked ‘Happiness’ by Tyrannamen ‘Grow Up’ by The Ocean Party ‘No fun’ by Love of Diagrams ‘Life in a Petri Dish’ by Mope City ‘Brain Spew’ by Liquid Diet ‘Liquid Soul’ by Brando’s Island ‘Twenty Four’ by Kitchen’s Floor

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‘All this could be yours’ by Panel of Judges ‘Drowning in the Dark’ by Circle Pit ‘Obsessed’ by Ghastly Spats ‘Slave’ by Treehouse ‘Whipping Boy’ by Wives ‘Jet Fuel can melt Steel Beams’ by Camp Cope ‘In the Bin’ by Terry ‘System Collapse’ by Dispossessed ‘Streets of Fitzroy’ by Secret Valley ‘Fuck off back to Melbourne’ by Obat Batuk

Chapter 4

Hipsters and bogans Distinctive figures of classed anxieties

The misrecognition of the real foundations of differences and of the principles of their perpetuation is what makes for the fact that the social world is perceived not as the site of conflict or competition between groups endowed with antagonistic interests but as a ‘social order’. (Bourdieu 2013: 298)

Introduction The previous chapter laid groundwork to think about affect from a Bourdieusian perspective. Skeggs (2004: 5) has asked how can class be spoken and known, both directly and indirectly, across a range of sites? In response, this chapter traces how the iconic categories of ‘hipster’ and ‘bogan’ are summoned and portrayed across popular culture, to support the argument that news and opinion, and parody and satire, serve to ‘make class’. In this chapter I draw on the figures of hipster and bogan to discuss modalities of struggle in terms of the representation of class. I argue that the affective space between Bourdieu’s two objective social orders – the material order and the symbolic order – is one where class classifications are made and remade. Much of this representational work, this struggle, is done by middle class professionals working in the creative and media industries. The mental constructs of the hipster and bogan evolve from attempts to map and represent class anxieties around taste, morals and values from a privileged position in social space. Once created and disseminated, they then work to patrol and enforce those very qualities. In the above quote, Bourdieu contrasts notions of order and conflict as a relationship of misrecognition. I propose that the misrecognised relationship between order and conflict is one of ambivalence. This ambivalence creates an affective space that sees the promise of happiness that is central to the doxa of the most legitimated fields – economy, education, labour markets, consumption – shrouded in a relation of cruel optimism. The figures of ‘hipster’ and ‘bogan’ are used as pejoratives for describing various youth taste cultures. The hipster crosses national borders and is used globally, while bogan is a specifically Australian term that has cousins in

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other countries (such as chav, redneck, white trash and the like). The use of hipster tends to allow for reflexivity, irony, self-knowing and ambivalence. Bogans tend to be abjectified as vulgar, aggressive, lazy and undeserving. The hipster provokes (mostly) discussion and debate. The bogan provokes (mostly) disgust and denigration. These figures are used by media workers, both professional and amateur, to individualise and even pathologise widespread social, economic and political issues. The moral and symbolic economy of opinion and comedy in the field of representation is analysed by looking at a wide array of commentary about young (and not so young) people and popular culture that make use of the hipster and bogan. I therefore link the order of material inequality to those who get to create and maintain the symbolic order. This chapter sets the scene by describing how and where hipster and bogan are used in the media. It reviews current academic material that considers them, then proposes that thinking of them as affective figures will show how they work to create and maintain class boundaries. The next chapter presents two case studies on news and opinion and on comedy to trace how these figures represent moralistic and taste classificatory struggles that illustrate contemporary class anxieties. As Bourdieu argues: Analysis of the struggle over classifications brings to light the political ambition that pervades the epistemic ambition of producing the correct classification … to set forth the frontier between the sacred and the profane, good and evil, the vulgar and the distinguished. (Bourdieu 1985: 735) The hipster has social and taste homologies with the members of the Commentariat, while their relation to the bogan is one of social distance. The bogan is talked about, but has little voice of its own. The hipster is used as a ‘straw man’ to provoke debate about social change, taste, consumerism, sexism and racism. As precariousness becomes normalised for even the welleducated middle classes, this challenges the illusio of a variety of fields, so these figures serve to highlight social processes of continuity and change. They illustrate new forms of class-based anxieties. They are important politically because they are mobilised daily across numerous platforms. They provoke both symbolic violence whilst obfuscating the economic causes of social problems. They are also indicative of how class ‘haunts’ (Gordon 2008) our media consumption. The ‘bogan’ taps into fears, insecurities and a sense of injustice of the educated middle classes, producing a form of ‘disgusted subject’ (Lawler 2005). The ‘hipster’ plays a dual role: it represents a kind of pop cultural clown, affording the middle class a reflexive laugh at itself alongside an ambivalent and somewhat sheepish recognition of the cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) of consumer culture. I use these figures as heuristic foils to discuss the complex symbolic and representational dimensions of reflexive

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modernity, where ‘the fate of groups is bound up with the words that designate them’ (Bourdieu 1984: 481). The representations of symbolic classes and their apparent doxic tastes, morals and values are made in the image of the middle class media workers who produce them. Journalists, opinion writers, bloggers, comedians and film makers struggle to represent their classifications and tastes through their stories, articles, skits, jokes and films. These texts then become part of everyday cultural conversations, where they are discussed face-to-face IRL,i disseminated through social media, commented upon under news stories or on Facebook and Twitter, and responded to with more articles, opinion, jokes and films. The figures of hipster and bogan, and the representational work about them, become elements of the affective atmosphere where the very doxic recognition of class is struggled over. That is, the material objective order is reinforced by struggles over its symbolic representation. This is the setting where mental constructs become a social reality with their own emotional veracity, where class becomes an affective structure, even where it is politically doxic to deny the existence of class as a form of social conflict.

Hipsters and bogans in the news In everyday media around the western world,ii especially online, references to hipsters and bogans are legion. Let me paint the picture.iii The BBC described ‘hipster’ as the perfect slang term to sum up an era,1 while hipster was deemed an ‘emerging tribe’ in Sydney.2 There are hipster cops.3 Hipster dinosaur pictures.4 Hipster Angela Merkel memes.5 Foucault is explained with Hipsters.6 There are stories on the most hipster neighbourhood in the world;7 Australia’s most hipster suburbs;8 and on the ‘young and rich’ who are buying up property in ‘hipster suburbs in Sydney’.9 There’s the Top Ten US hipster college campus.10 The 22 most hipster foods on the planet.11 There are hipster dating websites.12 To celebrate the start of Danish fashion week, Lego Hipsters were created.13 Surf brand Billabong is evidently collapsing because it failed to keep up with ‘hipster fashion’.14 Hipsters have apparently created a worldwide whiskey shortage.15 McDonalds’ character The Hamburglar has been refashioned ‘From Cartoon Chubster to i ii

iii

IRL: In Real Life. The following examples are drawn from and jump between Australia, UK, US, Canada and Europe, especially Scandinavian countries. I do not distinguish between these sites, for although there are some local historical and stylistic differences, they mostly play the same social role. I am aware that in the following pages there are references to an array of popular culture and media entities with which not everyone will be familiar. Specific footnotes for each was too unwieldy, with a detrimental effect on readability. So, please allow Google to be your friend in cases where you are unfamiliar with a specific example.

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Handsome Hipster’.16 A story about people looking for their stolen iPads using tracking GPS apps because police will not issue search warrants based on the technology was called: ‘Vigilante justice: a guide for placid hipsters’.17 A Malaysian popstar ‘clad in skinny jeans and a hijab’, Yuna, is said to be a poster girl for young hijabsters, which is a combination of hipster and hijab.18 American actor Mark Ruffalo is the ‘the wounded hipster neurotic of modern cinema’.19 The New York Times traces the move of hipsterdom from the urban to the suburbs, or to ‘Hipsturbia’.20 In Sydney, an ‘influx of Sneaking Duck wearing Hipsters from Surry Hills’ are blamed for ruining one writer’s local gelato bar.21 Another argues that ‘Hipsters and snobby staff are ruining our inner-city cafes’.22 Inner-city Indigenous residents of Woolloomooloo and Redfern in Sydney ‘fear they are being pushed out for “white hipsters”’.23 A comment piece bemoans that the ‘hipster habit’ of getting tattoos has spoiled their meaning because they were once a rite ‘of passage, tribal identification and more, but they’ve been reduced to casual decoration’ deeming them ‘unartistic art’.24 When UK model Ricki Hall was quoted describing how he takes fashion inspiration from the homeless, he was described as ‘a twat, narcissist and insufferable hipster’.25 There are examples of ‘extreme’ hipsterdom where young men with sculptured beards chain their Penny-farthing bicycles outside the organic single origin coffee house to write their novel on a typewriter.26 Prefix magazine asks: ‘Has the dominance of hipster rap taken away from hip-hop’s vitality’?27 Priceonomics created ‘the hipster music index’ to rate the hipster approval of particular bands.28 In 2007, ‘there was a faux documentary Hipster Olympics … with such events as the “ironic T-shirt” hunt and the LP record “bragathon”’.29 But then, in Berlin in 2012, there was a real Hipster Olympics, an actual ‘sporting contest consisting of different disciplines such as the horn-rimmed glasses throw, skinny jeans tug-o-war, vinyl record spinning contest and cloth tote sack race’.30 Sweden then apparently hosted the most hipster festival ever.31 You can use the Hipster Name Generator to find a name for your newborn.32 The term ‘Columbusing’ was invented for when white hipsters ‘discover’ a new cool bar or band. The term plays on the notion that young Americans are taught in school that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America despite the presence of Native Americans.33 Advertising uses the hipster trope, with a Honda Jazz ad asking ‘How much Hipster can you pack in a Jazz?’34 You can follow the adventures of Hipster Hitler,35 who wears t-shirts with slogans like ‘Death Camp for Cutie’. There are blogs that show us ‘stuff hipsters hate’36 and ‘unhappy hipsters’.37 A London play, World Factory, asks the audience to run a clothing factory in China. It was described as, ‘How to turn a liberal hipster into a capitalist tyrant in one evening’.38 When English band Coldplay filmed a video in King St, Newtown, Sydney, it was described as, ‘Coldplay take over hipster streets to shoot A Sky Full of Stars video with fans’.39 A satirical piece notes that a ‘Hipster Finds Lifestyle Too Expensive, Reverts to Mainstream’.40

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The hipster’s beard is given particular attention. Satirical pieces tell us that hipster beards compensate for a lack of personality.41 An actual Professor of Evolutionary Ecology has argued, ‘fear not’ the hipster beard ‘shall pass’.42 Post-structuralism can be illustrated with hipster beards (this is different to the Foucault one above).43 Another website displays ‘Hipster Men with Beards Shaped like Animals’ that are ‘so damn trendy’.44 There have also been stories on (ahem) ‘shear madness’, where ‘Brooklyn’s hipster beard craze has grown so popular that men in New York are rushing to doctors for “facial hair transplants” – surgery that helps make beards look thicker and less patchy’.45 Young hipster writers, referred to as ‘middling millennials’, are blamed for destroying literary culture, with their alleged narcissism.46 In response to UK writer Will Self saying ‘the awful cult of the talentless hipster has taken over’,47 Guardian journalists responded with a piece that asked ‘Is it ok to hate hipsters?’48 Their answer was no. Others argue ‘the hipster must die’49 to save New York cool and that they have moved from ‘cool to tool’.50 Another asks ‘why do we hate the hipster’ and ponders that maybe we need to ‘learn to live with our skinny-jeaned friend instead’.51 Executive Style magazine claims that ‘The word hipster is now thrown around so frequently to describe everything from fashion choices, music and even types of beer that it would suggest that there are actually more things “hipster” than there are things that aren’t’.52 In 2015, the Evening Standard claimed the death of the hipster53 while The Observer reported on their end.54 In response, The Guardian wanted to ‘prove them wrong’ about the hipster’s apparent demise and asked their readers, ‘have you spotted any hipsters in the wild?’55 Mashable announced that the hipster is dead and has been replaced by Yuccies: Young Urban Creatives.56 Meanwhile The Wall Street Journal reported that the thriving growth of ‘artisanal food-and-drink makers from craft-beer to rustic ice-creameries’ which are ‘hot item[s] for Melbourne’s hipsters and middle class’, ‘are skewing the [Australian] nation’s productivity figures’. ‘Due to their lack of scale and the amount of labour involved, artisan bakeries, wineries and breweries are aggravating a continuing decline in productivity’.57 In England in September 2015, a ‘punk carnival’ protest organised by the longstanding Class War group damaged with paint and scrawled the word ‘scum’ on the window of Cereal Killer in Brick Lane, a café that sells bowls of cereal for over £3.50. The café opened in December 2014 and provoked discussions about hipsters and gentrification.58 A 55-year-old artist, who had lived in Shoreditch for 17 years and was forced to move out of the Shoreditch area after her rent doubled, was quoted: It’s our fault, artists like me go to these kind of areas, then the architects follow, the developers, the hipsters etc. … The problem is social cleansing. There are no protections for us. The law does not protect us, only the greedy landowners.59

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But some have painted a more positive picture of the hipster, since their apparent eco-friendly lifestyle and digital readiness can open ‘potent spaces for an altogether different culture to take shape’ (Wood 2014). In the UK, there have been several stories on the so-called ‘flat white economy’ (McWilliams 2015) that is said to be driving the economic success of London compared to the rest of the country. The term alludes to the ‘coffee popular in East London Cafes, [and] refers to a sector formed of media, information and creative industries. Included here are software publishing and programming, TV & film post-production, advertising agencies and website design’.60 The Guardian has asked ‘can hipsters save the world?’61 Responses were ambivalent. A columnist proposed that the hipster is a positive agent of social change where ‘hipster culture is the movement that turned acceptance of gay people for the better’.62 Another piece argues that ‘we should subsidise hipster novelists’ housing’ otherwise ‘we risk missing out on our cities’ stories being captured on the page’.63 Unfortunately for me and the contents of this book, the Village Voice states that ‘Intellectualizing Hipsters is the New Hipster Intellectualism’.64 I suppose that if you don’t ‘get’ all the above references, you need to check the vitality of your hipster cultural capital. References to the hipster above are from the global media because it is used all over the Western world. Therefore, instances of hipster outweigh mentions of bogan, which is native only to Australia and referred to only in the national media. That said, instances of its use also border on the ubiquitous. There are many stories on the ‘worst baby bogan names’, such as Anfernee, Beejay, Benz, Holden and Cash for boys and Caprice, Princ’ess, Rybekkah and Shiraz for girls.65 Bogan names can apparently be a ‘life sentence’.66 The NSW town of Nyngan plans to build The Big Bogan, to go alongside other ‘Big’ attractions in Australia such as Coffs Harbour’s Big Banana and Goulburn’s Big Merino.67 Bogan Ipsum68 is a website that randomly generates chunks of Boganesque nonsensical phrases such as: ‘you little ripper ripper piece of piss stands out like a slab’. A contestant on the Reality TV show The Block Glasshouse, Deanne, had a message for a judge on the show, Shaynna Blaze: ‘you’re a suburban bogan with no style’.69 When billionaire James Packer and millionaire David Gyngell were filmed fighting on a footpath in a rich Sydney suburb, it was deemed ‘primal bogan behaviour’.70 Former prominent Australian food critic, Leo Schofield, was apparently driven out of Hobart because the city’s ‘two greatest assets are the natural and the built environment, and both of these are in the process of destruction by a bunch of bogans’.71 This prompted Van Banham in The Guardian to respond by highlighting the class problems in the arts field. He claimed that there are actually ‘heaps of bogans in the arts, Leo Schofield just hasn’t noticed yet’.72 Schofield later apologised.73 Young tradesmen in Sydney with the Boganesque ‘mullet’ haircut are not being allowed to enter certain nightclubs because the haircut associates them with Bikies. As one man put it: ‘Yeah, we’ve got mullets and we’re well dressed and clean, we haven’t got gold chains dripping off … but clubs in

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the city and in the west say we can’t come in because we look like bikies … We’re not bikies. We’re just young blokes who wear a sensible haircut to work in the sun’.74 More recently an apparent ‘hipster’ pub in Paddington, Sydney, The Village Inn, banned boganesque iconography such as high viz vests, helmets, rat’s tails and mullets, creating a deluge of online one-star reviews.75 The plight of convicted Bali drug smuggler, Schapelle Corby was described as ‘Bogan Shakespeare’.76 Bali also seemingly needs to be made a ‘Bogan free zone’77 with another article claiming we need to ‘Turn back the bogans’, Forget about ‘stop the boats’. It’s time, please, to ‘turn back the bogans’.78 The Brisbane Times ran a ten-point guide on ‘how to spot a bogan’,79 which was followed by a 13-point list of how to spot the opposite of a bogan (which looked suspiciously like a hipster).80 Others have a more positive spin on the term, with an online shop called Bogan and Proud81 selling aprons, flags and eskys with the term emblazoned on them. The Facebook page All Things Bogan82 runs with the motto: ‘Bogan isn’t a dirty word. Everyone has a little bit of bogan in them (not just talkin’ about you Shazzas in the back seat of the Commo)… the world would be a better place if everyone just embraced their “INNER BOGAN” more’. Executive Style reported on the rise of a bogan chic, ‘With items considered bogan back in the day reappearing as must-haves, it’s possible “westies” are ahead of the fashion pack by about 15 years’.83 The bogan has become part of the Australian political landscape and lexicon, where it works to blur the line between socio-economic position and style category. For instance, former Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was dubbed ‘Queen of the Bogans’.84 In particular, there have been several instances where bogan has been associated with mining magnate Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party (PUP). One particular ‘controversy’ was when the Leader of the Party in Queensland, Dr Alex Douglas, had an email leaked where he claimed that bogans had inherited the earth. Douglas observed that what is interesting about what he called Boganland is ‘how the sufferers just copy one another so quickly with each trend … It is no longer satisfactory that they will just buy (and wear) ugg boots, watch Big Brother, choke on a diet of grease, dye their [hair] bright purple [sic], tattoo [sic] and rejoice in their ignorance’.85 He went on to describe the success of PUP’s own Jacquie Lambie, a Senator from Tasmania, as having an ‘ace up her sleeve’ because she came from ‘Boganland’. According to Dr Douglas, Lambie is ‘from a world we see daily and quietly hope will disappear’. After the email became public, he explained his comments by saying: ‘I’m a bogan. There’s bogans in all of us. People shouldn’t be offended by it, it’s not a derogatory term. I’m overweight therefore I must be a bogan’.86 PUP leader, Clive Palmer, agreed, saying that he himself has ‘spent most of [his] life as a bogan’87 and that Douglas was a ‘bogan for voting for [then conservative Queensland State Premier] Campbell Newman … All I can say is I like chips, I regularly eat at McDonalds but I’m eating more salads now. I wear Ugg boots and I go fourwheel driving. We have got an alliance with the Motoring Enthusiasts’.88

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Senator Lambie shrugged off the labelling, saying: ‘Bogan is a derogatory term, I am from the underdog world. Some people call them bogans, I call them underdogs. It is hard to keep getting up each day, trying to put food on the table, when there is no employment’.89 In another example, Minister for Agriculture Barnaby Joyce made an impromptu call to national ABC talkback radio which was discussing what is a bogan and whether Australia has a class system. He said: If people honestly believed there was a class system [in Australia] then it would be clearly identifiable as you walk down the street … You’d be able to say that person belongs to that class, that person belongs to another class, and I don’t think it is.90 Joyce sees the discussion as not about class, but about consumption: These pejoratives or an accolade – bogan and what would otherwise be middle class – and I think in many instances that’s just a consumer choice. We can have people who are obviously vastly wealthier who are so-called bogans than other people in the middle class.91 Confusingly, he also said that even listening to a talk back program on ABC Radio National could be thought of by some as ‘elitist’ or a ‘statement of class’. Phew. I’d say by now after that onslaught of examples, the words hipster and bogan are sounding like fingernails on a chalkboard. But the vast variety of uses and incarnation of these figures is needed to illustrate their constant and sometimes baffling usage. There are new examples appearing every day. Depending on where you look, the hipster is either an economic saviour or responsible for a decline in productivity. Bogans are either ugly and daggy or driving fashion poverty chic. Hipster and bogan style and behaviour can be attributed to both the poor and to billionaires. These categorisations capture both the making of, and struggles over, class boundaries and their symbolically blurry nature.

Slippery categories As the range of the above examples attests, the terms hipster and bogan seem to be able to cover a wide range of functions. They can be nouns (‘there’s lots of hipsters here’) and adjectives (‘that is a very bogan haircut’). Hipster and bogan can also be used to represent the same thing. Newcastle, where this book was mostly written, has long been described in boganesque terms because of its historically white monoculture, love of footy and economic reliance on coal (and formerly steel). More recently in its post-industrial phase since BHP left town for cheaper pastures in the 1990s, Newcastle has been reconfigured in some mediums as a hipster place. The organisation

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Renew Newcastle (Westbury 2015) has used empty and dilapidated real estate in and around the CBD to house artistic and creative outlets that would not usually be able to pay the rent or be economically sustainable. Newcastle appeared in a ‘Top 5 hipster cities in the world’92 list and is now frequently cited in consumer and fashion publications as a ‘cool’ place to visit.93 Newcastle: hipster and bogan at the same time. Highlighting the moralistic and value laden nature of these figures, it seems clear that vast wealth is not an arbiter of avoiding classification as a hipster or bogan. Like the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ money, you can be the wrong kind of wealthy. Former self-made mining magnate, Nathan Tinkler, once a billionaire at least on paper, has been consistently referred to in newspaper articles as The Bogannaire, with a biography released under that name (Manning 2014). Meanwhile, Tasmanian professional gambler and art connoisseur, David Walsh, is portrayed as some kind of aging hipster millionaire, putting on edgy festivals, micro-brewing and writing an irony-fuelled autobiography (Walsh 2014). We might note that the bogan has a book written about him while the hipster writes a book about himself. Another example where the terms have both been applied is around the Hobart gallery built and owned by Walsh, The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) (see Franklin 2014). MONA has been positioned as both a Hipster’s Disneyland and as Art for Bogans. It is defined as a Hipster Disneyland because it has confronting modern art, much of it concerning ‘sex and death’. MONA is housed inside an amazing architectural feat of a building where you can drink boutique beer. Finally, before MONA opened, not many mainland Australians ventured towards Hobart. Yet now, the Summer and Winter Festivals organised by the gallery, MONA FOMO and DARK MOFO, have been described as ‘the ultimate hedonistic playground for hipsters’.94 Tourism Industry Council Tasmania CEO Luke Martin’s praise for the economic benefits of the festivals for the Tasmanian economy were under a headline of ‘Hip-Hipster Hooray’.95 The gallery itself is lined with layers of irony from the tennis court at the entrance to the ‘Art Wank’ explanations on the iPod ‘O’ device used by visitors. However, MONA has also been positioned as Art for Bogans because you receive an iPod that gives you information about the art. Of course, only bogans lack the cultural capital to understand what a poo-making machine, a wall of vaginas, or a waterfall that spits out words computer generated from real-time Google searches actually means. The adjoining brewery, also owned by Walsh, sells a beer that playfully engages with these concerns via its slogan: ‘Not suitable for bogans’ (see Figure 4.1). One of the installations, Roman Signer’s Engpass, has garnered its own permanent public comment with graffiti scrawled on it that says: ‘Sex, Death + Bogans?’ (see Figure 4.2). Other stories have focused on how the apparent bogans living in the low-SES suburbs that surround the gallery in Hobart do not ‘get’ or appreciate having such an establishment on their doorstep.96

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Figure 4.1 Moo Brew cup: ‘Not suitable for bogans’ Source: Author.

Figure 4.2 Roman Signer’s Engpass, MONA: ‘Sex, Death + Bogans?’ Source: Author.

Personally, I have had my own anecdotal experiences with the figures of hipster and bogan. I like playing and watching sports; I’m very partial to a sausage roll (entrée) and a meat pie (main); I drink a lot of beer; I wear thongs at every opportunity and have been pretty much wearing the same thing fashion-wise since the mid-1990s. Apparently, this is all bogan stuff. On the other hand, I like bands you have probably never heard of; I buy LPs and tapes (that’s right, tapes); I go to gigs sometimes in places that are not really ‘venues’; I have become something like a coffee snob. Apparently, this is hipster stuff. This was summed up well in one

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week when I was having a beer after a gig with a friend in the inner-west suburb of Newtown, Sydney. He asked whether I was going to make the two hour drive back down from Newcastle to go to another gig the next weekend. When I replied that I couldn’t because it was the start of the cricket season next Saturday, he said ‘Cricket! Cricket’s for bogans’. That weekend at cricket, I was asked by a teammate what I did last weekend. I said, ‘I went to see R.I.P Society gig’. He replied, ‘what the hell is that … you’re a bloody hipster Thready’. It is exchanges like these along with the growing use of the figures hipster and bogan in the media that led me to ask questions like: Just how ‘floating’ are these floating signifiers? What do they mean and what purpose do they serve? Is this the way class is produced and policed in a so-called ‘classless’ society? Hipsters and bogans seem to be everywhere. So, what exactly are they?

What is a bogan? What is a hipster? Academic research on the hipster and the bogan is relatively thin in quantity. In the UK, there is an important body of work that discusses the figure of the ‘chav’, especially around issues like the ‘self-control ethos’ (Adams and Raisborough 2011); disgust and mockery (Brewis and Jack 2010; Jones 2011; Tyler 2008); and chav presentation on Reality TV (Skeggs, Thumin and Wood 2008; Wood and Skeggs 2008; Wood and Skeggs 2011; Skeggs and Wood 2012). While the use of chav is in some ways similar to the use of bogan in Australia, in other ways it is quite different. So there is a need to maintain cultural specificity when distinguishing between these figures (Rossiter 2013). Bogan in Australia has never quite reached the level of malice that the chav has acquired in the UK. Campbell’s analysis of media, TV, film and literary texts describes how the bogan is a purely discursive device used in the media to both celebrate Australian-ness whilst providing a cultural cringe-worthy outcast to laugh at and loathe. ‘The bogan does not reflect [just] the material conditions of a socioeconomic class, nor the self-articulated formations of a subculture. Rather, the bogan discourse produces understandings of reality through representations in journalism and popular culture’ (Campbell 2004: 2). Campbell’s thesis usefully outlines and criticises various ways the bogan is defined: as class, as aesthetic and as subculture. Campbell proposes that the bogan is a ‘metadiscourse: it produces a temporary, partial national identity by mediating between Australians’ shifting, unruly lived experiences and various pre-existing discourses of Australian national identity’ (2004: 17). She considers the bogan historically alongside a string of nationalist ideologies including the ‘bush hero’, the ‘battler’, ‘community parenthood’ and a ‘do-it-yourself ’ ethos. Campbell concludes by pointing out that Bourdieusian research needs to be done on the topic and that ‘the bogan is above all a consensually maintained figure; and to some extent, all Australians are implicated in imagining it into existence’ (Campbell 2004: 109). Campbell (2002) also draws on the telling case of the 1997 murder of 13-year-old Jaidyn Leskie in Victoria,

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Australia. She shows how media reportage was framed in a moralising downward gaze, and when telling the story of the lost child, positioned the parents as some kind of bogan lost tribe for exploitative exotic entertainment. As Little (2011) points out, ‘their crudely drawn and misread cultural group cannot purchase any real dignity or social agency in their media representation’, and they are denied the right to private grief. Yet, ‘when members of Jaidyn’s family accepted money for media interviews, they were painted as “losing their innocence”. This reveals insecurities underpinning the concept “bogan”: evidently, bogans were not supposed to engage in media manipulation themselves’ (Campbell 2002: 116). Nichols’ (2011) work illustrates how the figure of the bogan works as a folk devil concocted by the urban middle classes, creating a convenient excuse to never leave the café laden streets of the inner city while providing a scapegoat to dump the blame for an array of social changes. Nichols excoriates a litany of falsehoods surrounding the bogan, with a chapter deconstructing the myth of bogan as environmental vandal, a trope that works by unfavourably comparing inner city dwellers and suburbia’s ecological footprints, car use, plasma TV screens, housing size and location. In a section called ‘Down with Democracy’, he highlights the inner-city resentment of ‘the suburbs’ and the perception that they decide elections: ‘It would appear that elites and governments … are just a little bit terrified of the bogans in their suburban heaven-hells’ (Nichols 2011: 142). Nichols proposes that there have been changes in aspects of Australian culture, especially when it comes to issues about stratification, that negatively affect the way culture develops and cities and towns progress. ‘Using offhand terms like “bogan” or, for that matter, “antibogan”,iv are a symptom of this change, whereby it becomes okay to write people off. The bogan delusion has put us all in a holding pattern of foolish fear and loathing’ (Nichols 2011: 215). I think Nichols’ book has had an impact on the way opinion writers in particular engage with bogan. Since the release of the book, references to bogan as an out and out pejorative have dropped in that realm, if not so much in news pieces and discussion boards. As Rossiter (2013), points out, the bogan elicits both love and contempt. Nichols’ book therefore seems to have contributed to a more ambivalent affect emanating from the figure of the bogan. The work of Barbara Pini and colleagues (Pini, McDonald and Mayes 2012; Pini and Previte 2013a, 2013b) is the first research that has brought an overtly Bourdieusian perspective to analysing the bogan, and is a key influence on the understanding in this book about the way bogan is deployed. They have used the figure of the ‘Cashed-Up Bogan’ (CUB) to show resentment towards working class coal miners in news stories during the so-called ‘resource boom’, where the increased demand for skilled manual labour allowed some miners to earn high salaries, increasing their disposable income. iv Nichols’ own description of the ‘antibogan’ has several quite hipster-ish tendencies.

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Cultural capital then plays a key role the defence of middle class tastes, whilst disparaging the CUBs as vulgar, destructive and undeserving of their relative wealth. Access to economic capital has provided the CUB with the apparent mobility to enter the everyday spaces of the middle class, but this has caused disruption to, and anxiety about, middle-class hegemony. Thus, Pini and colleagues argue that members of the middle classesv have redrawn and reinforced class-infused symbolic and cultural boundaries. In short, despite their wealth, pernicious media representations mark CUBs as ‘other’ to middleclass deservingness, taste and morality (Pini, McDonald and Mayes 2012: 142). Rossiter (2013) has analysed the bogan by invoking Ahmed’s (2004) notion of ‘affective economies’, where the bogan works as a ‘sticky sign’ that incites emotional reactions of various intensities, where ‘what happens around “bogan” is as fleeting and labile as it is congealed and sticky. Attunement to the ambiguity and complexity of these movements … may afford some insights into the matter of class and culture in Australia’ (Rossiter 2013: 80). I take a similar position, although when it comes to the complexity of the bogan figure, my analysis sees more symbolic violence than affection. In the same manner, the figure of the hipster provokes less symbolic violence and much more ambivalence. In terms of the hipster, again there is a relatively small but growing amount of academic material. In the field of neuroscience, Touboul (2014) apparently solved the age-old paradox of why so many ‘anti-conformists’ wind up looking the same. He proposes that when hipsters are too slow at identifying trends, they will continue to make the same choices and therefore: Remain correlated as time goes by, while their trend evolves in time as a periodic function. This is true as long as the majority of the population is made of hipsters. Otherwise, hipsters will be, again, largely aligned, towards a constant direction which is imposed by the mainstream choices. (Touboul 2014: 1) In Bourdieu’s terms, through a constant recontextualisation of signs, actors actively perform mechanisms of distinction in order to maintain cool as something that is not easily accessed. The constant reproduction of scarcity results in cool being a fundamentally ethereal and fluid concept. ‘What is considered to be cool is constantly changing; it is always on the move’ (Tolstad 2006: i). v I am cognisant of over-simplification here. Care needs to be taken to avoid turning a category like ‘middle class’ into singular, abstract and personified entity with its own apparent agency. Throughout Chapters 4 and 5, I do make some generalisations about class relations, struggles and boundaries but try to do so on a broadly comparative basis to indicate the terrain of a broad affective structure.

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Tolstad’s (2006) more sociological study engages the hipster as one aspect of the maintenance of cool identities in Williamsburg, New York. She sketches out the idea of ‘cool capital’, where cool becomes a complex and scarce resource, bound up with contradicting agendas. Alfrey (2010) uses what she calls the ‘hipster subculture’vi as a case study for tracing the ways consumption practices allow ways of thinking about how identity is reified through taste cultures. In their constant search for ‘authenticity’, ‘individuals with high hipster taste are more likely to cite icons or styles from past eras and musicians as the inspiration for their style’ (Alfrey 2010: 67). The desire for locally produced artisanal products means that hipsters ‘may be the canary in the cultural coalmine, harbingers of larger generational shifts’ (Alfrey 2010: 67). The example is claimed to demonstrate how a local subculturevii (Williamsburg, NY) went truly global through online interactions. One of the editors of a collection on hipsters (Grief, Ross and Tortorici 2010), Mark Grief, wrote a New York Times article to promote the book called ‘The Hipster in the Mirror’ (Grief 2010). The title acknowledges that much of his own and his peers’ consumption habits could easily be classified as ‘hipster’. This is important when considering relations of social distance when it comes to those who get to write about hipsters and bogans and the different tones that the two figures summon. Grief (2010) draws on Bourdieu to discuss the topic through the lens of cultural capital and contemporary forms of distinction. He distinguishes three different classes of hipster: ‘liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands’ who are aiming to work in the so-called creative industries; ‘trust fund hipsters’ who are positioned as wealthy philistines trying to purchase ready to wear cultural capital; and ‘couch-surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters’, the most ‘authentic’ but also the poorest who are stuck in jobs serving the other two classes. ‘Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be “superior”: hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility’ (Grief 2010). For Grief, the hipster figure is a way of thinking about distinction in a media-saturated and fast-moving consumer culture. Being an early adopter and knowing what’s coming as the next cool thing is a way of garnering pride and satisfaction. But this engenders a form of self-loathing as they understand the weakness of their own and everyone else’s position: they are fake while you have naturally good taste. Hipster, then, becomes a potent insult regarding authenticity by people who themselves could be readily identified as a hipster (Grief 2010). For Horning (2009: 81), ‘late capitalism makes us allviii fear being a hipster and thus makes us all in to one’. Horning goes on to say,

vi I argue that ‘hipster’ cannot work as an example of subculture, especially as it is rarely claimed as a source of self-identity. vii Again, it is debatable whether hipster had its genesis in New York. viii Note here that ‘us all’ denotes only fellow members of the middle classes.

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The hipster, then is the bogeyman that keeps us from becoming too settled in our identity, keeps us moving forward into new fashions, keeps us consuming more ‘creatively’ and discovering new things that haven’t become lame and hipster. We keep consuming more, and more cravenly, yet this always seems to us to be the hipsters’ fault, not our own. (Horning 2010: 81) I will later discuss these aspects further around notions of reflexivity, ambivalence and cruel optimism. Kinzey (2012) places the hipster at the centre of a wider critique of consumer capitalism: ‘Ironic postmodern kitsch zombies are finding comfort in the apathy and over-consumption of late capitalism … Hipsters are the most postmodern “mainstream subculture” to date and are perfectly integrated into postmodern late capitalism (a la Fredric Jameson)’ (Kinzey 2012: 1–2). The reference to Jameson (1991) alludes to his famous proposition that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, where it can successfully sell back its own subversion at an inflated price (see Morley 1996). Hipsters, in this line of argument, are ‘perfect for a culture that has revolutionized itself into stasis’ (Kinzey 2012: 39). Kinzey (2012: 3) argues that the hipster traits of irony, cynicism and distance are the ‘dominant aesthetic filter through which mainstream culture emanates’. The hipster’s apparent search for endless cool is perpetuated by cultural imperialism, where everything is for the taking. Nothing is really new, it is all about retromania, bricolage, sampling and remixing, where ‘selling out is practically programmed in to the hipster’ (Kinzey 2012: 4). But at the same time, the cultural imperialism of the hipster is turned back on them (Kinzey 2012: 57) as they are key to the burgeoning free labour markets (Terranova 2000), immaterial labour markets (Lazzarato 1996) and affective labour markets (Hardt 1999) that drive contemporary cool (McGuigan 2009), Web 2.0 capitalism. Drawing on an array of neoMarxian analyses such as Fisher’s (2009) notion of ‘capitalist realism’, Badiou’s ‘the passion of the real’ (Badiou and Toscano 2007), Sontag’s (1966) ‘camp’, Benjamin (1970) on art and mechanical reproduction and Zizek (2009) on ideology, Kinzey’s book is a scathing polemic that positions the hipster as infantile, interloper, hypocrite, sell out, superficial, dilettanteix – the human face of all that is wrong with Western consumer culture. ‘Not evil, just pathetic’ (Kinzey 2012: 64). In contrast, Schiermer (2014) offers a more nuanced analysis of what he calls ‘hipster culture’ in terms of late modernity, irony and authenticity. He argues that hipsters usher in ‘broader cultural and social changes: different relations among generations, new ways of relating to technology and media, new ways of being together, and new phenomenologies and sensibilities’ ix A similar list of traits is common to media moral panics about young people and youth culture in general.

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(Schiermer 2014: 167). Schiermer positions the hipster figure as a way of shedding light on the dynamics between imitation and authenticity in popular culture. He argues that the predilection for irony problematises hipster consumption practices as straightforward Bourdieusian distinction: ‘Yesterday’s fashion is always bad taste. And bad taste is phenomenologically intriguing’ (Schiermer 2014: 173). While there is a balance between the ironic individual and collective notions of imitation, Schiermer also proposes that there is genuine enjoyment in the ‘redemption of the recent past’ that shows a generational aspect: ‘hipster culture is not a counter culture but a conserver culture’ (Schiermer 2014: 174, my emphasis). The hipster figure ushers in a new, sensuous awareness of the losses and sacrifices made by the previous generations at the altar of technological development. The hipster is no time traveller; rather, he [sic] actualizes what former generations fascinated by the latest technological developments have thoughtlessly relegated to the past. (Schiermer 2014: 176) The ‘rediscovery’ of retro icons such as the ‘vinyl disc record, the cassette tape, the travelling typewriter, the traditional offset printing technique, the conventional “film” camera and the “old-school” photograph development hides a sensuous and pleasure-seeking conservatism’ (Schiermer 2014: 176). Hipster culture, therefore: saves sensibilities and ‘experiences’ inherent to certain media; from the warm scratching sound coming from the pickup in the groove to the yellowed ambience of the old Polaroid photographs. (Schiermer 2014: 176) Schiermer then goes on to problematise Bourdieusian, subcultural and neotribal understandings of the hipster, arguing that they are ill-equipped to grasp the irony and retromania central to hipster culture, since hipsters ‘exert a form of cultural hygiene, either ironically burning the objects of the recent past which deserve it or redeeming authentic cultural expressions from oblivion’ (Schiermer 2014: 178). He concludes by proposing ‘what keeps the hipsters “together” is but their shared habitus does not explain much’. He goes on to argue: Rather, to understand the dynamics of constant change haunting their world and to understand how a strongly individualized culture may still achieve some degree of unity, the focal point of the investigation has to be placed on the way unconscious imitational dynamics surfaces in apparent self-assertion. (Schiermer 2014: 179)

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I have some sympathies for Schiermer’s view. To propose such things as a ‘hipster habitus’, or a bogan one for that matter, does not make sense. Nevertheless, ‘the way unconscious imitational dynamics surfaces in apparent self-assertion’ sounds a lot like notions of illusio, collusio and social gravity (see France and Threadgold 2015). When basing analysis on media texts and objects, it is difficult to discuss illusio without making generalised assumptions. I will discuss illusio in more detail in the later chapter on DIY Cultures, research informants who use the figures of hipster and bogan as a way of thinking about who is in and who is out of the scene, whilst also being critically aware of the problems associated with making those categorisations. The range of academic studies mentioned above form a burgeoning body of work that takes iconic figures such as hipsterx and bogan seriously, as a ‘way in’ to considering the cultural entanglement of class, identity politics, consumer culture and inequality; to consider both social change and social reproduction. Through reading this work, and from my own analysis of hundreds of hipster and bogan related media texts I have gathered over the last few years, I have constructed the following figurative archetypes. But, it is important to add here, as Nichols (2011: 215) usefully points out, that one’s own prejudices emerge when creating the ‘bogan’ (and in my case ‘hipster’ as well) from a ‘recipe of assumptions encountered in print and on screen’. 1

2

The bogan is uneducated, usually in blue collar manual work or unemployed. They are drawn as lazy, both intellectually and physically. Bogans are racist, sexist, misogynist, and violent. They are ‘aggressive’, often described with ‘masculine’ traits regardless of their actual gender. They are mostly white, but there are examples of the term being used to describe other ethnicities. Bogans are a ‘threat’: physically, culturally and economically. They are feckless: the bogan ‘doesn’t give a fuck’. The bogan’s immigration politics is: ‘Fuck off we’re full. We grew here, you flew here’. The bogan has conspicuous, vulgar and obvious tastes, where brands and advertising decide for them what is cool. They are mindless consumers, not cultural producers. The hipster on the other hand is attending or has dropped out of university education, usually in arts, communication, business or marketing. They either work in the white collar ‘creative culture industry’ or are setting up small artisanal businesses, often with digital sales and marketing. As opposed to the lazy bogan, the hipster is seriously invested in selfpromotion, especially through social media. While often portrayed as ‘PC’ and ‘green’, the hipster is also accused of ‘ironically’ using the tropes of race and gender that result in so-called Hipster Racism and Hipster Sexism or blind cultural appropriation of sacred cultural symbols without x For further studies on the hipster, see also Arsel and Thompson (2011); Michael (2015); and Cronin, McCarthy and Collins (2014).

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any consideration of their meaning. Hipster gentrification is also responsible for driving out traditional locals from newly bohemian inner-city districts. The hipster is often depicted as ‘caring’, in ‘effeminate’ or ‘wimpy’ terms regardless of their actual gender. They are post-metrosexual. The hipster is mainly white, but there are examples of other ethnicities. The hipster ‘cares’ about ‘issues’, but this is largely expressed by signing a Facebook petition, wearing a wrist band or opening a small business to solve/exploit the problem. The hipster is in constant search for ‘authentic’ tastes, especially the nostalgic, bespoke and exotic as a means of a pretentious and insecure form of distinction. They like the idea of artistic creativity, but it is usually expressed as a form of self-promotion or advertising. We can further construct a taste typology around the hipster and bogan figures and their cultural consumption practices, or at least the representation of them in media sources I have analysed. The bogan likes dumb commercial music; the hipster likes bands so obscure they haven’t even formed yet. The bogan drives big inefficient cars and rides jet skis; the hipster drives hybrids or hatchbacks, and rides a Vespa. The bogan loves reality TV; the hipster ironically loves reality TV. The bogan reads Guns and Ammo or Zoo Weekly; the hipster reads Frankie, Monocle or The Smith Journal. The bogan does not read books; the hipster pretends to read books. When it comes to drinking habits, the bogan binges on cheap beer, pre-mixed alco-pops in beer barns and nightclubs; the hipster sips on boutique wines and artisanal beer in tiny bars decorated with paintings of old ships. The bogan scoffs fast food; the hipster samples organic food. The bogan has a fake tan, with a mullet or rat’s tail; the hipster has pale skin, with expensively coiffed but messy hair and a lumberjack beard. The bogan lives in the outer suburbs in McMansions; the hipster lives in inner-city suburbs in shared housing or apartments. The bogan shops at megamalls; the hipster shops at markets, op shops and pop ups in ‘cool’ suburbs or ‘exotic’ countries. When it comes to brands, the bogan wears Ed Hardy; the hipster wears American Apparel. As depicted in these constructions, the media production of the figures of hipster and bogan represent struggles over taste. They are modalities of struggles over the representation of lifestyle. Bourdieu maintains that what is at stake in these struggles is ‘personality’, the very quality of a person. One’s capacity to appropriate an object, whether that is an actual ‘thing’ such as a coffee, a piece of furniture or a car, or whether that object is a cultural text such as a TV show or song, is taken to be indicative of the depth of one’s inner essence (Bourdieu 1984: 281). ‘The same behaviour or even the same good can appear distinguished to one person, pretentious to someone else, and cheap and showy to yet another’ (Bourdieu 1998b: 8). Bourdieu argued that objects with the most distinctive power are those which attest ‘quality’, which is associated with time and capacity. Firstly, time and capacity refers to

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the skills to make the thing itself. Secondly, because legitimate appreciation must be the result of the time and capacity aspects, there is ‘good investment’ – of developing and finessing cultural capital. In these terms, the quality of the ‘thing’ itself is equated with the quality of the person. When a journalist equates a well-manicured beard with a hipster, or a mullet haircut with a bogan, the positioning of these artefacts by the cultural intermediary can be understood as representing the author’s own struggles over taste and lifestyle, where they maintain a sense of dignified social homology or demeaning social distance. But when it comes to some of the ‘objects’ that hipsters and bogans are said to consume, which are quite often the same ‘thing’ – tattoos, music, beer, cars, facial hair and the like – it becomes obvious that the ways they are perceived and represented are contingent upon time and space in a different way. Things and symbols will have very different meanings over time and their affective embodiment of social relations is contextually contingent. For example, in 2015 several 1980s Australian music stars – who have been usually associated with ‘bogan’ tastes – bemoaned the use of their music at anti-immigrant rallies around Australia, protests which have also been publicly associated with white bogans. An opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald97 describes how former ‘Aussie’ iconography – the southern cross, Jimmy Barnes and the Cold Chisel song ‘Khe Sahn’ – has been moved into the category of racist bogan. What Aussie icons can the good, upstanding, non-racist bogan continue to love now the mouth-breathers from the Reclaim Australia movement have co-opted the above for their anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, anti-tantrums that are popping up all over the country? This is positioned as a sense of loss of ‘Old Australia’, where for those now lucky enough to be upwardly mobile, it is more difficult to look back nostalgically and enjoying ’80s bogan icons, even ironically, ‘without coming away with a whiff of intolerance clinging to you’. The wrong type of bogan is now associated with this iconography. It has moved from the deserving and hardworking bogan ‘good bloke’ stereotype to the racist, ‘we grew here, you flew here’ bogan stereotype. This is further complicated when irony is the key to understanding how objects are being engaged and put to work. Artisanal objects, in the form of hipster retro-bricolage, are retrofitted and repurposed for contemporary mores. In theoretical terms: [Objects] always include a degree of indeterminacy and fuzziness … as historical objects, they are subject to variations in time so that their meaning, insofar as it depends on the future, is itself in suspense, in waiting, dangling, and therefore relatively indeterminate. (Bourdieu 1985: 728)

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These facets of play and uncertainty provide: a basis for the plurality of world views, itself linked to the plurality of points of view, and to all the symbolic struggles for the power to produce and impose the legitimate world-view. More precisely, to all the cognitive ‘filling-in’ strategies that produce the meaning of the objects of the social world by going beyond the directly visible attributes by reference to the future or the past. (Bourdieu 1985: 728) Modes of distinction can still work in this manner, but one’s relationship to things – the ‘filling in’ – is more complicated when notions of irony and retro are considered. For example, the purchase of a chair from Ikea or from an expensive antique dealer are both still imbued with the traditional notion of Bourdieu’s distinction. But what if the Ikea furniture is bought and presented ironically in the household? What if the purchase and restoration of an old chair is done for reasons that are not about ‘quality’ but more about keeping up with bespoke fashions that are bound up with retromanic looking to the past? Again, the blurriness of these distinctions problematises the simplistic notion of class relations where the middle-class hipster has ‘better’ or more legitimate taste than the working-class bogan. Nevertheless, these endless struggles – ironic or not – constitute our everyday existence: The sense of good investment which dictates a withdrawal from outmoded, or simply devalued, objects, places or practices and a move into ever newer objects in an endless drive for novelty … is guided by countless different indices and indications, from explicit warnings to the barely conscious intuitions. (Bourdieu 1984: 249) Once the middle-classes become aware that something is popular or has become overcrowded, it can ‘insidiously arouse horror or disgust for objects or practices that have become common’ (Bourdieu 1984: 249). In a consumer culture where irony is a key mode of engagement, taste still classifies, and it still classifies the classifier, but the classifications are not simply accepted as one’s static place. The classifications are blurry, continually struggled over, contributing to a reflexive, insecure and anxiety-ridden sense of one’s place, for the authors of the texts and for those consuming them. The author of an opinion piece represents the world, and their own location in social space, by the way they position the hipster or bogan. The text then moves out into the world to be read, disseminated and debated. The representation of hipsters and bogans therefore constitutes elements of the affective atmosphere where these struggles over the meaning of class transpire as cultural distinction.

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Hipsters and bogans as ‘figures’ Media creatives use hipster and bogan as stereotypes, clichés, signs, memes, targets, scapegoats, folk devils. They are all these things at once and more. They are used for satirical and parody purposes, but also in ‘serious’ news and opinion pieces. I began thinking of them as floating or empty signifiers in the semiotic sense (Chandler 2002: 78–81). However, I was uncomfortable with referring to ‘people’, even the symbolic representation of humans, in the same way as ‘things’. I had thought of them in terms of their function for purposes of self-identity and social-identity work (Barker 2000), but I wanted to go beyond the way those concepts can act as a proxy for the well-worn agency and structure dichotomy. I note that some of the work above, especially in regard to hipsters, has deemed them as a form of subculture or has described them in more neo-tribal terms. The use of these terms has been the subject of much debate in youth studies (Bennett 1999, 2005, 2011; Blackman 2005; Hesmondhalgh 2005; Shildrick and McDonald 2006). Yet unlike the traditional form of subculture, hipsters and bogans are not forms of selfidentification, in that someone is likely to say ‘I am a hipster’. With the bogan, there are some instances of self-identification, but for the most part in both media representation and in everyday conversations, the terms are applied to others, not to oneself. Hipsters and bogans are not subcultures, neo-tribes or even scenes. These problems led me to the notion of the ‘figure’. The term ‘figure’ has been chosen deliberately following the UK work of Imogen Tyler (2013) on ‘revolting subjects’. Tyler shows how figures such as ‘chav’, ‘gypsy’, ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘underclass’ are used in processes of social abjection and scapegoating to obfuscate increasingly sharp material inequalities and to buttress neo-liberalised middle class values. The figures are ‘revolting’ because they cause torrents of condescension at best, disgust and outrage at worst. But, following the Foucaultian claim that wherever there is power there is resistance (Foucault 1990: 100–101), once these labels are apportioned, the victims can then use the terms to ‘revolt’ against the classification. Figures engender revulsion by distorting social relations, but then the actual people who have been labelled revolt from within their own representations. Figure, therefore, is used here ‘as both a theoretical concept and as a method’ (Tyler 2013: 10).xi A figurative method allows tracking the construction, usage and repetition of figures across multiple sites such as popular culture, news and opinion media, parody and satire texts and across communication in everyday life. Tyler focuses on the nexus between political, economic and media fields and the governmentalised use and abuse of nationally abject figures. For Tyler, this is a form of statecraft, where neoliberal governance relies on actors such as politicians and journalists to manufacture and maintain a state of xi This also resonates with the idea that Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is a theorymethod (Costa and Murphy 2015: 3).

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permanent insecurity (Wacquant 2008a), with the constant invocation of Othered threats such as terrorism, criminal gangs, youth-led riots and migrants. The provocation of ‘disgust’ then inflects identity making processes, taste and social relations generally.xii But, as Tyler (2013: 4) argues, what is bracketed out of accounts of social disgust is ‘what it means to be (made) abject, to be one who repeatedly finds herself the object of the other’s violent objectifying disgust’. Figures, therefore, are objectifying and othering. Tyler shows how national abjectified figures are ‘employed to incite and legitimize “tough” economic measures and punitive government responses’ (Tyler 2013: 10). The figures of hipster and bogan, while making some appearances in overtly political and economic discourse, are invoked more in cultural discussions than political discussions. In that sense, while these fields – cultural, political, economic, media and so on – maintain relative autonomy from each other, they all influence each other and all have a homologous pole with the field of power. The figures of hipster and bogan mark cultural expressions of precarious insecurity fostered by rapid changes to the labour market and education, in globalised forms of consumer culture that combine notions of irony with values and morals. As figures they are utilised in struggles over class inequalities and taste in the field of representation, all the while obfuscating the legitimacy of class as a way of understanding these very struggles. As Rossiter points out in her invocation of the bogan as a ‘sticky sign’ (Ahmed 2004), but equally applicable to the hipster as well, the study of these figures ‘as the mobile and fluid expression of a relational politics of class, a figure that circulates, though never fully occupied, may be advanced through speculation about how material and affective economies intersect’ (Rossiter 2013: 88). Later I analyse this affective economy through case studies of news and opinion journalism, and parodic and satirical comedy texts.

Classification struggles in the field of representation The figures of the hipster and the bogan mark the symbolic order of social space and imbue the affective atmosphere of relational struggles over class. The symbolic order of social space confers on some the ‘power to nominate’, where those high in cultural capital tend to have a monopoly on the right to legitimate naming (Bourdieu 1985: 732): ‘All the symbolic strategies through which agents seek to impose their vision of the divisions of the social world and their position within it, can be located between two extremes: the insult … and official nomination’. Bourdieu sketches out three levels where these struggles take place: the personal; the authorised and the State. The personal day-today level of individual perspectives produces self-interested forms of ‘naming’ such as nick names, insults, accusations and even slander. It is unlikely that these forms of naming struggles have capacity to enable recognition or have xii

This is influenced by the work of Julia Kristeva (1982).

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broader social influence, unless someone possesses the capitals to do the naming from an authorised level. They are ‘authorised’ usually through educational qualifications, credentials and occupations – the critic, the academic, the author, the media personality, the shock jock, the film maker or the journalist for instance. At the authorised level, what may look very much like personal squabbles can attain a legitimacy that can conserve or transform a field. At a higher level of hierarchy, the State is the ‘holder of the monopoly of official naming, correct classification, the correct order’ (Bourdieu 1985: 734, emphasis in original). The State both holds the means to decide, and ascribes the means to reach the authorised level, while also holding the authority to legal, legitimised and official naming. ‘Official nominations’ usually happen as an imposition of the State which holds the ‘monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu 1985: 732). The use of hipsters and bogans happens across all three levels: at the State level where politicians have discussed the bogan as a proxy for discussing the actuality of class; at the authorised level where hipsters and bogan are invoked by cultural intermediaries in struggles over class location and anxiety; and at the personal level where people use the terms in their own day-to-day lives, in conversation, and in comments on news stories and social media. The figures of bogan and hipster are invoked in struggles within levels and between them. Examples of this are analysed in detail in Chapter 5.

Conclusion In summary, class is an absent presence in these media discussions, it ‘haunts’ (Gordon 2008) cultural conversations while being denied as politically relevant. As figures, hipster and bogan incite a co-mingling of political denial with stratified emotions, which makes them portentous proxies to think through the fuzzy relational aspects of class. In her work on racialised capitalism, Gordon advances an argument about intersections of class, gender and race using the metaphor of ‘haunting’. ‘What’s distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely’ (Gordon 2008: xvi). I used the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view. (Gordon 2008: xvi) As in the notion of habitus, the present is haunted by the past and, more importantly, by thinking about haunting in this way we are notified that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment

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and repression ceaselessly directed toward us. Haunting raises spectres, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These spectres or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. (Gordon 2008: xvi) Gordon shows how the injuries of the past such as slavery ‘always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present’ (Gordon 2008: xvi) and that it is a frightening experience for those who experience it. Hipsters and bogans are not really frightening and I’m certainly not comparing their absent presence to that of slavery. They are received more as annoying, but they are figures that cause and delineate insecurities and anxieties, illustrating how class haunts day-to-day life even though class itself is largely blocked from view in the field of representation. In this chapter I have sketched out how the figures of hipster and bogan constitute elements of the affective atmosphere of the field of representation in constructing and maintaining fuzzy cultural class boundaries. In the following chapter I present case studies that critically engage Bourdieusian tools as a way of thinking about the affective nature of illusio and social gravity, where the simultaneous denial and promotion of class may short circuit the availability of happiness for precarious and anxious actors.

Notes 1 BBC News Magazine. 2014. 10 slang phrases that perfectly sum up their era. Viewed 04/07/16. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27405988 2 Elliott, T. 2014. A spotter’s guide to the emerging tribes of Sydney. Viewed 04/07/16. http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/a-spotters-guide-to-the-emerging-tribes-of-sydney-20140 607-39qc2 3 McKinnon, A. 2015. This Impeccably Bearded London Police Officer Is Now ‘Hipster Cop’, According To The Internet. Viewed 04/07/16. http://junkee.com/thisimpeccably-bearded-london-police-officer-is-now-hipster-cop-according-to-the-internet/ 56536 4 The Awesomer. 2015. Hipster Dinosaurs. Viewed 04/07/16. http://theawesomer. com/hipster-dinosaurs/58870/ 5 Hipstermerkel. 2015. Viewed 04/06.16. http://hipstermerkel.tumblr.com/ 6 Binary This. 2013. Foucault Explained with Hipsters. Viewed 04/06/1016. http:// binarythis.com/2013/05/21/foucault-explained-with-hipsters/ 7 Jaccomma, G. 2014. THE 10 MOST HIPSTER NEIGHBORHOODS ON EARTH. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/top-10-hipster-neighborhoodson-earth-williamsburg-new-york-tops-our-list; Izzi, S. 2014. The 20 most hipster neighbourhoods in the world. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.skyscanner.net/news/20most-hipster-neighbourhoods-world; Domain. 2015. The world’s most ‘hipster’ neighbourhoods. Viewed 04/06/2016. http://news.domain.com.au/domain/real-estatenews/the-worlds-most-hipster-neighbourhoods-20150618-ghr6my.html

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8 Gadd, B. 2015. Australia’s most hipster suburbs. Viewed 04/06/14. http://www. domain.com.au/blog/australias-most-hipster-suburbs/?utm_source=outbrain&utm_ medium=cpc&utm_campaign=blognetwork 9 Macken, L. 2015. Young and wealthy buying up in Sydney’s hipster suburbs. Viewed 04/06/16. http://news.domain.com.au/domain/real-estate-news/young-andwealthy-buying-up-in-sydneys-hipster-suburbs-20150711-gi9obv.html 10 Kron, J. 2014. The 10 Most Hipster Campuses 2014. Viewed 04/06/2016. http:// www.collegemagazine.com/editorial/4205/The-Top-Ten-Hipster-Colleges-2014 11 Spiegel, A. 2014. The 22 Most Hipster Foods On The Planet. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/15/hipster-food_n_5146632.html 12 Date a Hipster. 2016. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.dateahipster.com; Hipster Dating Site. 2016. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.hipsterdatingsite.com 13 The Guardian. 2015. How Lego imagines Danish hipsters dress – in pictures. Viewed 04/06/2016. http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/gallery/2015/jan/28/howlego-imagines-danish-hipsters-dress-in-pictures#img-1 14 Mann, E. 2013. Billabong ‘flailing’ in no man’s land. Viewed 04/06/16. http:// www.smh.com.au/business/retail/billabong-flailing-in-no-mans-land-201307172q47y.html 15 McMahon, J. 2014. Hipsters create world whiskey shortage. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2014/05/14/4004347.htm?site=newcastle 16 Godoy, M. 2015. From Cartoon Chubster To Handsome Hipster: McDonald’s Revamps Hamburglar. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/ 05/07/404952605/from-cartoon-chubster-to-handsome-hipster-mcdonalds-revampshamburglar?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr &utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150507 17 Wood, D. 2015. Vigilante justice: a guide for placid hipsters. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/09/29/vigilante-justice-a-guide-for-placid-hipsters/ 18 Yee, CM. 2014. A Malaysian Popstar clad in skinny jeans and hijab. New York Times. 13/10/14. Viewed 14/07/16. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/arts/interna tional/yuna-has-become-poster-girl-for-young-hijabsters.html?_r=0 19 Bunbury, S. 2014. Begin Again star Mark Ruffalo is the king of ruffled charm. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/begin-again-starmark-ruffalo-is-the-king-of-ruffled-charm-20140805-1004tm.html 20 Williams, A. 2013. Creating Hipsturbia. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2013/02/17/fashion/creating-hipsturbia-in-the-suburbs-of-new-york.html?_r=1 21 Benton, A. 2014. Cow and Moon: what it’s like when your local gets ruined. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.dailylife.com.au/dl-food/food-features/cow-and-moonwhat-its-like-when-your-local-gets-ruined-20140908-3f405 22 Callick, R. 2015. Hipsters and snobby staff are ruining our inner-city cafes. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/hipsters-and-snobby-staff-are-ruiningour-inner-city-cafes/story-e6frg9zo-1227316990080 23 Teece-Johnson, D. and Burton-Bradley, R. 2016. Inner Sydney’s Aboriginal community fear they are being pushed out for ‘white hipsters’. Viewed 04/06/16. http:// www.sbs.com.au/nitv/the-point-with-stan-grant/article/2016/03/09/inner-sydneysaboriginal-community-fear-they-are-being-pushed-out-white-hipsters 24 Bidisha. 2014. Sleeve tattoos are now a hipster habit – and the permanence of mine pains me. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/ jun/10/sleeve-tattoos-hipster-habit-unartistic-art?CMP=fb_gu 25 Koziol, M. 2015. Homeless chic: Zoolander moment for British fashion model Ricki Hall. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/celebrity/ls-celebritynews/homeless-chic-zoolander-moment-for-british-fashion-model-ricki-hall-201506 16-ghp31n.html

100 Classification struggles in representation 26 Wysaski, J. 2014. 20 Examples of Extreme Hipsterism. Viewed 04/06/16. http:// www.pleated-jeans.com/2014/11/26/20-examples-of-extreme-hipsterism/ 27 Stanislawski, E. 2008. The Chicago Reader has hip-hop hipster backlash against hip-hop hipster backlash. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.prefixmag.com/news/hiphop-hipster-backlash/19451/ 28 Dhar, R. 2014. The Hipster Music Index. Viewed 04/06/16. http://priceonomics. com/the-hipster-music-index/ 29 Selinger-Morris, S. 2011. From cool to tool. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh. com.au/entertainment/music/from-cool-to-tool-20110512-1ej8o.html#ixzz1MSZ6L lOM; POYKPAC Comedy. 2007. Hipster Olympics. Viewed 04/06/16. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=kAO4EVMlpwM 30 Kingsley, P. 2012. Berlin wins gold for irony at the Hipster Olympics. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/jul/24/hipster-olympicsberlin-wins-irony The Guardian. 2012. The Hipster Olympics – in pictures. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2012/jul/24/festivals-germany 31 Blum, K. 2014. SWEDEN HOSTED THE WORLD’S MOST HIPSTER FESTIVAL, AND WE WERE THERE. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.tonedeaf.com.au/ 415678/sweden-hosted-worlds-hipster-festival.htm?utm_source=Tone+Deaf+News letter&utm_campaign=601e4477dd-Tucker_Bag484&utm_medium=email&utm_ term=0_b6f823df63-601e4477dd-203765661 32 Ulane, P. 2013. Hipster Baby Name Generator. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.ma ndatory.com/2013/04/09/hipster-baby-name-generator?icid=mens%257Cmoreon% 257Clink%257C2013-04-09-hipster-baby-name-generator 33 Harris, A. 2014. Finally, a Perfect Term for When White People ‘Discover’ Things. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/06/25/_columbusing_ college_humor_video_coins_the_perfect_term_for_when_white_people.html 34 Honda Jazz. 2010. How much Hipster can you pack in a Jazz? Viewed 04/06/16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5dIzY7yvRA 35 Hipster Hitler. 2016. Viewed 04/06/16. http://hipsterhitler.com 36 Stuff Hipsters Hate. Viewed 04/06/2016. http://stuffhipstershate.tumblr.com/ 37 Unhappy Hipsters. Viewed 04/06/16. http://unhappyhipsters.com/ 38 Mason, P. 2015. How to turn a liberal hipster into a capitalist tyrant in one evening. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/24/ turn-a-liberal-hipster-into-global-capitalist-world-factory 39 Vincent, P. 2014. Coldplay take over hipster streets to shoot A Sky Full of Stars video with fans. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/ coldplay-take-over-hipster-streets-to-shoot-a-sky-full-of-stars-video-with-fans-2014 0617-zsa6n.html#ixzz3c4CxvgzI 40 Costin, J. 2014. Hipster Finds Lifestyle Too Expensive, Reverts to Mainstream. Viewed 04/06/16. http://lettucefold.com/2014/06/30/hipster-finds-lifestyle-too-expensivereverts-back-to-mainstream/ 41 Wunderground News. 2014. 75% Of Hipster Beards Compensating for Lack of Personality. Viewed 04/06/16. http://wundergroundmusic.com/75-of-hipster-beardscompensating-for-lack-of-personality/ 42 Brooks, R. 2014. Fear not the hipster beard: it too shall pass. Viewed 04/06/16. https://theconversation.com/fear-not-the-hipster-beard-it-too-shall-pass-24715 43 Rodley, C. 2014. Post-Structuralism Explained With Hipster Beards: Part 1. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisr414d8a71a/post-structuralism-exp lained-with-hipster-beards-xwfz#.upELYdm8O; Rodley, C. 2014. Post-Structuralism Explained With Hipster Beards: Part 2. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.buzzfeed. com/chrisr414d8a71a/post-structuralism-explained-with-hipster-beards-2-xwfz#.rp NDkY3Zr

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44 Driscoll, B. 2014. Hipster Men With Beards Shaped Like Animals, Have You Ever Seen Anything So Damn Trendy? Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.huffingtonpost.co. uk/2014/06/02/hipster-beards-animals_n_5430461.html 45 O’Neill, N. 2014. Hipster wannabes get facial hair transplants. Viewed 04/06/2014. http://nypost.com/2014/02/25/hipster-wannabes-forking-over-thousands-for-facialhair-transplants/ 46 Champion, E. 2014. Emily Gould, Literary Narcissism, and the Middling Millennials. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.edrants.com/emily-gould-literary-narcissism-andthe-middling-millennials/ 47 Self, W. 2014. The awful cult of the talentless hipster has taken over. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/09/will-self-awful-cult-talentless-hipsterhas-taken-over 48 Reidy, P. and Rayner, A. 2014. Is it OK to hate hipsters? Viewed 04/06/16. http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/20/is-it-ok-to-hate-hipsters-will-self; Lynskey, D. 2012. Hating the Hipsters. Viewed 04/06/2016. https://33revolutionsp erminute.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/hating-the-hipsters/ 49 Finnegan, M. 2010. The Hipster in the Age of Online Ridicule. Viewed 04/06/ 2016. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/the-hipster-in-the-age-of-online-ridicule/ 50 Selinger-Morris, S. 2011. From cool to tool. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com. au/entertainment/music/from-cool-to-tool-20110512-1ej8o.html#ixzz1MSZ6LlOM 51 Rayner, A. 2010. Why do people hate hipsters? Viewed 04/06/16. http://www. theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/14/hate-hipsters-blogs 52 http://www.executivestyle.com.au/too-hip-to-be-a-hipster-so-ironic-2o3kd 53 Godwin, R. 2015. Death of the Hipster: Why London decided to move on. Evening Standard Magazine, April 18 2015. Pp. 17–20. 54 Ferrier, M. 2014. The end of the hipster: how flat caps and beards stopped being so cool. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/jun/22/endof-the-hipster-flat-caps-and-beards?CMP=fb_gu 55 Walsh, J. 2014. Have you spotted any hipsters in the wild? Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/jun/23/have-you-spotted-any-hipstersin-the-wild 56 Infante, D. 2015. The hipster is dead, and you might not like who comes next. Viewed 04/06/16. http://mashable.com/2015/06/09/post-hipster-yuccie/ 57 Sprothen, V. 2015. Australia’s Artisan Conundrum: Are Thriving Craft Businesses an Economic Drag? Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.wsj.com/articles/australias-artisa n-conundrum-are-thriving-craft-businesses-an-economic-drag-1435729734 58 Moore, S. 2014. Cereal Killer cafe is just a symptom of gentrification, not the cause. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/15/ cereal-killer-cafe-gentrification-media-hipster-brothers Gillan, A. 2015. The hipster Cereal Killer Cafe owners aren’t the East End’s real enemy. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/27/hipster-cereal-killer-cafegentrification-east-end 59 Khomami, N. and Halliday, J. 2015. Shoreditch Cereal Killer Cafe targeted in anti-gentrification protests. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/uknews/2015/sep/27/shoreditch-cereal-cafe-targeted-by-anti-gentrification-protesters? CMP=fb_gu 60 Centre for Economics and Business Research 2013. http://www.cebr.com/reports/ flat-white-economy-driving-london/ 61 Cummings, E. 2015. Can hipsters save the world? Viewed 04/06/16. http://www. theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/08/can-hipsters-save-the-world 62 Leach, A. 2011. Hipsters are agents of social change. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jan/21/hipsters-gay-people

102 Classification struggles in representation 63 Delaney, B. 2014. Why we should subsidise hipster novelists’ housing. Viewed 04/06/ 16. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/20/why-we-should-subsidisehipster-novelists-housing?CMP=fb_gu 64 Kamer, F. 2011. Intellectualizing Hipsters is the New Hipster Intellectualism. Viewed 04/06/16. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2010/10/intellectualizi.php 65 Triple M. Pub Talk. 2014. Australia’s Best/Worst Bogan Baby Names. Viewed 04/ 06/16. http://www.triplem.com.au/melbourne/stuff/pub-talk/2014/9/bogan-and-proudaustralias-bestworst-baby-names/ 66 Jubb, C. 2012. A bogan name is a life sentence. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh. com.au/it-pro/a-bogan-name-is-a-life-sentence-20120212-1szp2 67 Clutterbuck, A. 2015. NSW town set to build The Big Bogan. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/nsw-town-set-to-build-the-big-bogan-20150408-1m gd07.html 68 Bogan Ipsum. 2016. Viewed 04/06/16. http://boganipsum.com/ 69 Sydney Morning Herald. 2014. Block Glasshouse judge Shaynna Blaze a bogan: Deanne. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/ block-glasshouse-judge-shaynna-blaze-a-bogan-deanne-20140922-10k519.html 70 Butler, E. 2014. The Gyngell-Packer punch-up confirms it: ‘bogan’ is how winners behave. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/05/ the-gyngell-packer-punch-up-confirms-it-bogan-is-now-the-behaviour-of-the-winners? CMP=soc_567 71 Dapin, M 2015. Baroque and bogans battle over the menu at lunch with Leo Schofield. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/baroque-and-bogans-battleover-the-menu-at-lunch-with-leo-schofield-20150403-1mdb48.html 72 Badham, V. 2015. There are heaps of bogans in the arts. Leo Schofield just hasn’t noticed yet. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/ 17/there-are-heaps-of-bogans-in-the-arts-leo-schofield-just-hasnt-noticed-yet 73 ABC News. 2015. Leo Schofield apologises ‘unreservedly’ to Tasmania for bitter putdowns. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-10/leo-schofieldapology-to-tasmania-for-putdowns/6384872 74 Murphy, D. 2014. Young men with mullet haircuts say they are neither bikies nor rednecks. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/young-men-with-mullet-ha ircuts-say-they-are-neither-bikies-nor-rednecks-20140627-zsode.html 75 Aubusson, K. 2014. High-vis ban at The Village Inn sparks deluge of one-star reviews on Facebook. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/highvis-ban-atthe-village-inn-sparks-deluge-of-onestar-reviews-on-facebook-20150826-gj8cvb.html The Working Life. 2014. THE [CRAFT] BEER WAR: HIPSTER PUB BANS TRADIES! Viewed 04/06/16. http://workinglife.org.au/2015/08/26/the-craft-beer-warhipster-pub-bans-tradies/ 76 De Britto, S. 2014. Schapelle: Bogan Shakespeare with no end in sight. Viewed 04/ 06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/comment/schapelle-bogan-shakespeare-with-no-endin-sight-20140210-32d1v 77 O’Brien, S. 2014. Why we must make Bali a bogan-free zone. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/travel/why-we-must-make-bali-a-boganfree-zone/ story-fnjjuxwd-1226926751372 78 Dennis, A. 2014. Turn back the bogans: What Really Happens in Bali exposes Australians at their worst. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.traveller.com.au/turn-backthe-bogans-what-really-happens-in-bali-exposes-australians-at-their-worst-39ghm 79 The Brisbane Times. 2010. How to spot a bogan. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www. brisbanetimes.com.au/lifestyle/life/how-to-spot-a-bogan-20101018-16qdz.html 80 Sydney Morning Herald. IT Pro. 2010. What’s the opposite of a bogan? Viewed 04/ 01/16. http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/whats-the-opposite-of-a-bogan-20101027-170ee

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81 Bogan and Proud. 2016. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.boganandproud.com/ 82 All things Bogan. 2016. Viewed 04/06/16. https://www.facebook.com/allthingsboga n?fref=ts 83 Executive Style. 2016. The rise of bogan style. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.execu tivestyle.com.au/the-rise-of-bogan-style-2b593 84 Maiden, S. 2010. All hail the Queen of the bogans. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www. theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/all-hail-the-queen-of-the-bogans/ story-e6frg6zo-1225935133742 85 Smith, M. and Tin, J. 2013. Palmer United Party Queensland leader Alex Douglas blasts bogans in emails. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/ queensland/palmer-united-party-queensland-leader-alex-douglas-blasts-bogans-inemails/story-fnihsrf2-1226775466981; Hurst, D. 2013. PUP leader defends ‘bogan’ comment, citing Darryl Kerrigan from The Castle. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www. theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/05/pup-leader-defends-bogan-comment-citing-da rryl-kerrigan-from-the-castle?CMP=fb_gu 86 ABC News. 2013. Palmer United Party MP Alex Douglas dubs Tasmania ‘Boganland’ in email to ex-member. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-05/expalmer-party-member-claims-pup-mp-dubs-tasmania-27boganland/5135984 87 Munro, K. 2013. Newsmaker: Bogans. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/ federal-politics/political-news/newsmaker-bogans-20131206-2ywpe.html 88 Smith, M. and Tin, J. 2013. Palmer United Party Queensland leader Alex Douglas blasts bogans in emails. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/ queensland/palmer-united-party-queensland-leader-alex-douglas-blasts-bogans-inemails/story-fnihsrf2-1226775466981 89 Smith, M. 2013. Jacqui Lambie hits back at ‘Boganland’ title, saying ‘I’m for the underdogs’. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.themercury.com.au/news/tasmania/jacquilambie-hits-back-at-boganland-title-saying-im-for-the-underdogs/story-fnj4f7k1-1226 775484160 90 Bourke, L. 2014. Barnaby Joyce on bogans: Agriculture Minister goes incognito on Radio National phone-in. viewed 04/06/16. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201403-14/barnaby-on-bogans/5321458 91 Swan, J. 2014. Barnaby Joyce makes surprise call to ABC radio to talk about class and bogans. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/politicalnews/barnaby-joyce-makes-surprise-call-to-abc-radio-to-talk-about-class-and-bogans20140314-34rx1.html 92 Barrett, A. 2012. Five global hipster meccas even cooler than Seattle. Viewed 04/ 06/16. http://seattleglobalist.com/2012/04/13/five-global-hipster-cities-cooler-thanseattle/2296 93 Holberton, M. 2012. Out of Towner – Newcastle. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www. broadsheet.com.au/sydney/food-and-drink/article/out-towner-newcastle 94 Lehman, N 2014. DARK MOFO 2014: ENCORES AND APOLOGIES. Viewed 04/ 06/16. http://somethingyousaid.com/2014/07/01/dark-mofo-2014-encores-apologies/ 95 Thomas-Wilson, S. 2014. Hip-hipster hooray, says tourism boss Luke Martin as Dark Mofo 2014 winds up. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.themercury.com.au/news/ tasmania/hiphipster-hooray-says-tourism-boss-luke-martin-as-dark-mofo-2014winds-up/story-fnj4f7k1-1226963629923 96 Spinks, B. 2014. MONA OFFERS A SLY WINK, BUT DO LOCALS GET THE JOKE? Viewed 04/06/16. http://dailyreview.com.au/mona-offers-a-sly-wink-but-dolocals-get-the-joke/12515 97 De Britto, S. 2015. Your icons are not everyone’s. Viewed 0/06/16. http://www.smh. com.au/comment/reclaim-your-icons-but-remember-theyre-not-everyones-20150721gihp0s

Chapter 5

Hipsters and bogans in the news media and comedy Two case studies

Introduction The previous chapter took a general look at hipsters and bogans, outlining the variety of ways they are invoked in the media. I described the attributes ‘stuck’ to them (Rossiter 2013, Ahmed 2004) and proposed that it is theoretically and methodologically useful to think of them as ‘figures’, drawing on Tyler (2013). This chapter presents two case studies in the modality of struggle over meaning in the field of representation: news media and the opinions of the Commentariat, and forms of popular culture that use the figures to parody and satirise contemporary cultural customs, social relations and social change. Two inter-related theses act as the background to the rest of the analysis that follows. Firstly, the notion of struggle is central to an understanding of the ways these figures highlight the ambiguities and fuzziness of symbolic class relations whilst at the same time ‘making’ class knowable and affecting. Secondly, the field of representation itself, the media, cultural and creative industries, are dominated by the well-educated middle classes that have a stronger social homology with more ‘hipster’ elements of culture than they do with ‘bogan’ elements described above. This is not to say that the media solely stands for the cultural intermediaries of the middle classes, or that the middle class acts as a coherent entity for itself. But Bourdieu highlights the point that one’s ability to make entities actually exist in public forums is a key form of social power, that is, the capacity to take one’s own ‘malaise, anxiety, disquiet, expectations’, and to render them visible and even ‘official’ (Bourdieu 1985). This is an important form of cultural capital that affords those with privilege greater opportunity to struggle to ‘make the world’ in their own image. This ensures that the figures of the hipster and the bogan play quite different roles in terms of the classed tastes, morals and values they stand in for, and have different functions in the work that they perform in the field of representation. It is important here to emphasise that this analysis is about use in the media, where bogan is mostly used for methods of vertical hierarchical positionality (see Bottero 2004). As Rossiter (2013) very usefully points out, when

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used in conversation in everyday life, the term is not necessarily imbued with as much class antagonism. Bogan can be employed to refer to people within one’s own social circle as a form of playful horizontal hierarchical positioning.

Case study 1 Broadsides from the Commentariat:i The bogan as working class folk devil Since my thinking about hipsters and bogans began, the use of the figure of bogan in the media has changed. There has been a recent surge in opinion pieces that have highlighted the class-based abuse for which this term has been employed.1 It may be no coincidence that this has happened since the publication of Nichols’ (2011) Bogan Delusion and his various media appearances. This lightening of vitriol exemplifies Tyler’s proposition that once figures are established as folk devils, they also become poles around which struggles can form and resistance can be built. Yet while overt symbolically violent examples of the term bogan may be on the decline they are certainly not disappearing. Examples of obvious class-based resentment include the following (both cited from Pini et al. 2012): Whereas once they (Bogans) occupied a single socioeconomic stratum, they must now be differentiated into at least two classes: the ‘unterBogans’ (who are born and bred in – and will never leave – struggle town) and the ‘uber-Bogans’ also known as ‘CUBs’ or ‘Cashed up Bogans’ who are moving into leafier suburbs. (Huynh, 2007) [They] build their McMansions an hour’s drive from where they work and then hop in their fuel-guzzling monster trucks every morning to pay for their five wide-screen televisions, air-conditioning to counteract poor design and petrol to fuel their lifestyle which is basically shopping. (Deveney 2008) Don Watson (2011), in left-of-centre magazine The Monthly (2011), refers here to ‘tradies’ in a Toyota Hilux.ii When Watson sees ‘their bullbars or their

i I am employing the term Commentariat as a rhetorical representation of a ‘classon-paper’ that consists of those cultural intermediaries who are positioned to have their opinions heard through a variety of traditional and social media platforms. ii Itself somewhat of a bogan icon, the Toyota Hilux is particularly favoured by tradespeople for its large rear tray for carrying equipment, and its reputation for being ‘unbreakable’; tried and tested many times on controversial UK motoring review programme, Top Gear.

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cat-like headlamps on my arse’ he ‘confesses’ to ‘feeling a kind of existential threat’: Not the kind I get from the kid in the old Commodore with his cap on back-to-front – he threatens nothing worse than death. But the tradie brings intimations of pointlessness. And when I hear our political leaders, I suspect at least a general trend and complete acquiescence in it. Brash opinion pieces have diminished but not disappeared. The term bogan is still readily used on blogs and discussion boards as a class categorising insult. For instance, when The Biggest Loser filmed a series in Ararat, regional Victoria, in 2014, much social media snark combined fat jokes with comments about how they were all bogans. For instance, one tweetiii said: ‘I’m actually ashamed I’ve been making all these fat jokes about Ararat & completely forgotten they are also huge bogans’, which was met with the response of: ‘That’s the entertaining thing about The Biggest Loser. We’re laughing at them cos they’re bogans’.2 Ironically, watching reality-TV shows like The Biggest Loser has often been categorised as bogan activity itself.3 News stories also use the term, especially in the headlines for clickbait, such as ‘A Bogan name is a life sentence’.4 Bogan is utilised to describe not just specific ‘types’ of people, but instances of ‘bad’ behaviour that breach certain values. For instance, Federal MP Kelvin Thomson questioned if taxpayers should spend $AUS50 million a year to apparently ‘bankroll the lavish lifestyle’ of Tamara Ecclestone, who is the daughter of former Formula One boss Bernie, and the star of her own reality TV show. He said, ‘There are better ways to spend $50 million, year in and year out, than bankrolling Bernie’s billionaire bogan’.5 Here again the term is attached to cultural practices associated with a boorish lifestyle, not level of wealth. The bogan plays the role of folk devil in Australian media. It illustrates class relationality. It appears whenever disconcert needs to be expressed at taste crimes or to point out someone’s propensity for the ‘wrong’ conduct, where ‘attributes … thereby become attributions’ (Bourdieu 1984: 480). It is usually a form of symbolic violence from a middle-class position in social space projected ‘downwards’ even if the target has much economic capital. These attributions are motivated by older struggles over discernment and morals, or by social changes that produce class-based anxiety. As Bourdieu states, ‘aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different lifestyles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes’ (Bourdieu 1984: 56). The social relation that produces this cultural production is one of iii

Different social media platforms add a layer of complexity to analysing the field of representation as it is more difficult to ascribe class positionality. Nevertheless, there are recent studies that sketch out the class profiles of social media platforms, where Twitter is favoured by well-educated cultural intermediaries.

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social distance between the producers of news and opinion and their fearful object of mockery and derision. The hipster and middle class cultural reflexivity The figure of the hipster is more complex than the straightforward folk devil role of the bogan. The hipster’s social relation is much more one of social homology to middle class media workers in terms of cultural capital. The use of the hipster figure provokes reflexive struggles. For instance, Mark Grief writes about the reaction when he put out calls for a symposium discussing hipsters in New York where the responses were more intense than when they had held events on health care, feminism and conservatism: ‘perfectly blameless individuals began flagellating themselves: “Am I a hipster?”’ (Grief 2010). Analysing the hipster proves anxiety because ‘it calls everyone’s bluff’. Many of us try to justify our privileges by pretending that our superb tastes and intellect prove we deserve them, reflecting our inner superiority. Those below us economically, the reasoning goes, don’t appreciate what we do; similarly, they couldn’t fill our jobs, handle our wealth or survive our difficulties. (Grief 2010) Writing in the field of representation about hipsters incites middle class consternation: about the way social changes affect their place in the world; about their underlying hypocrisies; and debates about cultural and political issues that are close to their hearts. These can range in scale from concerns about the ‘future of the whole world’ to the symbolic politics of a specific shape of manicured beard. For instance, Adbusters magazine (2008), in an article called ‘Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization’,6 proclaimed: ‘hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality’. This was followed by a further piece called ‘Reconsidering the Hipster’7 (2009) that was less critical. Referring to the above article the author stated: ‘I’m not saying that hipsters hold the key to change; they may not. But to write off the largest conglomeration of young people across the globe as only a narcissistic clusterfuck – rather than the inception of the largest youth movement in history – could inadvertently suppress a flame worth fanning’. At a more individual level, the hipster beard is said to symbolise a range of meanings, where rather than traditional rebellion it connotes a more offbeat success; the ‘revival of a certain kind of old-fashioned, “rustic” masculinity’; or the expression of ‘dissatisfaction on the other hand, for the fact that the once-manly beard has been sported mainly by “hipster” young men who have no idea what to do with the pair of balls nature endowed them with’. 8 Scientists have proposed that we have ‘reached peak beard’ because ‘the more people grow

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facial hair, the less attractive it is’.9 While these deliberations go on, there are many instruction sites on how to grow and groom the perfect hipster facial hair.10 Another area where the hipster figure appears is in debates over ‘indie’ music. Here the hipster plays the role of dilettante. Their constant vapid search for the new and obscure jettisons established notions of authenticity and organic self-expression. The hipster is positioned as both liking little known bands, so new that they don’t yet exist is the common refrain. This maintains distinctive knowledge (‘What? you’ve never heard of Vampilla, the Japanese noise band? Really! They’re so cool…’). At the same time, hipsters are deemed blind followers of trends, especially associated with Pitchfork Media. Yet the current state of the music business makes it virtually impossible for those from non-privileged backgrounds to ‘make it’, due to the twin declines in profit of the music industry, venues closing down, and decline in government support for artists. Since it is difficult for small scale artists to make a living, it seems that a much higher percentage of the bands that make it to the radio or on festival bills are the children of the rich. It is only those with the affordances to be able to take the necessary time – what Bourdieu refers to as skole – to invest in their music. At the same time, there are often strong social capital links between their parents and high-ranking corporate music companies. In something like the notion of the ‘gap year’, the young and privileged can afford to dabble in the arts. Here, ‘indie’ music has become the habitat of the rich, alongside the hipster co-optation of ‘folk’ music and images by the likes of Mumford and Sons, who are children of the UK ‘1%’. As Jones (2013: 84) points out, you do not have to be wealthy to ‘make it big’ in music, but it certainly helps. Rich parents, inheritances and trust funds can provide access to studios, venues, equipment and publicity, let alone the financial security to be able to invest oneself into networking and creative work. For those without such advantages, ‘creative and entrepreneurial risktaking becomes far more of a luxury’ (Jones 2013: 84–85). Youth with creative ambitions and artistic passions without any support other than their own labour ‘find it accordingly harder to devote time and energy to creative endeavours, especially in circumstances where the already scant chances of surviving as an artist on the dole are now vanishing’ (Jones 2013: 84–85; see also Maconie 2015). It has always taken an array of capitals to succeed in the art world, but where once cultural capital was most important, Jones (2013) maintains that economic and social capitals are now more vital. Well-known bands that are put in the privileged hipster category due to their privileged upbringing include The Strokes, Vampire Weekend, Mumford and Sons, Laura Marling and Noah and the Whale. In Australia, the DIY scene, the ‘ugly Australian underground’ (Kritzler 2014), rebukes and traverses the dichotomy of the traditional notion of ‘making it’ in music and the punk sensibilities of not ‘selling out’. The punk, noise, rock, hardcore, electronic

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and dolewave music made in this scene is mostly by working class or lower middle class young people. This will be explained further in later chapters. Hipster Sexism? Hipster Racism? Hipster Marxism! The hipster figure is also deployed in media opinion pieces as a gateway for critically engaging with new forms of political, social and cultural relations. For instance, conservatives have fashioned what they call the Hipster Marxist. The Weekly Standard attacked the founder of the politically-left leaning periodical, Jacobin: ‘Since applied Marxism is responsible for 100 million or so corpses over the last century, it’s hard to imagine an ideology more worthy of scorn. But hipsters didn’t get the memo. Radical chic is alive and well in – where else? – Brooklyn’.11 More prominent areas where the hipster provokes debate are around new sexist and racist modes of discrimination that have sprouted their own terminologies: hipster sexism and hipster racism.iv Coined by Van Kerckhove,12 Hipster Racism is defined as the use of irony or satire to hide or blur racism. It includes being blatantly racist to be ‘edgy’, or the ignorant appropriation of cultural artefacts such as traditional tattoos. As traditional forms of overt vulgar racism decline, the well-educated middle classes can use racist remarks as an apparent form of satire. Van Kerckhove points to pop cultural trends such as ‘Kill Whitey Parties’ and ‘Blackface Jesus’, as well as the increasing instances of ‘tone deaf ’ cultural appropriation in pop music, such as Gwen Stefani’s deployment of Japanese Harajuku Girls. Other examples in this realm are the array of appropriation issues in Katy Perry’s ‘This is how we do’ and ‘Dark horse’ videos (see Pennington 2016), and Lily Allen’s use of black female dancers in her video ‘Hard out here’, which itself was meant to be a satire of the use of female body images in pop culture. Lindy West, in her ‘Complete Guide to Hipster Racism’,13 points to ‘recreational slumming’ and ‘wide-eyed acoustic covers of hip-hop songs’. An example of this is critically acclaimed Australian musician, Courtney Barnett, who apologised after backlash about a cover version of Kanye West’s song ‘Black Skinhead’ she performed on Triple J radio. In her version, she ‘playfully’ changed the lyrics from ‘stop all that coon shit’ to ‘stop all that Coon cheese’, completely decontextualizing the politicised lyrics of the original. As Clem Bastow pointed out at the time, ‘Barnett’s clueless cover is also indicative of the shallow level of engagement that so many people have with rap and hip hop, which sees (or dismisses) “rap” as a homogenous entity rather than a musical form that contains multitudes’.14 In Australia, Phillipov has discussed hipster racism through his experience at a Melbourne house party, primarily attended by iv See Kanai (2016) for a detailed analysis of online activity that ‘transacts and interacts gender, class and race in multiple ways, indexing social inequalities without recognising them as such’, and Ahmed (2016) for a detailed critique of ‘progressive racism’.

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young white people, where a hip-hop song came on and everyone in the room screamed the lyrics, including the N-word, with impunity. For Phillipov: These people seemed grotesque, in the way that only over-privileged people can be: grotesquely lazy in their lack of consideration, in their complete bypassing of what this word meant, for not one person looked anywhere near uncomfortable.15 The first series of Lena Dunham’s TV show ‘Girls’ has been accused of hipster racism, because the show is set in NYC with virtually no black people appearing. The first episode had only one black homeless man who shouts at the main character. Some opinion writers see hipster racism as possible in ‘well-intentioned’ situations, like when some white women named their PR company ‘Strange Fruit’ after the Billie Holliday/Nina Simone song, where the use of the word is positioned as just trying to stand out in PR terms, rather than mocking the artists. They did not understand what it meant to repurpose a song: so important to the struggle of civil rights and re-purpose it for your business needs. Seeing the most beautiful and heartbreaking renditions of the pain of black people turned into the slogan ‘Are you a strange fruit?’ is like a punch in the stomach.16 This is especially the case as the ‘“strange fruit” in the song is the hanging bodies of lynched black people’. But in other opinion pieces, the whole hipster lifestyle itself is accountable, where it is ‘not very introspective when it comes to race’: Hipsters are a driving force behind gentrification, driving out low income people and people of colour. They consistently co-opt and appropriate elements of other cultures, piecemeal, and often without any cultural sensitivity or respect.17 Hipster Sexism18 follows similar logic and is defined as a form of self-aware objectification of women perpetuated in quote marks, using paradox, irony and mockery to subjugate. Again, it is reasoned to be acceptable because the performers of hipster sexism are usually conscious of the sexism. However, since they are educated and understand classical sexism is antiquated and intolerable, making sexist remarks or performing sexist practices is therefore ironic or satirical. Kember (2015) offers useful hints for how to respond to ironicparodic sexism. Jokingly calling your friends slut, skank or bitch is a prime example: Can ironically using these terms avoid their sexist connotations? Popular culture examples that have been criticised for hipster sexism include TV show Girls’ use of language by male protagonists such as, ‘Yo skank,

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where you at? Getting that pussy pounded?’; the Harmony Korine film Spring Breakers;19 and the photographic work and general practices of Terry Richardson.20 These everyday reflexive struggles about the hipster can be illustrated by two opinion pieces that appeared on The Daily Life website, which describes itself as ‘the best online source of news and lifestyle content for busy Australian women’. The first was called ‘In defence of the Hipster male’.21 Journalist Alecia Simmonds argued that no group had come under more unjust snark than the hipster, especially as much of the critique seems to be about sissy men who fail at hegemonic masculinity. The piece concludes by arguing that there are better targets for ‘our’ bile than non-heteronormative hipsters: Let the hipster tend to his community garden and save your invective for forms of masculinity that deserve it, starting with the monosyllabic misogyny of Kyle Sandilands or the venomous vapidity of Tony Abbott, or the bovine stupidity of a rugger bugger. And the list goes on and on. Note the slide here to invoke what could be considered boganesque iconography: violence, shock jock DJs, football and a right-wing PM. The piece makes the points about gender, masculinity and homophobia in a way that aligns with Lawler’s (2005) position of the middle class disgusted subject.v A few days later a response by Daniel Stacey was published called ‘Offending the Hipster Male’.22 He argues that homophobia is not the main reason that hipster males are hated, and that the best satires of male hipsters highlight ‘their hypocrisy, callowness, narcissism, laziness and entitlement … he is a deeply unserious person, a failure not just as a man but as a human being … A Bondi hipster pretends to be a struggling artist, but is really a wealthy surfer bogan’. In these pieces, we have a litany of middle class concerns over forms of social change: gender and sexual relations; consumer culture, irony and authenticity; popular culture as representation of the social; and who is a legitimate target for satire and parody. The hipster in these struggles over representation has become a foil to talk about social change, and to discuss new forms of social relations that emerge after the successes of new social movements that have made barefaced sexism, homophobia and racist practices increasingly gauche. The hipster here is a shallow and unthoughtful middle class ‘straw man’ used to suggest how things should not be, thus revealing how old forms of social problems evolve and coalesce in new shapes. Bourdieu writes that ‘operations of classification refer themselves not only to the clues of collective judgment but also to the positions in distributions that this collective judgment already recounts’ (Bourdieu 2013: 296). For the most part, the examples presented here constitute cultural v I’m focusing on class struggles here, but gender in this case is equally important, as are all other forms of sociological contours of inequality.

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intermediaries in the middle classes discussing social problems through their own middle class lens. The framing of these struggles is from a privileged position in social space. The hipster then, when used as a motor of debate, is a reflexive funhouse mirror where the middle class recognises what it sees but does not like the distorted image. They then reflexively navel gaze about it. The moral and symbolic economy of news and opinion: Social homologies and social distance Bourdieu’s most famous quote is probably: ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ (1984: 6). Or more expansively: we are classified by our principles of classification … different classifications, which classify them at the same time as they think they are classifying. And this occurs infallibly because nothing varies more clearly with one’s position in classifications than one’s vision of classifications. (Bourdieu 2013: 296) The way we judge and categorise is congruent with our position in social space. If one has social homology with something or someone, they are likely to appreciate it. Appreciation here connotes value. When one has a relation of social distance, they are more than likely not going to appreciate it since appreciation here connotes understanding. Hipsters and bogans are figurative markers in the affective atmosphere of social space. Someone’s relationship to them is dependent upon that person’s own cultural capital: is it more towards hipster tastes or bogan tastes? This becomes obvious in the ways these figures are deployed in the opinion, discussion and news stories discussed above. It is in this affective space that Bourdieu’s two objective orders of class, the material and the symbolic, meet in a blurry array of anxiety, fear and frustration. One’s relation of proximity to, or distance from, hipsters and bogans displays how ‘social competency is embodied and tacit; knowledge accretes as a form of sensuous action in and upon the world; the body is the crucible that ongoingly welds passion and reason … membership rests on a bedrock of collective belief and embedded desire’ (Wacquant 2014b: 130). All actors perform categorisation work ‘incessantly, at every moment of ordinary existence’ (Bourdieu 1985: 729). The representation struggles expressed in media opinions of bogans and hipsters are struggles over the meaning of the social world and one’s position within it. They are misrecognised identity struggles conducted ‘through all the forms of benediction or malediction, eulogy, praise, congratulations, compliments, or insults, reproaches, criticisms, accusations, slanders etc.’ (Bourdieu 1985: 729). This is the political work of group making: The panoply of techniques of symbolic aggregation and instruments of claims-making whereby boundaries are drawn and enforced, such that a

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population is forged into a collective, a ‘class on paper’ turned (or not) into a real class. (Wacquant 2013: 276–277) The labour of symbolic manipulations tends to be monopolised by specialists such as politicians, pollsters, journalists, intellectuals, and media workers: who vie to steer the ‘social operations of nomination and the rites of institutions’ … through which social discontinuity is produced out of continuity, and categories rooted in the objective divisions of social space are made to emerge as active entities. (Wacquant 2013: 276–277) Workers in the field of representation are mostly from the well-educated middle classes (Randle, Forson and Calveley 2015). Journalists and opinion writers are ‘professional producers of objectified representations of the social world’ (Bourdieu 1985: 730). Or more accurately, they are professional producers of representations of their own social world. That is not to say that journalists and opinion writers can be taken to stand in for ‘the middle class’, but their position in social space certainly is more socially homologous with the other actors Bourdieu lists in the above. What is at stake with the use of each figure? They articulate a set of class relations. ‘Objective power relations tend to reproduce themselves in symbolic power relations, in views of the social world that help to ensure the permanence of these power relations’ (Bourdieu 1985: 731). The relatively high levels of cultural capital possessed by the content producers in the field of representation, what Bourdieu (1984) calls ‘cultural intermediaries’, are able to take their own meanings and desires public and make them a matter of legitimate concern. ‘Any capital, whatever the form it assumes, exerts a symbolic violence as soon as it is recognized, that is, misrecognized in its truth as capital and imposes itself as an authority calling for recognition’ (Bourdieu 2013: 298–99). In the moral and symbolic economy of news and opinion, the ‘truth’ is spoken from a middle classvi perch that renders matters close to their heart as more truthful, as the legitimate representation of the order of things.

vi Of course, there is important media analysis that indicates media acts as the voice of the interests of dominant members of the field of power. However, the media examples analysed here are from specific sectors of the field of representation that discuss cultural aspects of everyday life that specifically focus on lifestyle issues such as taste, morals and values. In other sectors of the field of representation, especially those which report politics and economics, the dominant group’s interests are what is represented.

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As one moves further away from the lower areas of social space typified by harsher economic restraints, the pressure of necessity relaxes. ‘As a consequence, less strictly defined positions, which leave more scope for manoeuvre, offer the possibility of acquiring dispositions that are freer in respect of practical urgencies’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 17). Thus, The powerful not only hide their spurious claims to power through legitimating their own interests, but also through access to systems of symbolic domination, which impose fixity onto to those from whom they draw and claim moral distance. (Skeggs 2004: 4) This can be seen in the example of the website ‘The Anti-Bogan’. The website publishes screen grabs of racist and sexist online behaviour. Its by-line reads ‘If they didn’t publish their hatred, it wouldn’t have appeared here’.23 As described by The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘You’ve got to visit the antibogan site to believe some of the racist vileness that springs forth from our countrymen, up to five of whom have now lost their jobs after being showcased’. In the story, the founder asked not to be identified due to the threats that he has already received. He is quoted as saying that the site never intended for people to lose their jobs and that they do not contact employers directly: The anti-bogan doesn’t serve as police, we’re not vigilantes, we just highlight what’s being said. People have the right to keep their private and work lives separate. Having said that, the vast majority of the screenshots we collect are of hateful comments on public Facebook group and fan pages.24 Reflexively speaking, my own political leanings appreciate this kind of ‘call them out’ activity, where blatant racist and sexist behaviour should be shown for the dire behaviour it is. But why is racist and sexist behaviour defined as ‘bogan’, which is a kind of code for working class? Bourdieu answers this question as follows: ‘Embodied or objectified properties thus function as a kind of primordial language, through which we are spoken more than we speak it, in spite of all strategies of presentation of self ’ (Bourdieu 2013: 298). Paraphrasing Skeggs (2004), we might say that, some people can use the classifications and characteristics of race, class or femininity as a resource (hipsters) whilst others cannot because they are positioned as bogans. In this regard, Lawler calls for a problematization of a normative and normalized middle-class location that is … given added legitimacy by a perceived decline in the significance of class itself … narratives of decline and of lack present in such

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representations can be seen in terms of a long-standing middle-class project of distinguishing itself. (Lawler 2005: 429) The middle classes’ view of the working class, as represented by media news and opinion, veers from romanticism to disgust, with the second option currently dominating, motivated by an anxious and defensive middle class subjectivity. The bogan in these terms is a scapegoat for the middle classes to blame for threats to their privilege, while the hipster figure facilitates a kind of social navel-gaze. As Lawler points out, disgust in the opposite direction – from the working class towards the middle class – just doesn’t count because they do not have the capitals and symbolic power to make it count. Thus, socially ascribed middle class power works through misrecognition. Those with ‘good’ taste, values and morals assume that it is naturally ascribed and therefore legitimate. Equally, ‘those at the opposite end of the social scale are also misrecognised as having ascribed and essential characteristics’ (Skeggs 2004: 4). This modality of representation struggles constitutes the affective atmosphere of how class boundaries are created. Yet they support a social order where class is politically denied as a legitimate cause of concern.

Case study 2 Parody and satire: The symbolic and moral economy of laughing The first case study looked at ‘serious’ news and opinion media, but what we find funny is also an important aspect of symbolic and moral economies and their affective atmospheres. Recent sociological work about humour (Friedman 2014a; Kuipers 2015) suggests that even in a culture with blurry symbolic boundaries, one’s comedy taste is a clear marker of position in social space and an important mode of distinction. As the tools of cultural studies have become the normalised perspective to dissect and evaluate the ways gender, sexual, ethnic and disabled groups are represented in pop culture criticism (Zborowski 2016), it seems that the creators of successful and even acclaimed comedies can struggle when it comes to the critical reception of their work. For every article that hails Orange is the New Black for its portrayal of LGBT inmates and its generally diverse cast, there are others that problematise the way the African American inmates are presented (Terry 2016; Caputi 2016; McHugh 2015; Television and New Media 2016). For every piece that hails Lena Dunham’s Girls as a feminist text that captures the zeitgeist of being an urban female youth, there are others that criticise her for the lack of black people in the show (Fuller and Driscoll 2015; Woods 2015; Perkins 2014). There are some examples of cultural criticism that draw attention to inequality and/or class based issues in popular culture, but for the most part those issues are marginal, if not

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overlooked. The following section outlines the philosophy of humour, then discusses recent work on the relational sociology of laughter. I then analyse some examples of comedy that use the figures of hipster and bogan, situating them in social space in terms of social distance and social homology. The chapter concludes by discussing hipsters and bogans through the lens of cruel optimism and the promise of happiness. It describes how the figures are used in classification struggles based upon levels of legitimacy in the politics of naming. The philosophy of humour Comedy has been studied from many disciplinary perspectives, with philosophy, history and linguistics at the forefront (see Raskin 2008). There are three (interlinking) theories of humour. Firstly, superiority theory shows how ethnocentrism, colonialism, sexism, racism, classism, and schadenfreude are key devices. For example, ‘Take my wife … please’; and ‘An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar …’. The second is relief theory, which proposes the audience discharges pent up nervous energy and pleasure over repression, when engaging with humour. Examples include ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’; and ‘Knock Knock’ jokes. Finally there is Incongruity theory, where what we ‘know’ and what takes place in the joke is comically juxtaposed, for example, ‘Hey, did you know that I was the person who started the Mexican Wave at Princess Diana’s funeral?’ (see Critchley 2004; Billig 2005; Morreall 1987). As Friedman (2014a) points out, these categories can make assumptions about audience responses to jokes that homologise and simplify how comedy is actually received. Relief theory emphasises the level of personal psychology, but downplays how individual responses are socially contextual. Superiority theory seems to assume everyone sees and understands the same hierarchies and feels the same prejudices in the same way. Incongruity theory presupposes that the very notion of incongruity will be interpreted the same way by different people. My own analysis here is bound to be plagued by the same problems. That is, what I find funny, ‘lame’ or offensive is contingent upon my own position in social space. It is difficult when doing textual analysis, when all you have is the text itself and publicly available interviews with the creators, not to make assumptions about audience reception or artistic intention.vii So, I want to make it clear at this point that I am not underestimating audience capacity to critically engage. This would be an antiBourdieusian in positioning actors as cultural dupes rather than struggling beings. My analysis here is about doxa and its creation; the ways popular culture vii

That would be a whole other research project the likes of which Skeggs and colleagues (Skeggs and Wood 2012; Wood and Skeggs 2008; 2011; Skeggs, Thumin and Wood 2008) have conducted and which are instructive for understanding how texts are received by those that consume them.

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contributes to what is normal and what is sayable; the ways these struggles demarcate forms of social identity; and how these immanent norms constitute an affective atmosphere that colours our day-to-day existence.viii I argue that in the symbolic and moral economy of the field of representation, parody of the figures of hipsters and bogans does symbolically violent work to make slippery class boundaries, but my suspicion is that the two figures play quite different roles.ix Yet these figures are both affective in that they invoke expressions of anxieties about social change, but allow an uncomfortable, but reflexive, laugh at it along the way. They are also representational in the sense that the emotional reactions provoked are homologous with one’s position in social space. For Critchley (2004: 11), there are instances of ‘laughing at power’ that expose how ‘what appears to be fixed and oppressive is in fact the emperor’s new clothes’, for example, a misogynist, a racist and a homophobe walk into a bar. The bartender says ‘Hi Tony’.x This may contribute in a tiny way to changing the world (Green and Linders 2016; Weaver and Mora 2016). But most jokes are ‘reactionary’ and are the ‘comedy of recognition’,xi that: simply seeks to reinforce consensus and in no way seeks to criticize the established order or change the situation we find ourselves. Such humour does not seek to change the situation, but simply toys with existing social hierarchies in a charming but quite benign fashion. (Critchley 2004: 11–12) In this vein, much mainstream humour actually maintains the status quo, by demeaning a specific social group ‘or by laughing at the alleged stupidity of a social outsider’ (Critchley 2004: 11–12). For Critchley, reactionary humour, its ‘untruth’, can tell us important things about who we are, that is, important things about our accumulated being. Such humour lets us reflect on the anxious nature of our thrownness in the world … Jokes can therefore be read as symptoms of societal repression and their study might be said to amount to a return of the repressed. viii Again, it is important to stress that doxic values when represented in the media are not impenetrable or determining. At the time of writing, as we have seen with the election campaigns and subsequent result of Donald Trump winning the presidency, some forces can undermine the media and middle class elites’ capacity to shape doxa. Nevertheless, the doxic work done in media is still important to understand and appreciate. ix The analysis here concentrates on the formation of class aspects of doxa. Comedy also contributes to gender and ethnicity aspects. See Leggott, Lockyer and White (2015) and Mills and Ralph (2015) for instance. x As in Tony Abbott, the former Australian Prime Minister. xi Recognition here is defined in the everyday sense of seeing, knowing and understanding something, rather than the sociological understanding of social recognition following the work of the likes of Honneth and Fraser.

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In other words, humour can reveal us to be the persons that, frankly, we would rather not be. (Critchley 2004: 12) My focus here is not on the Freudian repressed, but on the Bourdieusian doxic. It is with this in mind that we now turn to Bourdieu-inspired research to ascertain the relational nature of what we laugh at and how parodies and satires of the hipster and bogan figures are examples of popular culture struggles that mark the affective frontiers of classed insecurities. The relational sociology of laughter Friedman (2011) and Kuipers (2008) have recently highlighted the class based distinctions in the field of comedy production and consumption. For Kuipers (2006: 374), ‘comedy is popular culture par excellence, but … this popular genre is a stratified domain’. Friedman (2014a) uses a Bourdieusian perspective to critically analyse the ways comedy can be used as a form of cultural capital and to police class boundaries. He finds that comedy is an emerging field where the relatively young and privileged can activate their cultural capital as a resource. Challenging the study by Bennett et al. (2009) which buttresses the cultural ‘omnivore’ thesis (Friedman 2012), the middle classes continue to use culture ‘as a means of drawing symbolic boundaries’ (Friedman 2014a: 4). The production of comedy acts as a mechanism for expressing middle class identities. They label and pathologise the disadvantaged who are low in cultural capital. ‘By equating certain forms of comedy taste with disparaging notions of personal “worth”, these respondents reveal a stark form of cultural snobbery and render visible comedy’s role in contemporary processes of symbolic violence’ (Friedman 2014a: 4). Further, following Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of ‘cultural intermediaries’, Friedman shows how professional comedy scouts, who are inevitably high in cultural capital, act as ‘hidden tastemakers’ between act and audience, making judgements based on what they imagine audiences would like, favouring and channelling less challenging comedy towards the larger audiences and therefore ‘intensifying the scarcity of certain tastes and strengthening the ability of privileged audiences to use comedy in the claiming of cultural distinction’ (Friedman 2014b: 22). Kuipers (2006; 2015) also used a Bourdieusian perspective to analyse comedy tastes where laughter is shown to be one of the strongest markers of who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ in any given social situation. Laughing together is fun, comforting and reinforces shared feelings and dispositions. If you don’t get the joke, you feel left out, even excluded. Humour therefore marks boundaries but also creates togetherness and belonging. A straightforward Bourdieusian analysis of comedy would assume that those low in cultural capital would accept ‘legitimate’ comedy and try to imitate middle class tastes. Kuipers argues against this. While middle class participants often used comedy as a form of judgement

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and a measure of cultural competence, working class participants saw humour more as a way of relating to others (Kuipers 2015), where ‘people are not in awe of legitimate culture’ (Friedman and Kuipers 2013: 191). ‘With the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between high and low culture, less-educated people … become increasingly secure about their tastes. As a result, the legitimacy of highbrow culture, as well as highbrow knowledge, is steadily decreasing’ (Kuipers 2006: 377). Together, Friedman and Kuipers (2013) have highlighted the ‘divisive power of humour’. Comedy fans high in cultural capital, while somewhat omnivorous in their tastes, tend to be dismissive of low brow humour; they are comedy snobs. Those with less cultural capital were more likely to appreciate so-called low brow comedy. But, importantly they illustrated class distinctions in the way comedy was appreciated. Working-class participants appreciated styles of comedy that emphasised pleasure and sociality, middle-class respondents: distanced themselves from this by emphasizing that comedy should never just be funny. These respondents stressed the value of complex and original comedy, suggesting that to ‘work’ for one’s laughter leads to higher levels of comic appreciation. (Friedman and Kuipers 2013: 182) This all makes analysis of symbolic boundaries complex, but generally, those low in cultural capital seem to draw symbolic boundaries (both within their own social group and between others), while those higher in cultural capital and symbolic power can draw boundaries between their own social group and the ones they want to maintain a distinctive distance. Social distance and social homologies: Laughing ‘down’ and laughing ‘with’ The analysis in this section is inspired by these Bourdieusian ideas to help think about the comedic representations of hipsters and bogans. What I am interested in here is not an analysis of how these figures, as texts, are consumed, but to sketch out a cultural economy of comedy, using the hipster/ bogan dichotomy as a heuristic to illustrate the classed nature of representation and the work that those representations may perform. Who creates and produces these texts? What point of view are they from? How do they (in) advertently frame class? A good place to start is a comparison between two very similar satirical websites, one influenced by the other, that have both spawned books: Stuff White People Like (SWPL) from the US and Things Bogans Like (TBL) from Australia. SWPL lists cultural objects that, well, white people like. Written in a faux anthropological tenor, it is an instruction manual for if you were ever to meet an actual white person in the wild, yet it would be more accurately titled Stuff Middle Class White People Like. The items on the site are a

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laundry list of hipster artefacts and icons. It was created by Christian Lander, himself a middle class white person who has freely admitted it is based on his own peer circle (Lander 2008). The site became immensely popular and Lander has written several books and conducted speaking tours on the back of it. The content of the site is playful, tongue in cheek, and reflexively selfaware. Lander has a strong social homology with hipster culture (if there is such a thing). There is an inclusive ‘the joke is on us’ tone. Things Bogans Like (TBL) does the same thing: a laundry list of things working class people ‘like’. But where SWPL maintains a light-hearted faux-analytical mood, TBL has a much more snarky and callous edge to it. Written under pseudonyms such as Enron Hubbard and Michael Jayfox, the creators work in nongovernmental organisations and other middle class arenas. They have a social distance from bogans. There is an exclusive ‘the joke is on them’ tone. To compare, a SWPL entry is called ‘Hating People that Wear Ed Hardy’25 where the clothing brand ‘is so hated by white people that it cannot be worn ironically. This is no small feat. As it stands, the only other entries in this category are Nazi Uniforms, Ku Klux Klan Robes, and self-tanner’. As if to prove this very point, an entry on TBL is ‘Christian Audigier’,26 who is the creator of Ed Hardy clothing. From the entry: Christian Audigier is an arsehole, but the bogan loves him. Despite not knowing who he is. Despite being his personal billboard for years … Being able to display large tattoo art in a nightclub or shopping centre environment increases the confidence of bogans, and makes it feel closer to Hollywood. An addendum to this entry notes that the Ed Hardy company has been placed into administration and the authors hope that their post made a contribution to that happening. There is no self-referential irony here: it is straightforward denigration in the style of Trinny and Susannah from What Not to Wear, where insults as forms of symbolic violence and cultural capital are used as a class weapon (see McRobbie 2004).xii Both websites discuss tattoos (see also Kosut 2006; 2014). SWPL’s entry is called ‘Funny or Ironic Tattoos’,27 which are a ‘piece of bacon, old Nintendo characters, mustaches on the inside of their finger, or Asian Characters that say something funny and self-aware like “dim sum,” “chicken fried rice,” or “I can’t read Chinese”’. But the piece points out that the Asian character tattoos became problematic after the ‘wrong’ people started getting them with inspirational messages like ‘beauty’ or ‘truth’, so the white person was forced to move on to even more ironic tattoos. As with most of SWPL entries, it xii

Importantly, unlike McRobbie’s analysis of What Not to Wear, there is nothing ‘post-feminist’ about the symbolic violence on the Things Bogans Like website, with straightforward sexism the norm there.

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concludes with a tip on how to get along with any white people you may meet. Firstly, you need a few witty ideas for a tattoo, a donut around your belly button for instance. Your conversation partner will then likely tell you about their witty tattoo ideas and ‘before you know it they have forgotten all about your competition’. This will lead to a shared sense of taste, where the conviviality of social homology can begin. Note the ironic life coaching tone and self-awareness. TBL has several entries on apparently bogan tattoos: ‘Tramp Stamp’,28 ‘Foreign Tattoos’29 (an indication that the ‘wrong’ people do now have them from the SWPL entry), ‘Southern Cross tattoos’,30 and ‘Tribal Tattoos’.31 Tramp Stamps are tattoos on the lower back of women (mostly). The position of the tattoo is significant because it is both an unfortunate attempt at being discreet and a ‘display of plumage whilst getting ploughed from behind’. The female bogan is too dumb to realise that when she looks in the mirror, she can only see her front. It concludes that the female bogan has found the perfect method to: Augment her appearance without sacrificing her perceived likeness to classier women. Also problematic is the female bogan’s tendency to wear ill-fitting clothing, exposing large amounts of back real estate every time she bends over to belt her recalcitrant children. As Pini and Previte (2013b: 358) show, the male bogan is ‘typically presented as having a hostile relationship with feminism. At the same time, the boganette’s engagement with feminism is also questioned’, where the female bogan is positioned as a source of scorn. The Tramp Stamp entry invokes various forms of disgust about working class women (Skeggs 1997, 2004; Tyler 2008; Lawler 2005), reflecting the long history of mocking their bodies (Walkerdine 2011). Yet the other TBL entries draw upon similar discourses to position the bogan as aggressive (Tribal Tattoos), racist (Southern Cross Tattoos) and culturally ignorant (Foreign Tattoos). The invocation of distinction in terms of ‘foreign tattoos’ is instructive here: the ignorant bogan is racist and just doesn’t get it; the hipster is so informed that they can be ironically racist. The bogan is positioned as racist; the hipster can play with racist tropes. Stuff White People Like is a reflexively self-aware in-joke. Things Bogans Like is a symbolically violent superiority joke. For decades in Australia, the bogan has had a strong presence on TV (although the older examples were probably not called bogan per se): from The Paul Hogan Show; to Kylie Mole on The Comedy Company; to Michelle and Ferret, and Eric Bana’s Poida on Fast Forward. More recently there has been Kath and Kim (ABC, Seven Network); Bogan Pride (SBS); Paul French’s Pizza, Housos, and Bogan Hunters (SBS); Upper Middle Bogan and The Moodys (ABC) that have all drawn from the bogan well (see Gibson 2013).32 Some TV shows highlight the blurriness of class lines and this, along

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with one’s own taste, makes analysis of whether something is only downwardly symbolically violent complex. For instance, I have always found Kath and Kim condescending (and funny), laughing at the working class characters rather than with them, with its focus on mispronunciations and aspirational tastes (see Turnbull 2004; Davis 2008). But in many discussions I have had about the show, more people tend to say that the show is affectionate and celebratory, laughing with rather than at. The characters Prue and Trude are pointed to as a satire of middle class snobbery. Some propose it is a feminist text. Upper Middle Bogan is based on a well-to-do middle class woman’s discovery that her ‘real’ family is working class and into that most bogan of sports, V8 car racing. Upper Middle Bogan takes pot shots at the working class, but also strongly satirises traditional snobby middle class traits. It is an equal opportunity satire. It’s important not to take a privileged reading of these texts and assume that they are received passively. Skeggs’ work on UK reality TV has shown how there are a myriad of ways that people engage with the representation of class on TV and how that connects with their own sense of self. The comedy of Upper Middle Bogan, for instance, is based on cultural clashes of class, where struggles over the legitimacy of one’s cultural capital become fodder for misunderstandings and conflict. It is comedy that recognises misrecognition. But its main protagonist is middle class and the story is invariably told from her point of view, which draws inevitable sympathy for that very point of view. The creators of TV comedy tend to be middle class and their stories are inevitably framed from that perspective. Even a show like Bogan Pride, which has a much more sympathetic point of view, draws on the usual working class related signifiers for cheap laughs. My concern here is how this TV invocation of class contributes to notions of what is normal, tasteful and moral. These programmes all seem to be produced in the vein of Critchley’s (2004: 12) claim that ‘humour can reveal us to be the persons that, frankly, we would rather not be’. But it is more complex than that. As Little (2011) puts it: In comedy, the tendency of Australian society to normalise privilege becomes part of its humorous subversion. There is an implicit agreement in mass media production and reception of comedy that this particular way of seeing trumps any truth claim about social groups or cultural authenticity. The problem in terms of framing and the creation and maintenance of doxa is when journalists may assume that they have a similar convention, drawing on the tropes of Australian comedy representations of class in their work that is meant to be ‘news’. ‘However much journalists might imagine there is such an agreement with their audiences, this is more a fantasy than a situational reality’ (Little 2011). Little says that bogans ‘run’ in media stories ‘in what Julianne Schultz (1999) calls the “permanent present” of most journalists at

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work in Australia who, paradoxically, rely (out of pragmatism or commercial pressure) on historical patterns of cultural recognition’. Tyler has shown how in the UK the invocation of chav from comedy to news to politics works to legitimise austerity measures by pathologising social problems as individual failings, working to create scapegoats. For example, UK journalists draw upon the chav Vicki Pollard character used in the BBC produced Little Britain TV show and link this to the pre-existing ‘underclass’ thesis. Notably, both Wacquant (2008a) and Tyler (2013) strongly contest the notion of an ‘underclass’. UK tabloid stories point to council estates as ‘breeding grounds’, where the chav is blamed for the negative social consequences of failed economic policy. The imagery of ‘bad people’ and ‘dangerous places’ becomes fodder for moral panic pieces that portray a feckless and violent underclass amongst the young ‘out there’ in council estates (Tyler 2013). This feedback loop sees caricatures produced for comedic entertainment. They are used to symbolise what is ‘wrong’ with society in news and opinion media, which is in turn used politically to justify austerity policies and obfuscate the consequences of welfare shrinkage. These instances of ‘laughing down’ provide grist for the mainstream media mill, a well of cultural recognition to draw upon when wanting to represent those lower in social space. Notably, the middle class producers of these media representations may have very little meaningful interaction with those kinds of people in their day-to-day lives. Whereas comedic representations of the bogan are made from a social distance, there is a very different aesthetic and atmosphere when the hipster is used as a comedic figure. The 2005 UK TV series Nathan Barley,33 is seen today as the proto-hipster parody. It was recently described by The Guardian as follows, ‘10 years on, it looks more like a documentary about the future’. Barley is portrayed as a ‘self-facilitating media node, pioneer vlogger and allround bumptious idiot’.34 In Australia, the Bondi Hipsters35 began as a series of web videos and grew into an ABC series,36 with the creators later becoming DJs on national youth radio, JJJ. Created by Christiaan Van Vuuren and Nick Boshier, Bondi Hipsters features the characters Dom Nader and Adrian Archer who are trying to get their nameless fashion label off the ground. There is a certain irony in the fact that the show has been accused of homophobia because the ‘hipster male is coded as gay and becomes the subject of homophobic jokes’.37 A show that ironically parodies hipsters is accused of not hipster sexism, but hipster homophobia. In another example, ‘Northcote (So Hungover)’ by The Bedroom Philosopher (otherwise known as Justin Heazelwood) is a satirical song and video that sees him sitting on a Melbourne tram obliviously talking on the phone, telling Joel who is on the line that they won a band competition called ‘So you think you can copy’, which gets them a contract with ‘Independent Records, an offshoot of Sony’ where they have to make ‘one over-hyped album’. The Bedroom Philosopher continues, ‘we get Molly Meldrum kudos, Rage guest programming rights, a memory stick full of MySpace friends, and we can write the soundtrack to an ad of our

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choice’. The Hipster Games38, a parody video of The Hunger Games by Wyoma Films, sees ‘one woman and one woman-ish man’ compete, eating off the land where a character says: ‘I have been a raw foods vegan now for like 3 years now, so this is all like one big food bin for me’. The 1990s hit TV show Friends has been ‘rebooted’39 as a hipster parody with the famous theme song reworked as: ‘No one told you life was gonna be this way, your Tinder profile sucks and you spilled your almond milk latte’. The Hipster Conservative40 blog aspires to ‘capture that spirit of elitism which, according to their critics, hipsters and conservatives have in common’, with entries on ‘10 ways to be a hipster conservative mom’ and ‘Modern cynicism and Yeats “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”’. Unhappy Hipsters41 takes various Instagram photos, tweets and overheard comments and adds snarky or ironic captions or comments. The TV show Portlandia is probably the best known contemporary parody of hipsters, despite the way the creators have recently backed away from this. Carrie Brownstein, herself described as a ‘hipster icon’ and ‘hipster queen’, well known in indie rock circles from Sleater-Kinney, and Fred Armisen, known from Saturday Night Live, are the creators and main actors in the show. The first series of Portlandia was described in reviews as ‘a sketch comedy rip off of the website Look at This Fucking Hipster’.42 It began as being widely reported and reviewed as a hipster satire,43 skewering an array of hipster tropes from fashions (‘put a bird on it’) and food obsessions (‘we can pickle that’).44 But after a few series, both the creators have distanced themselves from ‘hipster’ as a key trope of the show, which certainly has progressed into darker territory in later seasons. Brownstein says that no one really knows what hipster means, and that it seems to play into insecurities about other people being cooler, or trying to be cooler than they actually are. She argues therefore that the term is insufficient, as it describes something that the individual using the term would actually like to be able to do or be: It felt sort of derogatory, but at the same time, there was the element of, ‘Should I be wanting to do that?’ … ‘Oh, I guess I can’t pull that off, so that person’s a hipster, and I’m not.’ But yeah, I don’t think it means anything anymore.45 Here, Brownstein uses the hipster as a self-reflexive device to question one’s own tastes and lifestyle. There is a social homologous relationship. Armisen has expressed similar thoughts. When asked in an interview whether Portlandia was about ‘hipster-skewering’, he replied that he doesn’t really know what hipster means: We do not skewer anybody. The characters on Portlandia are very much like us, right down to the way they talk. They pretty much sound just like we do. And their personality traits are very much like us. If we’re skewering anyone, it’s ourselves.46

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This resonated with Grief ’s comments in Chapter 4 about ‘the hipster in the mirror’. Armisen makes the case that the hipster plays the role of a ‘straw man’ in pop culture, that if you are calling someone a hipster, it is more a reflection on your own anxieties and insecurities than theirs: We’re all insecure and uncertain about our level of coolness. And here’s what’s really insane about the whole hipster label. As cool as we all think we are, there’s some underground movement happening right now, I don’t even know what it is, that’s way cooler than anyone can imagine. Armisen argues that the hipster represents one’s anxiety about whether they are cool (or not), echoing Bourdieu’s contention that the middle classes are immersed ‘in an endless drive for novelty’, where they are trying to avoid insidious arousal of ‘horror or disgust for objects or practices that have become common’ (Bourdieu 1984: 249). Hipster parodies and satires therefore display a ‘laughing with’ relationship, a reflexive ‘nudge nudge, wink wink’ self-awareness that discusses consumer culture identities and middle class apprehension over being cool, rather than the ‘laughing down’ examples that concern bogan morals and values. Brownstein and Armisen’s denial that the show is about hipsters is an ironic denial of what one sees in the mirror. Cruel optimism and the promise of happiness Butler (2015: vii-viii) has asked: ‘how do we understand precarity and its pervasive sense of “insecurity” as a dense site of power in subject formation’? When it comes to the relationality of class and the subject positions these relationships offer, the notion of illusio is helpful to think about the affective dissonance central to middle class subjectivity in a time of rapid social change and precarity. Inequalities are experienced emotionally. They are affectively produced through an array of engagements, entanglements and situations. The emotions one experiences from class relations are the product of affects. Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed are two writers whose works are helpful for understanding the class, affect and emotion nexus. Berlant has theorised what she calls ‘cruel optimism’, stating, ‘a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (Berlant 2011: 1). The figures of the hipster and bogan, and the emotional reactions they incite, can be read as expressions of a form of cruel optimism. Precarity threatens the illusio of numerous fields where the middle classes, high in cultural capital, have traditionally flourished. The concept of illusio affords a way to think about why individuals invest themselves in certain fields and whether it is worth it. That is, the concept of illusio can let us ask a reflexive question: does our investment of time, effort and emotion pay off? It therefore contains

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a sense of ‘justice’. I do not mean justice here in the legal sense. I would like to think of justice here more in terms of one’s own relational notion of social justice, what someone feels is fair, and also relate it to the idea of everyday practices of justification (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006). As precarity moves up social space and becomes normalised for even those relatively high in cultural, economic and social capital, the privileged middle classes feel a sense of social injustice. Having invested (or currently investing) themselves in education and work on the apparent promise of a secure career and comfortable existence, the middle classes are aggrieved. They have done well at school; completed the degree while doing part-time work and likely participating in volunteering or internships; and they have taken on casual and short-term contract work. Despite doing all the ‘right’ things and making the ‘right choices’, they are struggling to hold it all together, to have financial security, to buy a house, to maintain relationships, to feel satisfied. This is especially the case in the creative industries, where journalists, comedians, filmmakers and so on are working. The middle classes invest themselves in the illusio of the fields of education and work vigorously, but it doesn’t feel like it is paying off. How is this fair? How is this justified? Worse, there seems to be a whole bunch of people who didn’t go to university, who didn’t complete postgraduate courses and internships. Yet they are earning more money and seem to have more discretionary cash to spend on consumer goods (even if they are judged to be the wrong consumer goods!). This sense of injustice directly relates to how achieving happiness has been doxically positioned as the logical outcome of a successful ‘transition’ from child to adult. This transition encompasses an increasingly impossible set of achievements: stable full time job, financial security, affordable mortgage, and a stable family and home life. The normative investment, the illusio, in the fields of education and the labour market look more and more like a relation of cruel optimism, of craving something that is increasingly difficult to obtain and therefore an obstacle to one’s flourishing. The consternation invoked by the affective figures of hipster and bogan is an outlet for these emotions. The ‘bogan’ taps into fears and insecurities of the educated middle classes, producing a form of ‘downward envy’ (Everingham 2003).xiii The ‘hipster’ plays a dual role: it represents a kind of clown that allows the middle class to both ‘reflexively’ laugh at itself, alongside an ‘ambivalent’ and somewhat sheepish recognition of the cruel optimism generated by an irony-laden consumer culture and the false promise of educational investment. Relatedly, Ahmed’s (2014, 2010) work has opened a way of thinking about how the very notion of happiness has become a form of affective work and a moral order imposed by an imperative of ‘the happiness industry’ (Davies

xiii In the same way ‘boat person’ (apparently) taps into the fears and insecurities of ethnically diverse working class western Sydney.

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2015; see also Cieslik (2015) for a critical engagement with the sociology of happiness studies). Ahmed interrogates the very notion of happiness in terms of how it is associated with certain life choices, of what results from being a ‘certain kind of being’ (Ahmed 2010: 2). If we think of happiness as a kind of ‘world making’, it becomes a promise for those who live in the ‘right’ way. This seems to equate very well with a Bourdieusian example of social struggle where happiness is the illusio. In fact, one struggles in an array of fields in which one strategises, but is also pushed and pulled by forces beyond individual control. Ahmed critically engages with recent calls in philosophy and social science to return to a notion of happiness based on eudaemonia, living a good, meaningful and virtuous life. Relying upon Kantian aesthetics, Ahmed (2010) points out that this notion is based on a privileged understanding of happiness as something that is delayed, deep and, takes labour and time. It is not mere enjoyment or pleasure, which has been a form of happiness traditionally aligned with the working classes and popular culture. This framing of happiness and satisfaction has been criticised from both sides of the political spectrum: left critiques such as the cultural dupe (Adorno 1991) and right critiques that see ‘the popular’ as threat to the moral fabric of society (Bloom 1987). For Ahmed, ‘expressions of horror about contemporary cultures of happiness involve a class horror that happiness is too easy, too accessible, and too fast’ (Ahmed 2010: 12). But, we need to remember that: The model of the good life within classical Greek philosophy was based on an exclusive concept of life: only some had the life that enabled one to achieve a good life, a life that involved self-ownership, material security, and leisure time. (Ahmed 2010: 12) For Ahmed, proximity to good and tasteful objects comes not only to embody good feelings, but comes to embody what it means to have a ‘good life’. This is an ‘affective differentiation’ (Ahmed 2010: 34), where moral distinctions of worthiness and value acquire sensate dimensions which become expressions of emotion. One’s orientation towards happiness is therefore constituted by one’s position in social space and the intensity of one’s investment in a given field. Hipster and bogan objects and bodies in the field of representation do not enter it free of affective value (see Rossiter 2013). They enter an affective and moral economy infused with preconceived value. The condescending barbs against bogan tastes and the injustice expressed towards the so-called cashed-up bogan is an example of how one’s possible happiness is imbued with class relationality and one’s sense of what is right and wrong, fair or unfair. As Marx succinctly points out: A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace

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arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut … and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls. (Marx in McQueen 1998: 27) The middle classes’ reflexive consternation about various hipster tropes reveals an affective dissonance over one’s place in the world, and the very legitimacy of one’s own tastes and values.

The affective economy of hipsters and bogans So far, I have made the argument that hipsters and bogans permeate the affective atmosphere of class relations. I have indicated that their usage in the field of representation is framed from the point of view of the authorised middle classes, especially via the cultural intermediaries that work in the media. Previously, I sketched out Bourdieu’s three levels of the power to nominate: the personal, the authorised and The State. With these levels in mind, analysis of class needs to take into account the contribution that agents make towards constructing the view of the social world, and through this, towards constructing this world, by means of the work of representation (in all senses of the word) that they constantly perform in order to impose their view of the world or their own position in this world – their social identity. (Bourdieu 1985: 727, my emphasis) At the authorised level, the media use of these figures works as Bourdieu described in three inter-related ways. Firstly, the figures of hipster and bogan afford discussions of aspects of class to take place, often without actually mentioning class, and usually in a media culture that ignores and obfuscates class. Dominant economic and political discourse downplays the very existence of class and inequality, especially regarding the economic. This is seen at The State level when politicians deny that class is a legitimate political concern. Yet at the same time, cultural aspects of class abound in media stories and pop culture daily through notions of taste, morals and values. Hipster and bogan figures become proxies to talk through the cultural impacts of class relations, usually reinforcing dominant middle class desires and points of view, while obfuscating class as an economic category. Secondly, the figures of hipster and bogan indicate the blurriness of cultural class relations and the flickering boundaries between social groups. It is not wealth alone that configures how class is understood and then denied.

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Aspects pertaining directly to wealth are secondary in the field of representation to class-inflected cultural concerns that emphasis taste, lifestyle and morals. Even when economic aspects are discussed, they tend to be discussed from a middle class point of view invoking values: choosing between private versus public schooling and health; rising housing prices and negative gearing, and the like. Thirdly, the figures of hipster and bogan are folk devils that mimic and reproduce the traditional generational ‘moral panic’ perspectives that capture much of the representation of young people in the media. While the figures of bogan and hipster are not directly related or exclusively used for ‘youth’, the examples used in the media are mostly young people. These discussions reflect long-held symbolically violent depictions of youth in the media. They emphasise that struggles between generations are struggles over defining cultural capital (Bourdieu 1993a); for example, young people today are not doing it right (whatever ‘it’ is); they don’t know what they are talking about (regardless of the topic); they are vapid, lazy and irresponsible (individualising and pathologising social problems); things were better in ‘our’ day (an over-romanticised view of the past couched in a fear of the new and of an impending irrelevance); and they need to be more like us (relatively wealthy and benefiting from opportunities that today’s generation of young people no longer have). These tropes, even when invoked by young people themselves, are very similar. They happen through both the hipster figure (silly vapid hipsters need to get a real job, shave off that stupid beard and stop being so pretentious), and the bogan figure (vulgar bogans, need to be smarter and work harder, get the rid of the mullet and know their place). Both are figures that embody an affective ‘threat’. The mobile hipster represents the new threats of precarity of the labour market, the overload of irony, and the impossibility of originality in a globalised popular culture. The bogan represents the old threats of bad lower class values and morals, and the vulgarity and passivity of consumer culture. The figures are relational and affective markers of a sense of one’s place in social space. As Bourdieu notes: ‘The sense of one’s place, as a sense of what one can or cannot “permit oneself,” implies a tacit acceptance of one’s place, a sense of limits (“That’s not for the likes of us”, etc.), or, which amounts to the same thing, a sense of distances, to be marked and kept, respected or expected’ (Bourdieu 1985: 728). The hipster and bogan reinforce a sense of one’s place in two ways. Firstly, they are a sense of one’s classed place where social homologies, distances and limits are concomitantly reflexively marked and socially policed. Secondly, they are a sense of one’s generational place because they mark age relations to the fleeting contemporary notions of coolness, authenticity and taste. Hipsters and bogans classify, and they classify the classifier. They affectively mark what is, or is not, for the likes of us, or who is not like us.

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Conclusion: Global hipsters and local bogans A class is defined as much by its being perceived as by its being, by its consumption – which need not be conspicuous in order to be symbolic – as much as by its position in social relations of production (even if it is true that the latter governs the former). (Bourdieu 1984: 483, my emphasis)

As Skeggs (2004: 5) has pointed out, class is spoken through other concepts in a symbolic economy. The inscription and marking of characteristics onto certain bodies condenses a whole complex cultural history … Some forms of culture are condensed and inscribed onto social groups and bodies that then mark them and restrict their movement in social space, while others are not but are able to become mobile and flexible. (Skeggs 2004: 1) When it comes to the hipster in the field of representation, there is a strong social homology with who is doing the representing: reflexivity, irony, selfknowing, and ambivalence. Hipsters are problematic, but they are not so bad (silly hipsters!). The hipster provokes debate about ‘issues’. When it comes to the bogan in the field of representation, they are not the ones doing the talking and there is considerable social distance from those who are authorised to do so. This is a relationship of social distance, where people are abjectified and pathologised. The bogan is problematic (uncouth bogans!), provoking complaints about fairness, morals and tastes. In summary, these figures are codes that express contemporary anxieties. They contribute to making the thinkable sayable. The circulation of the hipster and bogan figures are saturated with affect, becoming ‘sites of personal and social tension’ (Ahmed 2014: 11). When they are figures of parody, hipsters and bogans ‘can be read in terms of what or simply who a particular society is subordinating, scapegoating or denigrating’ (Critchley 2004: 11–12). It is important to understand the affective and emotional ways these ‘struggles’ colour day-to-day existence. As Tyler argues via the work of Ranciere, the political is always aesthetic (Tyler 2013: 25). The techniques through which things are represented delimit the boundaries of when something can and cannot be said, and what can and cannot be seen; what Bourdieu calls doxa. Further, the political is always affective. Figures such as hipsters and bogans – and for that matter, junkies, boat people, dole bludgers and whatever other politicised symbolic figure you can think of – provoke politicised emotions. But this does not happen in a vacuum: the emotions provoked are co-constitutive of one’s position on social space. In that sense, these figures are ‘classes on paper’, where the mental constructs of the authorised sublimate material classes.

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Rather than (just) seeing class as something static and to be measured, we need to shed light on the ways classes are relational categories. These categories are produced through constant symbolic and moral struggles around complex contemporary forms of distinction and the ways they work to legitimise material inequalities. The figures of bogan and hipster are important politically because they are ingredients in the affective atmosphere of class as a set of power relations. They are invoked daily in numerous ways that provoke symbolic violence whilst obfuscating the real causes of social problems. Hipsters and bogans do not really exist in real life. The bogan and the hipster are dog-whistling ghosts haunting our reflexive modern anxieties.

Notes 1 Grills, E. 2014. No Worries: Bogans, cultural cringe and the great Australian anxiety. Viewed 04/06/1016. http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/2014/12/noworries-bogans-cultural-cringe-great-australian-anxiety/ 2 Edwards, K. 2014. Is The Biggest Loser preying on disadvantaged communities? Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl- opinion/is-thebiggest-loser-preying-on-disadvantaged-communities-20140117-30 zsc.html 3 Things Bogans Like. 2010. Reality TV. Viewed 04/06/16. http://thingsboganslike. com/2010/02/23/91-reality-tv/ 4 Jubb, C. 2012. A bogan name is a life sentence. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.smh. com.au/it-pro/a-bogan-name-is-a-life-sentence-20120212-1szp2 5 Pearlman, J. 2012. Tamara Ecclestone called a ‘billionaire bogan’ by Australian MP Kelvin Thomson. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celeb ritynews/9145401/Tamara-Ecclestone-called-a-billionaire-bogan-by-AustralianMP-Kelvin-Thomson.html 6 Haddow, D. 2008. HIPSTER: THE DEAD END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.adbusters.org/article/hipster-the-dead-end-ofwestern-civilization/ 7 Mitaru, I. 2009. Reconsidering the Hipster. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.ana rchistnews.org/content/reconsidering-hipster-acknowledgment-potentiality 8 Thorpe, J.R. 2015. The Symbolic Meaning of 6 Hipster Trends, from Beards to Fixies (Kind of Fascinating, But Whatever). Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.bustle. com/articles/70182-the-symbolic-meaning-of-6-hipster-trends-from-beards-to-fixieskind-of-fascinating-but-whatever 9 Vincent, J. 2014. Scientists warn we’ve hit ‘peak beard’: The more people grow facial hair, the less attractive it is. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/science/scientists-warn-weve-hit-peak-beard-the-more-people-grow-facial-hairthe-less-attractive-it-is-9264020.html 10 Alexander, D. 2015. How to Grow a Hipster Beard. Viewed 04/06/16. http:// menshair.about.com/od/facialhair/fl/How-to-Grow-a-Hipster-Beard.htm; Men’s Hair Forum. 2014. Hipster Beard – How to Style, Tips, Pictures, Products and More. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.menshairforum.com/talk/Thread-Hipster-Beard-HowTo-Style-Tips-Pictures-Products-and-More 11 The Weekly Standard. 2013. Hipster Marxism. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.week lystandard.com/articles/hipster-marxism_697848.html 12 Van Kerckhove, C. 2006. The 10 biggest race and pop culture trends of 2006: Part 1 of 3. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.racialicious.com/2007/01/15/the-10-biggest-raceand-pop-culture-trends-of-2006-part-1-of-3/

132 Classification struggles in representation 13 West, L. 2012. A Complete Guide to ‘Hipster Racism’. Viewed 04/06/16. http:// jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism 14 Bastow, C. 2013. This Kanye West cover wasn’t a good idea. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/this-kanye-west-cover-wasnta-good-idea-20130909-2tgpb.html 15 Phillipov, G. 2013. Hipster racism in Melbourne. Viewed 04/06/16. http://overland. org.au/2013/07/hipster-racism-in-melbourne/ 16 Oluo, I. 2015. Uncomfortable fact: hipster racism is often well-intentioned. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/13/hipster-racismwell-intentioned; Callahan, Y. 2014. Strange Fruit PR Firm Vanishes After Getting a History Lesson From Twitter. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theroot.com/blogs/ the_grapevine/2014/12/strange_fruit_pr_firm_vanishes_after_getting_a_history_ lesson_from_twitter.html 17 Smith, SE. 2009. Hipster Racism. Viewed 04/06/16. http://meloukhia.net/2009/07/ hipster_racism/ 18 Quart, A. 2012. The Age of Hipster Sexism. Viewed 04/06/16. http://nymag.com/ thecut/2012/10/age-of-hipster-sexism.html;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_ sexism 19 Arthur, K 2013. The Gross Hipster Sexism of ‘Spring Breakers’. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.buzzfeed.com/kateaurthur/the-gross-hipster-sexism-of-spring-breakers#. yeyXG832d 20 Chung, C. 2012. Hipster Sexism. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.dailylife.com.au/ news-and-views/dl-opinion/hipster-sexism-20120509-1ycnc.html 21 Simmonds, A. 2012. In defence of the hipster male. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www. dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/in-defence-of-the-hipster-male-201210 12-27hgg.html 22 Stacey, D. 2012. Offending the Hipster male. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.dailylife. com.au/news-and-views/offending-the-hipster-male-20121024-286uh 23 The Anti-Bogan. 2016. Viewed 04/06/16. https://theantibogan.wordpress.com/ 24 De Britto, S. 2011. The Anti-Bogan. Viewed 04/06/12. http://blogs.smh.com.au/ executive-style/allmenareliars/2011/03/15/theantibogan.html 25 Lander, C. 2009. #124 Hating People Who Wear Ed Hardy. Viewed 04/06/16. http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2009/04/13/124-hating-people-who-wear-ed-hardy/ 26 Things Bogans Like. 2009. #12 – Christian Audigier. Viewed 04/06/16. http:// thingsboganslike.com/2009/10/28/12-christian-audigier/ 27 Lander, C. 2009. #121 Funny or Ironic Tattoos. Viewed 04/06/16. http://stuff whitepeoplelike.com/2009/02/10/121-funny-or-ironic-tattoos/ 28 Things Bogans Like. 2009. #3 – Tramp Stamps. Viewed 04/06/16. http://thingsboga nslike.com/2009/10/19/3-tramp-stamps/ 29 Things Bogans Like. 2010. #163 – Foreign Tattoos. Viewed 04/06/16. http://things boganslike.com/2010/05/03/136-foreign-tattoos/ 30 Things Bogans Like. 2010. #67 – Southern Cross Tattoos. Viewed 04/06/16. http:// thingsboganslike.com/2010/01/19/67-southern-cross-tattoos/ 31 Things Bogans Like. 2009. #51 – Tribal tattoos. Viewed 04/06/16. http://thingsboga nslike.com/2009/12/18/51-tribal-tattoos/ 32 Smith, M. 2014. Our fascination with ‘bogans’ will be televised. Viewed 04/06/16. https://theconversation.com/our-fascination-with-bogans-will-be-televised- 25262 33 Channel Four: Nathan Barley. 2016. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/nathanbarley 34 Harrison, A. 2015. Totally Mexico! How the Nathan Barley nightmare came true. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/feb/10/nathanbarley-charlie-brooker-east-london-comedy

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35 Bondi Hipsters. 2011. On Manufacturing Ethics. Viewed 04/06/16. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=cbZapSkzfQ8&list=EL4xeB_muwhDY 36 Visentin, L. 2014. From Bondi Hipsters to Soul Mates. Viewed 04/06/16. http:// www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/from-bondi-hipsters-to-soul-mates20141015-116g7d.html 37 Stacey, D. 2012. Offending the Hipster male. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.dailylife. com.au/news-and-views/offending-the-hipster-male-20121024-286uh 38 The Hipster Games. Accessed 04/06/16. https://vimeo.com/39399768 39 Wort, T 2015. ‘FRIENDS REBOOTED’: A HIPSTER PARODY. Viewed 04/06/ 16. http://ewn.co.za/2015/02/17/Friends-Rebooted-a-hipster-parody 40 The Hipster Conservative. 2016. Viewed 04/06/16. http://hipsterconservative.com/ 41 Unhappy Hipsters. 2015. Viewed 04/06/16. http://unhappyhipsters.com/ 42 Humphrey, S. 2011. The Paradox of Portlandia. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www. portlandmercury.com/portland/the-paradox-of-portlandia/Content?oid=3273589 43 Wakemen, J. 2012. How Carrie Brownstein Chooses Which Hipsters to Mock on ‘Portlandia’. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.thefrisky.com/2012-01-04/how-carriebrownstein-chooses-which-hipsters-to-mock-on-portlandia/; Talbot, L 2012. STUMPTOWN GIRL. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2012/01/02/stumptown-girl 44 Flanagan, A. Lynch, J. and Payne, C. 2015. 15 Spot-On Hipster Parodies from ‘Portlandia’. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/list/6436288/ portlandia-hipster-parody-sketches 45 Feeney, N. 2015. Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein: The Word ‘Hipster’ Doesn’t Mean Anything Anymore. Viewed 04/06/16. http://time.com/3658544/carrie-brown stein-portlandia-sleater-kinney/ 46 Spitznagel, E. 2012. FRED ARMISEN EXPLAINS WHY THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS HIPSTERS. Viewed 04/06/16. http://www.mtvhive.com/2012/01/04/ fred-armisen-interview/

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Part 3

DIY cultures Struggles about creativity, identity and meaningful work

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A mix tape for Part 3

‘No 1 Must Have’ by Sleater-Kinney ‘Punx-spray’ by Scraps ‘Garbage’ by Royal Headache ‘The Last Chiko Roll’ by Beef Jerk ‘Take want you want’ by Deaf Wish ‘Rejected’ by Scott and Charlene’s Wedding ‘I don’t wanna play the game’ by Teenage Mothers ‘Out of time’ by Camperdown and Out ‘Always on time’ by Chook Race ‘New Start Again’ by Dick Diver ‘Walk with Style’ by Bitch Prefect ‘How low can a Punk get’ By Lower Plenty ‘All Gone’ by Pop Singles ‘Sweater vest’ by Suss Cunts ‘I don’t know what I’m doing with life’ by Justin Heazelwood ‘Hangovers’ by Weak Boys ‘New Start Again’ by Dick Diver ‘Wasting Time’ by Dead Farmers ‘Sexy Alien’ by Orion ‘Everyone’s Everyone’ by Dollar Bar ‘Work in the Morning’ by Lower Plenty ‘Greg, the Stop Sign’ by TISM ‘Who are you’ by Twerps ‘Life/Thrills’ by Lower Plenty ‘What me worry?’ by Whitney Houston’s Crypt ‘Procrasturbation’ by Guy and Marcus Blackman Experiment ‘No Plans’ by Full Ugly ‘False Hope’ by Terrible Truths ‘Makin it Work’ by Sarah Mary Chadwick ‘Any Day Now’ by Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys ‘Bad Life Decisions’ by Bitch Prefect ‘Which way to go’ by Eddie Current Suppression Ring

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‘Everything goes wrong’ by Constant Mongrel ‘I don’t even want to change’ by The Drones ‘Deluded’ by The Ocean Party ‘That’s Me’ by Weak Boys ‘Depreston’ by Courtney Barnett ‘Neural Tension’ by Bare Grillz ‘Natural Progression’ by Boomgates ‘Forward motion’ by Pikelet ‘Go Away’ by Destiny 3000 ‘Desperation’ by The Friendsters ‘Ghosts on Mainstreet’ by Harmony ‘The Girls’ by Miss Destiny

Chapter 6

A DIY scene Cultural struggles and meaning making

Introduction In Part 2 we looked at the modality of representation struggles that police and transform class via those very struggles. Classed-imbued figures mark this affective atmosphere. Thus hipster and bogan invoke consternation over taste, lifestyle and morals. In Part 3 the book changes focus to look at modalities of struggle in the lives of young people who are participating in creative cultural activities in a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) music scene. Here notions of illusio and social gravity are employed to trace the ways motivations and ethos can traverse between fields and challenge their doxa. Chapter 6 looks at modalities of everyday struggle about meaning, identity and recognition, that is, struggles over doxa and reflexive engagement with illusio as one embarks on creative practices in the field of cultural production. Chapter 7 looks at how those same young people struggle to combine creative and artistic endeavours while trying to find and maintain meaningful work. Where Part 2 focused on the ways hipsters and bogans are invoked in the field of representation to shape the ways class is thought and made, Part 3 analyses practice in the overlapping fields of the labour market, education, cultural consumption and cultural production. Bourdieu saw the field of cultural production as a primary arena where fractions of the dominant classes clash: ‘who fight there sometimes in person but more often through producers oriented towards defending their “ideas” and satisfying their “tastes”’ (Bourdieu 1993b: 102). Such struggles integrate various encounters in an array of subfields that can be completely separate in terms of market, geographical and social space. There, the ‘different fractions of the dominant class can find products adjusted to their tastes’ (Bourdieu 1993b: 102). Bourdieu maintained that the dominant class fractions are totally immersed in these struggles. This still rings true for many aspects of cultural production and consumption, but due to the blurring of the distinction between so-called high and pop culture, and the rising precarity of those that work in cultural, creative and media industries, this modality of struggle has been opened out to include people who could not be accurately described as

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members of a ‘dominant’ class. They may be relatively high in subcultural and even cultural capital and may indeed function as cultural intermediaries, but they are far too low in economic capital to fit the ‘dominant’ category. Many of the young people I spoke to in the DIY scene were living below the poverty line. Part 3 draws upon research in Australia, where there is a networked (Sargent 2009) multi-city DIY music scene (see Straw 1991, discussed in Chapter 1) that largely rejects ‘mainstream’ popular culture (Baker, Bennett and Taylor 2013). It mostly distances itself from the ‘Oz rock’ canon (see Nichols 2016; Walker, Hogan and Beilharz 2012a, 2012b; Stratton 2006; Homan and Mitchell 2008) and from media outlets positioned as central to supporting youth culture, such as Triple J radio (Maalsen and McLean 2016; Strong 2010; Shaw 2012; Albury 1999; Dawson 1992). Taking a DIY and punk attitude in terms of their relation to wider culture (Hannerz 2013), the scene has been referred to broadly as ‘the ugly Australian underground’ (Kritzler 2014). It has developed its own niche genres such as ‘dolewave’, alongside cultural production in genres with longer traditions such as punk, hardcore, pop, folk, electronic and noise music (Atton 2011). These are important considerations because it is the ‘underground’ music, fashion and art scenes, the ‘creative proletariat’, that are the drivers of creativity and innovation. ‘The term “underground” refers to relatively autonomous processes of cultural production that unfold in the urban environment, often in connection to some “sub-cultural” (another difficult term nowadays) “scene” or other’ (Arvidsson 2007: 14). The underground scene, like youth cultures in general, exists and functions both online and offline (Kruse 2010; Lingel and Naaman 2011; Robards and Bennett 2012). This chapter broadly introduces scholarship on the development of punk and DIY as important areas of alternative cultural production and lifestyle. It then moves to discussions with members of the scene about their everyday struggles around the very meanings of DIY practice; struggles around the politics of naming that sprung up in the scene over the (non)genre of dolewave; and gender/sexuality struggles about practice that stem from a debate about a book written about the scene and the subsequent formation of a feminist collective.

‘DIY’: From punk to sociology to co-optation and beyond Music production and consumption has been a key object of study for understanding the everyday creation and maintenance of identity (DeNora 2000; Hennion 2001; Haenfler 2006). Youth cultural studies, especially since the Birmingham School’s (CCCS) foundational studies on subcultures, Cohen’s (1972) development of moral panic analysis, and Frith’s (1978) ‘sociology of rock’, has had a particular interest in punk (Laing 1985) especially as a form of ‘political’ (Phillipov 2006) and/or ‘transgressive’ (Langman 2008) popular culture. There is widespread academic interest to the point

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where it now has its own academic journal, Punk and Post-Punk, along with a group of researchers who refer to themselves as ‘punkademics’ (Furness 2012), and the Punk Scholars Network in the UK. Beyond the usual studies of punk as a (post)subculture, it has been variously theorised as ‘secular sacred clowning’ (Van Ham 2009). It is claimed punk can ‘both participate in, and often contradict, the utopian possibilities of performance’ (Maskell 2009); and punk has also been studied as a social network (Crossley 2015). My argument is that punk is now a form of social practice that takes it beyond mere subculture. In the scene where the research is conducted, ‘punk’ is used to describe music, bands, gigs and individuals. But the two ways ‘punk’ is mostly drawn upon is to define an attitude and to characterise an aesthetic. Punk as an outsider attitude with a rebellious nature has been popularised by the work of Don Letts, who made a documentary with the title, Punk: Attitude, and made many statements along the lines of ‘Punk is not mohawks and safety pins. It’s an attitude and a spirit, with a lineage and tradition’.1 Encarnacao (2016), who analyses the ways that ‘new folk’i is influenced by punk, argues that punk is also an aesthetic that has shaped the practices and philosophies of many musicians, and creative types in general, since the 1970s. He points to the formii of music, where, following Bourdieu, consideration of the form of a text illustrates a deeper understanding of it than ‘the mere apprehension of its content’ (2016: 3). For Encarnacao, the punk aesthetic involves questioning the ‘pop order’ and music industry practices in general, and asserting ‘the power of the flawed product’ (15), where ugly can be beautiful. Irrespective of musical style, punk manifests through ‘aesthetic’ entities such as lo-fi recording; an attitude to vocals where the usual idea of ‘a good singer’ is refused for a less conventional voice; the voice is not necessarily there to be ‘understood’ and is often quite low in the mix; and a less conventional song structure than the verse/chorus/bridge form. Essentially, the punk aesthetic celebrates ‘the importance of spontaneity, amateurism, improvisation in the broadest sense, DIY prerogatives, and experimentation with sound and structure’ (24). The people, practices and music that are in the scene discussed here all exhibit elements of the punk aesthetic and attitude. Punk is sometimes used interchangeably with DIY (Do-It-Yourself), an important concept in music scenes across the world. A prominent idea following the post-punk scenes in the early 1980s (Azerrad 2002), the idea of i Encarnacao (2016) defines new folk as encompassing an array of genre terminologies such as freak folk, progressive folk and New Weird America. Artists that he categorises as new folk include Will Oldham/Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart, Johanna Newsome, Cat Power, Akron/ Family, Six Organs of Admittance, Kes, Iron and Wine and Smog. ii ‘Form’ here in its technical sense as the structure of a piece of music, the way a song is divided into sections such as verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus/fade out.

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DIY was used to create an alternative space where musicians and likeminded people could work outside of the ‘mainstream’ commercial music industry to foster a relatively autonomous space for artistic creativity, community building, politics and identity work (McKay 1998; O’Connor 2008; Martin-Iverson 2011, 2014; Luvaas 2012). DIY, when thought of in this manner, is a form of subcultural capital (Thornton 1995) in the punk scene. Struggles over its meaning and practice become associated with who or what is ‘authentic’, traversing local and global levels. Not all punk is DIY, and not all DIY is punk. Aspects of this will be discussed through the data below, but we can see recent parallel struggles around the notion of ‘indie’ (Jones 2013; Harris 2012; Hibbert 2005; Cummings 2008; Fonarow 2006) or ‘alternative’ (Moore 2005; Frank 1997). Moore (2007) has looked at punk as a field of cultural production, arguing that its ‘dissent’ lies in the creation of ‘three chord poetry’ outside of the culture industry, where a DIY ethic imbues practices performed independently of the commercial market place and contains an anti-consumerist ethic. DIY with a punk attitude is about creativity, but is also about resisting commercial practices, where it can be considered as a form of political socialisation (Paris and Ault 2004). Cultural production continues to be an important site of meaningful practice and social struggle, despite the oligarchy of the multinational media conglomerates. Young people continue to appropriate the technologies of communications media to establish creative forms of work, participatory social networks, and outlets for self-expression. (Moore 2007: 469, my emphasis) O’Connor (2008) uses a Bourdieusian lens to analyse the emergence of DIY record labels in the US throughout the 1980s, looking at their 30-year struggle to maintain autonomy from traditional commercial music industry processes of organisation, distribution and marketing. He maps the dynamics of the field (O’Connor 2016) by using habitus to think about how decisions are made, and employs forms of capital to think about status and class. O’Connor’s work is valuable for understanding punk as a form of everyday social practice. He accentuates the usual positioning of punk as a form of subcultural resistance that tends to overemphasise shared values within it. DIY record labels are therefore seen to serve as both a ‘social activity and an anticapitalist business model … This leads into an examination of the ways in which DIY punk labels embody Walter Benjamin’s call for progressive cultural production’ (Dunn 2012: 217). Like many studies that rely only on the use of the habitus-field-capital triad (for critique see James 2015; Malsch et al. 2011; Sallaz and Zavisca 2007; France and Threadgold 2015; Brosnan and Threadgold 2017), O’Connor misses the opportunity to dig deeper into these day-to-day struggles through summoning Bourdieusian concepts that speak to how experience, emotions

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and choice interact in the way young people make decisions. This is especially important because some studies tend to treat punk practice as mere aesthetics, not in the way that Encarnacao generalises the term above, but as aesthetics in a simple mode of fashion and distinction. For instance, Force (2009) studied the merchandising practices of a DIY scene in the US, emphasising the ‘competitive’ aspects of the performance of authenticity to increase subcultural capital, largely bracketing out the processes of meaning making and identity (see Burns 2016) that are fundamental to these practices. Authenticity is a concept long debated (Mullaney 2012), but in my research, it is something that is genuinely struggled over. It is not seen as some kind of symbolic competition or fake performance (Lewin and Williams 2009). Rather, commitment to the illusio of authenticity is reflexively managed over time. Emphasising punk as a practice within fields can show its diversity, while highlighting struggles over its very values and practices. Put simply, some punks want to change the world while others want to just listen to loud aggressive music. Some punks practice socially progressive politics, while others are racist and sexist. These different actions and opinions all happen within the same social space, and may even happen within the same person. What unites it all is the punk attitude and aesthetic. I propose these operate as an illusio that is summoned by some young people to make decisions outside the fields of cultural production and consumption. In the social sciences, the concept of DIY has been invoked in a variety of ways to contribute to an understanding of processes of social change and processes of individualisation. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) have written about the idea of ‘DIY biography’ in terms of reflexivity. This much-maligned concept in youth studies still expresses quite well the struggles young people face. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that the development of the DIY biography does not necessarily happen by choice, and it does not necessarily ‘succeed’. It needs to be thought of as a ‘risk biography’ or even a ‘tightrope biography’, where a young person may feel in a ‘state of permanent (partly overt, partly concealed) endangerment. The façade of prosperity, consumption, glitter can often mask the nearby precipice’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 7). This creates an intensity about making the right choices, where making the wrong choice can be: compounded by the downward spiral of private misfortune, divorce, illness, the repossessed home – all this is merely called bad luck. Such cases bring into the open what was always secretly on the cards: the do-it-yourself biography can swiftly become the breakdown biography. (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 7, my emphasis) The reference to ‘bad luck’ is about how one perceives misfortune. Structural explanations are obfuscated by the processes of individualisation, but they are still there mediating life chances (see Threadgold 2011). The young people in

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this scene are walking the tightrope between maintaining their creative passions and finding a satisfying work-life. In this endeavour they are reliant upon their possession of forms of capital (see Threadgold and Nilan 2009; Threadgold 2015a). Recently, the notion of DIY has been reconfigured to think about the variety of ways that people practice outside normative civic expectations. For instance, the concept of ‘DIY citizenship’ has been developed to understand ‘practices of youth cultural production and consumption, civic networks in everyday spaces, and work on the self as new forms of civic engagement’ (Harris and Roose 2014: 794). In fact, Beer (2014) has made a case for bringing a punk and DIY ethos into sociology itself, to develop creativity, inventiveness and liveliness in a field challenged by a neoliberalising workplace and governmentalised ranking and ‘quality’ exercises. Beer argues that a relativistic and eclectic formation of sociological knowledge; raw, stripped back and fearless public communication; and an inventive DIY ethic towards methods will help sociology have a greater impact in the future. In the field of cultural consumption, ‘DIY’ seems to have undergone a process of co-optation. It is now invoked to encourage activities such as home decorating and renovations and other forms of ‘self-improvement’. ‘Big Box’ (Klein 2001) companies such as Bunnings and Ikea use ‘DIY’ in their promotion collateral. Home brewing and cheese making sets are sold online with marketing directed at the so-called ‘hipster’ target market (Arsel and Thompson 2011; Cronin, McCarthy and Collins 2014; Michael 2015). If one types ‘DIY P’ into Google, the algorithmic auto-complete fills in the blank with ‘projects’, ‘pirate costume’, ‘poison ivy costume’, ‘photo booth’ and ‘princess jasmine costume’. ‘Punk’ is not among the predictions. These developments have seen a move in what would have been traditionally considered DIY scenes to embrace the term DIT (Do-It-Together) (Sharp 2017; Stahl 2011). DIT still maintains core DIY values such as self-publishing, crowdfunding and so on, while rejecting music as an economically productive endeavour. However, DIT also recognises the mainstreaming (and masculinising) of contemporary DIY narratives and so resists individualised practices and the pervasiveness of co-optation. Wehr (2012) traces the increasing phenomenon of people ‘doing it themselves’ – building, repairing and making – without the aid of experts. He frames this theoretically in line with Habermas’ ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ and Marx’s concepts of alienation and mystification. ‘Social behaviours can be a conscious reply to a complex and fast-moving world, a nostalgia for simpler times past, or just an economic impulse’ (Wehr 2012: x).iii Three categories situate ‘do-it-yourselfers’ (DIYers). There are DIY iii

DIY examples include: the ‘back to the land’ move around food production and home building; the rise of home schooling and self-governed worker collectives; ideas about self-government such as squats and areas of cities like Copenhagen’s Christiania; and the rise of DIY media such as blogs and the return of zines.

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individualists ‘acting on their own inclinations’. There are DIY coordinators, who actively share their DIY spirit with others. ‘Lastly, there are people entirely caught up in the idea of DIY, and follow it almost like a philosophy. They live a lifestyle devoted to the idea, so we might call them DIY lifestylers’ (Wehr 2012: 2). The participants in my research project conveyed a combination of all these traits, but I would be reluctant to categorise them completely as such. All expressed the idea of DIY as a key motivation. It is framed here under the concept of illusio. DIY is important for their practice and sense of community, but they also struggled over what the very concept means. In the following sections I discuss an array of what O’Connor (2008) calls ‘struggles for autonomy’, to show how these struggles are not only about creating a semi-autonomous space for practice, but are struggles over the very meaning of what constitutes its doxa. The invocation of notions of authenticity, genre classifications, and recognition debates about gender and sexuality discussed below, all serve to position individuals within the scene and also define the scene itself. These struggles are its very conditions, its doxa and illusio, which are so attractive to the participants in the first place. But these struggles also create the social circumstances for the evolvement of the scene, where challenges to accepted norms and taken for granted assumptions come from participants who bring in influences from broader social movements and values. These struggles also define individuals’ efforts to, as one participant put it, ‘find themselves’.

Everyday struggles in a DIY music scene in Australia Across the world, ‘indie’ music, once arguably seen as an authentic ‘alternative’ to the crass and commercial ‘mainstream’, has provoked some vehement debate in music journalism and blogs about whether it has become the habitat of the privileged and the site of the ‘hipster’ co-optation of alternative culture (Jones 2013). For instance, the band Mumford and Sons, who are still often labelled alternative or indie, are the children of the UK 1%iv while co-opting the sounds of folk and sing about ‘rising up’.2 In Australia, these struggles are sometimes expressed over the role Triple J radio plays in shaping who gets heard. It raises questions about whether bands are altering their sound to get on the radio (the so-called ‘Triple J sound’) and debates the general homogenisation of music and music reporting.3 Participants in this national but ‘underground’ indie scene have all struggled to give a name to what they do. Even the term ‘DIY’ invokes some consternation around its possible connotations and associations. Naming something, especially something that is creative and means a lot to you, is difficult to accept. Once it has a label, it can be categorised, stereotyped, co-opted and destroyed. It feels iv 1% here refers to the Occupy Movement’s slogan of ‘we are the 99%’ against the super-rich of the 1%. See Graeber (2014).

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condescending and cosmetic.v It is with struggles over naming and meaning in the scene that we begin. Meaning struggles and authenticity: DIY, scenes and practice Everyone I interviewed had their own relationship to the very notion of DIY. Opinions also varied as to whether what they are participating in is actually a ‘scene’ based around DIY principles. Stan is in many bands that are positioned in many different genres: I think it’s a scene. I dunno, even from [his Hard Core band], people who sometimes are at a [his Dolewave band] gig, people will have a [Hard Core band] shirt on. And I’ll be like, ‘ok, that’s funny’, because I can’t think of music that’s further apart. It’s a scene that definitely doesn’t have one musical genre … It’s definitely not genre based, but I think it’s a scene. (Stan) Stan then invokes a form of illusio as something that unites the scene: a shared passion for and commitment to, ‘good’ music, where ‘good’ is defined within the doxa of the field as analogous with ‘authentic self-expression’, and shared investment in seeking out a community of likeminded people who feel like outsiders: Everybody who is part of the scene are extreme music enthusiasts … You can go to the Big Day Out [festival] and you can tell that this is not something that people devote their whole lives to. Most of the people [at the Big Day Out] show, they don’t play music or collect music avidly. Like they wouldn’t know about The Friendsters, the [underground] Sydney band. See you wouldn’t know about them if it wasn’t for being obsessed with the music. It’s like an obsessed scene. (Stan) Similarly, Axel, who has been heavily invested in punk and hardcore as a performer and ‘zine’ writer (see Atton 2010) for well over a decade, points to comparable traits that are about commitment and wholeheartedly investing in the illusio of the scene: I think a lot of the music I like and a lot of the bands that I’m into and a lot of the writing that I like is about that experience of being a fanatic. It’s just like, this is like, everything. (Axel) v See Hebdige (1979) for a discussion of processes like those I describe here, through his notion of incorporation.

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Music is everything. When I then ask Axel if it is weird for him now that there are fanatics about his own music, he replies: ‘Certainly, yeah. But I’m fanatic about it, so I guess I can relate to that in some respects’. Stan points out that it is not a sound itself that unites the community, but an attitude, and then goes on to reflexively question some of his own practices in terms of DIY authenticity: It is as simple as just underground music … just music that’s not popular. But it’s also just good music because I don’t feel like stuff that I listen to on Triple J or mainstream radio is good. It’s people who … Yeah, it’s really hard to say what unifies that scene … It’s a DIY attitude but not everybody who’s in the scene is DIY. (Stan) Stan then notes that one of the more popular bands he is in is not strictly DIY: [DIY record label] may organise stuff for us sometimes. I guess that’s like an indie label though. Or even the [his Post Punk band] record was put out in Australia, the CD was put out through [Overseas record label] which is owned by Warner, I think. So that’s not strictly DIY. (Stan) Stan is sketching out the blurry border between what can be deemed DIY and what should be categorised as indie or commercial, where the line falls somewhere between small scale, local independent labels and multinational corporations. He illustrates this with an anecdote about one of his band’s songs being used in commercial skate videos. He also mentions doing gigs sponsored by corporations: I didn’t like that … Ok, so the first one was kind of done without our knowing. It was like, ‘oh yeah, p.s. – this song is on a video’. It wasn’t a song I’d written or anything, and it was a friend of [band member] who made the video. And he used to let him put his songs on them and stuff. And then the next one came on, and I was like, ‘oh, ok, free shoes, cool’. I wasn’t really paying attention then. Two months ago, we were offered another one, and I said no. I maybe snapped out of it or something. It’s hard to be consistent. And we weren’t getting much money for it. I think it was just to help out [band member]’s mate. (Stan) Here, Stan struggles between helping friends in the DIY community way, and the implications of his work being used by a multinational corporation. He points out that someone is getting money from the publicity created: ‘somebody in head office at Nike in America or somebody at the advertising

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company in Australia. It certainly wasn’t a Vietnamese woman [who makes the shoes he was given]’. Stan is therefore negotiating a strategy between the delicate boundaries of staying true to traditional anti-commercial punk notions, and the need to be compensated for one’s own labour. In that space, the spectre of ‘selling out’ hangs heavy but is difficult to avoid. Yet he does not see this as ‘selling out’: ‘[The whole band] get like $200 or something. It’s like “ok, is this selling out even though we’re getting probably a similar amount of money as if we just put on our own show”’? Jan points out that members of the scene who manage to start their own DIY record label ‘work hard and are quite savvy’, therefore their success isn’t about ‘selling out’, but knowing how things work, that is, possessing and wielding subcultural capital: In my mind, I would classify [name of label owner] as, if you take away his actual participation in so many bands which is fucking ridiculous, I don’t know how he manages to do that … I would say that he’s more of like, an amazing small business owner cause he’s making it work … So you probably present in quite a DIY aesthetic but you’re probably a lot better at the business side of things. (Jan) This speaks to the acceptance of doing business in the scene, if it is done in the right manner. Axel has developed concerns about what ‘DIY’ has become: ‘It’s not a sound, it’s not a style. It’s not a fashion, it’s not a political ideology or a sense of identity with anything typical’. Around the time he started doing his zine, over ten years ago, Axel saw DIY becoming associated with a particular politics: ‘I can understand why people that were very attracted to leftist politics were attracted to using the word DIY to identify with their stuff’. At the same time, the term DIY started to be used in what Axel sees as problematic ways: It also became a word that was just like: ‘this is a word that anyone can use and it applies to any activity’. Even bands like Jetvi at some stage were DIY and could have been like, [sarcastically] ‘Yeah, we were DIY and then we became too busy’. (Axel) vi Jet are a successful, but much maligned Australian rock band. They started playing gigs in Melbourne bars and were picked up at the time there was a worldwide push for the resurgence of rock music, especially promoted by Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, which also included bands like The Strokes, The White Stripes, Vue, Von Bondies, The Vines and Wolfmother. Their debut album sold millions of copies, but they have been consistently criticised for an inauthentic and derivative sound.

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At that point, Axel started to rethink the notion of DIY, how it was used, and struggled with his own relationship to it. He points out that for the early US and UK scenes that used the term: There was always a community around them and a bunch of people. So, I never got a real sense from anything that I was doing that I was completely alone or that I couldn’t depend on other people. I suppose the idea was that DIY was coming from a sense of a community whereas everything else was coming from a sense of industry. I understand that kind of tension. But it became a word that so many fucking bands involved in the industry would use as a badge of credibility. That they either were a ‘DIY band’ or that they still were DIY even though they had a manager! So, I kinda have strayed away from it for a while. (Axel) Axel here implies the spirit of DIT (Sharp 2017), where the community is central to DIY practice; it is not something to be done individually (see Martin-Iverson 2014). One of his bands was nominated for an independent record award: [We] got elected for this independent record award thing recently and we were the only band that had released a record independently. But the definition of what is independent has shifted … The industry developed this ‘independent labels’ thing, but they were still run and operated and essentially were an industry phenomenon. Whereas independent labels at one stage were independent cause they weren’t part of the industry. (Axel) Axel implies here that the very authenticity of the concept ‘independent’ had been obliterated. At that point, Axel stopped using DIY because he ‘felt it had been co-opted … I was struggling to retain ownership of the term DIY; I saw it as a dead-end street. So, I just abandoned it’. What Axel is describing are struggles over the blurry boundaries of the field, what is in and out, and what is at stake. Axel is reflexive, he sees DIY up against mainstream concepts and posits himself as not part of the mainstream. If bands that are not legitimately practising independently are included in the classification, then the classification of ‘independent’ itself needs to be rejected, removed and replaced. DIY then, is a practice that is still pursued, but may not be something that one would label themselves: one might say, ‘I’m a punk’, but is much less likely to say ‘I’m DIY’. This section has presented discussion about ‘what is DIY’ (McKay 1998). All the participants have a general understanding of the doxic form of what DIY ‘is’, but have differing views on how they engage with it, how it changes, and what it will be in the future. These struggles over taste and boundaries

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resonate with Hennion’s (2007: 98) claim that thinking about taste as a form of reflexivity can help us to ‘understand the way we make ourselves become sensitized, to things, to ourselves, to situations and to moments, while simultaneously controlling how those feelings might be shared and discussed with others’. The struggles expressed about DIY and authenticity are struggles over the very motivations and meaning of their cultural practices and are therefore central to the ways they understand their own position in social space and challenge normative doxa. Classification struggles and genre: Dolewave and the politics of naming A new genre has evolved in and around the scene: Dolewave.vii Some of the bands included in discussions around dolewave include: Dick Diver, Twerps, Kitchen’s Floor, Bitch Prefect, The Ocean Party, Lower Plenty, The Stevens and School of Radiant Living.4 Jimi Kritzler, author of Noise in my Head: Voices from the Ugly Australian Underground, could not be more dismissive of the category, especially as they are not particularly ugly, and some are more prominent than what should be described as underground. Kritzler points out that his 500-page book does not mention dolewave at all, which expresses his feeling towards intellectualising the ‘non-existent’ genre. For Kritzler, the bands linked to dolewave are ‘just great pop bands’: To force on them and the music some kind of socio-economic status is ridiculous … Dole Wave is a hilarious joke taken too far by critics struggling to link a batch of bands together who in no way subscribe to such a half-baked music theory.5 I somewhat agree with the spirit of what Kritzler is saying here, but I’m going to intellectualise it anyway! Statements like this, the writing that created and promoted the idiom, and the discussions of the genre presented below, all display elements of a Bourdieusian classification struggle, while at the same time showing how recent socio-cultural changes make the class aspects of classifying blurry and porous. Quite a few of the writers writing those pieces could be described as subcultural cultural intermediaries. In the past, the naming of a music genre has always engendered discussion and debate, especially around the seemingly obligatory mythologising around rock history (Inglis 2007; Strong 2011a; Williams 2012; Thackray 2015). These histories are always contested: was ‘Heavy Metal’ coined by William Burroughs? Steppenwolf ? Or Barry Gifford in Rolling Stone in 1968? Was ‘Punk’ coined by Dave Marsh or Legs McNeil? Was ‘Grunge’ coined by Mark Arm of Mudhoney or Everett True in Melody Maker? The mythologising vii

‘Dole’ is slang for welfare in Australia, with dole bludger being a symbolically violent colloquial term for someone who depends on welfare payouts.

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around names is part of the mythologising of rock. But the coining of the term dolewave is different. Unlike traditional music genre terminologies created by prominent musicians, experts or journalists, dolewave was devised on a discussion board6 by an anonymous participant under a pseudonym, ‘hyperfuzz’, on the now largely defunct website, Mess and Noise.viii It was an ironic in-joke made in a space with a few hundred participants that later made its way to the pages of The Guardian. With the internet providing a semi-permanent searchable history, maybe the politics of naming has democratised and demythologised (see Carter and Rogers 2014). Fans on blogs and discussion boards can be responsible for the naming of new genresix rather than the usual gatekeepers.x Bourdieu argues: Knowledge of the social world and, more precisely, the categories that make it possible, are the stakes, par excellence, of political struggle, the inextricably theoretical and practical struggle for the power to conserve or transform the social world by conserving or transforming the categories through which it is perceived. (Bourdieu 1985: 729) The resulting discussions, that is, the struggles, in and around the scene about the invention of dolewave provide a good example of how category classifications can either conserve or transform the social world. The debate raged. Is dolewave actually a thing? Regardless of whether it’s a thing, what does the discussion even mean? Is there a politics of ‘dolewave’? Is it a rejection of the precarity of the Howard/Rudd/Abbott era of Australian politics? What ‘class’ are the dolewavers representing and is it ‘authentic’? Is there such a thing as authenticity, even in underground music?7 Is dolewave an artistic critique or fatalistic apathy? What does this music say about the creators and their lives? Why do people writing about the scene get to label it, rather than those who are creating the music? Dolewave may have started as an ironic in-joke, but the label has stuck and grown to be meaningful, even if the bands don’t care for the label themselves. Artists often do not like to be categorised and compartmentalised, even if some of them engage with the categories ironically themselves. Irony, as discussed in earlier chapters, is itself political, even when it is attempting to be apolitical (see viii Mess and Noise was an influential website in the scene that posted news, reviews and some longer feature and analysis articles. The Mess and Noise discussion board was where people in and around the scene discussed things from the latest record release to what was on TV that night to global politics. The site was seen across the country as being Melbourne-centric. ix Another example of a similar naming process was the invention of ‘Chillwave’ (bands such as Youth Lagoon, Washed Out, Neon Indian) by ‘Carles’, from the satirical and now defunct Hipster Runoff blog. x For more on music journalism see Morley (2009); Thackray (2015); and Popular Music and Society (2010) Special issue on Music Journalism.

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Serazio 2008). Dolewave has become ‘something’ whether they like it or not and is used by participants in the scene even if they are rejecting it. In these discussions, the term ‘dolewave’ is often taken very literally by band members, who reject it because they actually have jobs. But what binds these bands and the individuals who constitute them, and, importantly, the people who write about them, is the experience of youth precarity, regardless of whether they are middle class, working class, on the dole, employed or under-employed. It is social media, blog discussions and journalistic pieces that ‘invented’ dolewave. They serve to maintain its cultural position, while at the same time debating its legitimacy, authenticity and existence. There have been several analytical pieces written about dolewave on music blogs and websites that attempt to locate it within broader political struggles, especially in the lives of outsider young people who aren’t enamoured by the doxic trajectory of career, marriage and 2.2 kids. Some of the analysis is quite sociological. For example, writing on his Crawlspace website, which as he puts it championed ‘strange/weird/beautiful/repugnant Australian music’, Shaun Prescott’s piece began as a review of a record by School of Radiant Living but developed into a wider paean to the genre of dolewave. These bands are powerful now because they reject the neo-liberal, selfimprovement, mortgage-till-death, make-a-buck-or-die, protect-at-all-costs impulses which are more real now, in established workaday Australian life, than ever before. This uncovers a realisation that ‘our’: former notions of Australianness were flimsy, and that what remains when these notions are removed is … basically nothing. We have nothing. We have no identity but our illusions and our atrocities. Prescott is situating dolewave as reflecting the day-to-day realities of young Australians who do not buy the governmentalised illusio sold to them from an early age. Dolewave expresses how ‘we’, young people who resist and critique mainstream culture, feel, pointing to a resistant collusio: I think the best dolewave is intrinsically depressed. Bitch Prefect and Dick Diver are beautiful and poignant in an aggressively sad way, in a fashion we can only laugh along with. Referring to a specific song, he sees: Dick Diver’s ‘New Start Again’ is a paean to the years when artists and outsiders could exist without being ‘creatives’, when unprofitable, art-forits-own-sake wasn’t necessarily a contract with poverty.

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Dolewave, therefore ‘is not important’, but it is, sad, smart and beautiful. It is not, as some of its detractors have surmised, the result of blind apathy. It is bearing witness to these developments and insinuating their results. This implies notions of social gravity; the very aesthetic of dolewave expresses being young and feeling disenfranchised by things that are mostly beyond your own control: But it is pop music so it does not bludgeon. It is understated yet incisive. It is aesthetically unambitious but it contains multitudes. Dolewave is the exploration of a dream which, once potent, is no longer believable. Notions of ourselves are the only positive thing we have left. There are echoes here of the reflexive modernity theorists, such as Beck, Giddens and Bauman, where how we live is constituted by biographical solutions to systemic contradictions (Beck 1992: 137). Max Easton responded with a piece called: ‘Bad beer and guitar-pop’.8 He reflects on the way the term dolewave was used to denigrate, where he resisted it because he thought it was classist and mean, it was a form of snobbery and condemnation: ‘Dolewave’ to me is used to belittle something, as if they are saying: ‘you are singing about poverty and thus you are no good to me. Maybe you should work harder and get a better job’. But as these exchanges evolved, the meaning of dolewave changed, to where: Both sides of the class war have accepted its usage and I’m not one to argue with them; I’m happy to use it here for ease of reference. There’s no irony in sipping at a VB with your mates, it’s an unconscious acceptance of your place in the class war. Dolewave has moved from a form of expressing symbolic violence to signifying one’s lowly place in social space, where laughing at failed attempts at selfimprovement is a way of making do. Further, and against the usual critical attitude towards brands in rock and punk (Cummings 2008; Klein 2008), Easton locates the use of brand signifiers as a sign of authenticity, they are not ‘having a laugh’ when they do this but they are: recounting aspects of their lives through details that mean something to them. In listing off perceived failures and contextualising them, you empower it, and dolewave makes it culturally important to embrace your flaws.

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For Easton, this speaks to the social position of those who make the music: When you don’t have money and you don’t have an identity, you do what you can: you pretend it’s all okay, you have a whinge, you go out and have a laugh, you learn a few open chords and read from your diary. Easton pitches dolewave against the rise of post-Oprah self-help, ‘everything will be alright if you just try harder’ discourse that dominates media discussion about how to be successful in life, especially for young people. Ian Rogers, who is slightly older than the previous writers and is now an academic, later situated the rise of dolewave beyond the immediate present and back to the politics and cultural economy of the 1990s. He challenges the class analysis implicit in the previous pieces, where there was ‘an absence of aesthetic politics and taste’:9 Flying Nun style jangle pop is not exactly working class music. (That’s metal.) The vibe of these bands is the eternal share-house, forever stuck at that moment when you say to yourself, ‘Enough of this shit’ but can’t scratch together the bond for your own place. Reflecting some of the key findings of youth studies research, Rogers points out that it is now normal for this feeling to carry into the 30s, and dolewave marries this feeling to some of the more enjoyable and cheap moments that can be ‘extracted from the mess … It doesn’t cost a lot to have a picnic in the park or to record at home. There’s more to life as well as less’. He then associates the themes of dolewave as a rejection of the legacy of recent postHoward Australian politics, especially ‘Kevin Rudd (incompetent and a prat) and then Julia Gillard (incompetent and a homophobe)’. So, while Rogers can ‘take or leave’ dolewave bands he expresses respect for them ‘for their blanket rejection of this recent past’. For none of what happened in those last years of Howard prepared anyone for what came next. All our pop songs of rejection and homespun valorisation didn’t mean a thing when the ‘distant future’ proved such a bummer. Joshua Manning subsequently challenged dolewave about its apathy and lack of punk credentials in a piece called ‘Someone please tell me punk’s not dead’.10 Echoing the Frankfurt School critique of popular culture, he argues that dolewave does not look to change anything or enlighten anyone, and provides ‘a jaunt in escapism, reminding us that life can still be enjoyable on the cheap’. Its ‘approach is one of begrudging acceptance of a system that crushes its creative aspirations and celebrat[es], ironically, the failure to achieve the societal definition of success’. He juxtaposes the ‘hardline

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upbringing’ of (unnamed) punks who ‘were told that art could not flourish in the system and this triggered a desire to overthrow it’. Manning then argues that the psychology of dolewave is more complex: Thanks to that constant mantra of ‘try and you will succeed’, instead of being angry at a system that doesn’t work we are left with unrealistic expectations and a feeling of personal failure. Again, there are echoes of reflexive modernity theorists here. The perception of blame for social failure is individualised, despite widening inequalities. He then goes further to seemingly denigrate his generation for ‘accepting the system’, living life ‘under the illusion that we can exist as we want under it’. In our minds, our failure to thrive is our own. From here it’s not hard to come to the simple conclusion that the reason dolewave is so apathetic is that you can’t rage against what you can’t blame. For Manning, this is ‘extremely unsettling’ because it just accepts the status quo. So, while ‘self-depreciating lyrics’, in jokes about ‘yuppie social climbers’ and remembering the fun day when you got drunk with friends is ‘all well and good. In fact, at times they’re great’: But I’d much rather if dolewave wasn’t ‘intrinsically depressed’ and ‘poignantly beautiful’, but wanted to simultaneously fuck up the system and enlighten the masses to the plight of our society. Reading these pieces, you can feel how much music means to these writers. Reflexively speaking, for me as a lifelong avid consumer of ‘underground’ and not-so-underground music (with no musical ability), these discussions are significant for the very experience of listening and appreciating. It is not just the music that plays an affective role in one’s pleasure and emotional reaction. Reading about what other people think about the music, how they situate it in broader social context, and whether or not you agree, all contribute to how music feels. DeNora (2000: 68) argues that ‘musical materials provide terms and templates for elaborating self-identity – for identity’s identification’. Peter, who plays in several bands and records many others in his own studio, puts it like this: The people who can write about it well and with context and who sort of position it in a broader scheme of like, ‘this is actually what this is about or this is some of the things that it’s drawing from and this is where it’s leading potentially’ … Like, you can read it and it’s not pretentious academic waffle, it’s brilliant. (Peter)

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When you are talking to musicians themselves about the activity that goes on around the scene that isn’t specifically making records or playing gigs, they will often say something along the lines of ‘it’s all about the music’. But it never is. Even for the creators themselves. I’m not saying that musicians are lying in this regard, but this is a good example of what Bourdieu calls ‘the double language of disinterest’ (1998b: 92–126), where ‘necessity’ is disguised as ‘disinterest’. In the DIY scene, deliberating on the meaning of punk or dolewave illustrates that it is about much more than the music. Nonetheless, the illusio of the scene is based on notions of authenticity. Artistic intention and purity therefore are used to obfuscate and downplay other struggles in, about and around the community. Elements of these dolewave pieces are echoed when scene members discuss the significance of it in different ways. In the interviews, members of the scene reflected on the emergence of dolewave in a number of ways: from dismissal, to mirth, to forming their own analysis. Most have read some, if not all the above pieces. For instance, Jemima is a member of one band categorised as dolewave. When asked if she thinks dolewave is actually a thing, she says: I mean I guess it is. Like, if people think it is, it is, you know? At least for now it is. Maybe in a couple of years’ time, people will have more perspective … It’s more like a time thing that relates us and a geographical thing. And a social thing. (Jemima) Jemima sees dolewave doing categorising work that speaks to locality and temporality. Thus dolewave evinces a sense of place, in a similar manner to bands like The Triffids that are situated as evocative of 1980s Australia (Stratton 2007). John, who is in several bands and runs a label that has released bands that have been put in the general dolewave category, extends this to analyse how music journalism contributes to a historical narrative that forms its doxa: I think dolewave is a thing, I think it’s definitely a thing because it’s been invented and has now been written into the books of history to some extent. It’s an interesting reflection on the way journalism is going, where we pull those terms off comments on threads and blogs as opposed to published magazines or a qualified journalist. Yeah, the name definitely exists, people talk about it, people argue about it, but I don’t think people [in the bands] necessarily subscribe to it. (John) Yet John is resistant to what the term means and the symbolic violence inherent in the ways it misrepresents the actual lives of the artists:

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A lot of the musicians think it’s a ridiculous term. In fact, there is an argument that there are very few similarities between those bands, to link them into some sort of movement … The thing is, they’re not actually on the dole [laughs]. (John) Most of the band members find the whole thing quite funny and are reluctant to take it too seriously: Oh, it’s pretty funny. I like that there’s a grouping. And I think that the actual name is funny. I don’t know why I think it’s funny, maybe just the grouping at a base level, that we have enough of us to qualify for a name, that’s really cool. And that someone has deemed that enough so that it’s a sort of movement thing … Oh, I don’t know, it didn’t offend me. It bemused me. But I wasn’t doing that argey-bargey like, ‘oh, I work’! It bemused me but I don’t really let any of those stupid music things make me angry [laughs]. (Fanny) Following Fanny’s mention of work, Stan pushed the critique further to include how it does not accurately represent the situations of the people in the bands or their mixed class and ethnic backgrounds. He sees it as an effort to put a label on some similar bands, but ‘the people who play in these bands are not all one class’. He sketched out the background of one of the bands he is in that has been called dolewave. He and another band member are: ‘both from like, lower class. I couldn’t say I was working class, because my parents never worked! [laughs]’. Another band member ‘came through the art scene … and then, he’s like half Indonesian’. The final member of the band ‘is super inner city Melbourne’. For Stan, the fact that ‘there’s four totally different people’ in the band makes the class based categorisation of dolewave redundant. Debbie experienced symbolic violence when a record she worked on closely with her mostly female bandmates was co-opted in the name of dolewave. It was categorised in one written piece as emblematic of a movement with which she feels minimal connection: Yeah, well we put out that [band name] record and it all just became a discussion about dolewave. ’Cause the first thing he wrote was: ‘This album I thought it would be dolewave and it’s not.’ And then he starts talking about dolewave and then the whole thing was just about dolewave. (Debbie) This felt unfair, she added, ‘I was like: “what about our thing? This woman band!” Instead of discussing what the bloody fucking guys making fucking

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guitar pop are doing, you know? Very annoying’. The dominance of men in the scene is discussed further below: here Debbie’s ‘woman band’ was consigned to a discussion about mostly boys making melancholy pop music. Other members of the scene who are not actually in bands considered dolewave also have quite ambivalent attitudes towards the genre. Callan thinks the term is hilarious, he pointed out that in one of the bands that are ‘torch bearers’ of dolewave, ‘half of them are like private school boys. And they’re gainfully employed’. More importantly for Callan, he has authenticity issues with the bands: I think that a lot of [the music] is really derivative and I think that it’s just not authentically Australian either. I don’t know if it’s coming from an authentic place and that’s what I find disagreeable with it. (Callan) A lack of ‘authenticity’ here is used to downplay the political significance of the genre, especially as the sound is generally seen as being retro and in debt to the New Zealand label Flying Nunxi and some prominent Australian bands of the 1980s such as The Go-Betweens.xii But others saw the ‘Australian’ aspect as key to the genre’s importance: Yeah, the lyrical thing … Like some Dick Diver songs are a bit more metaphysical. It’s like an Australiana thing. There’s been a new sort of like, nationalism through music. I think the obvious thing is time and place. It is music that was made in Australia, at this time and I think within a community … So, those are all linking factors. (John) For John, looking at dolewave more broadly, ‘there are a lot of linking factors, there’s the Aussie accents and stuff like that’ but at the same time ‘there’s a lot of differences between the bands’ as well. Consequently, while band members expressed ambivalence about being categorised as dolewave, they had read the pieces and begun to form their own analysis of what those pieces meant. They often pointed out inconsistencies in the classifications. Here, Stan is referring to the Manning piece cited above: The first one I read saying [dolewave] was super unpoliticised, or like, it was trying to be political but it kinda put a class on it, saying that it was

xi Flying Nun is an influential New Zealand record label that is commonly mentioned as a key influence on the dolewave bands. See Bannister (2006). xii The Go-Betweens were formed in Brisbane in 1977. They established a cult following in the 1980s. They reformed in 2000 until McLennan died in 2006. They have a bridge named after them in Brisbane. See Nichols (2003).

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all rich kids doing the dolewave music and ‘how can you take it serious’ and it was really anti-revolution. Or something. (Stan) The ‘or something’ here is a rhetorical device used to minimise one’s apparent emotional or intellectual investment, that is, to convey disinterest. Axel goes on to reject the argument that the dolewave bands are somehow inauthentic because some of their members are middle class, doing a class analysis of his own: Yeah, these people that are making the accusations about these bands being middle class, generally they are gonna be middle class as well. Cause it’s generally middle class people that are most concerned with calling out other people for being middle class. (Axel)xiii He also linked dolewave to something intrinsically Australian. He feels that we are in a time where ‘people are not embarrassed of Australian identity, but they’re not necessarily proud of it either’. Axel doesn’t see dolewave as ‘nationalistic’ and says that if these bands were around in the 1990s, they would probably have dressed like grunge bands, aping the American movement. But where he saw grunge fashion – ‘that kind of logger, working class, flanno, pair of ripped jeans and boots’ – as a kind of ‘working class chic’, when it comes to dolewave bands: The thing is a lot of these people are actually working class, it’s not that they’re trying to look working class. That’s what their family looks like and they don’t want to look like they’re American, they’ve seen the limitations of that kind of thing. I think that’s important. (Axel) In discussions about dolewave, as well as discussions about punk in general, the revolutionary stereotype sometimes associated with punk, as in the Manning piece, was largely rejected by many scene members. For instance, Axel, who is in several punk and hardcore bands, rejected the association of punk with revolution as naïve and ill-informed: That last piece, about the ‘social hostility of punk’ … I read that piece and I was like ‘this is the kind of approach to punk that I always find problematic, this demand that it be responsible’. There has been bands like Crass or bands like the DC, bands that have attempted to produce a socially responsible and aware audience, but it’s always also been full of

xiii Reflexively speaking, this is a fair description of Part 2 of this book.

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nihilistic, hateful and politically confused people. Often racists. Often completely ignorant about the way that their actions affect others. (Axel) For Axel, punk and progressive politics do not necessarily go together. Many of his favourite punk and hardcore bands are not progressive, but nihilistic and ‘idiotic’. For instance, he points to the long history of punk bands that write songs about hating war: You can be right wing and hate war, you can be left wing and hate war. It’s not a political statement to say you hate war or that war frightens you or whatever. The [dolewave bands] are identifying tensions that exist, these bands are not necessarily pissed off or angry, a lot of them are just kind of resigned to it. (Axel) But this is not apathy or defeatism for Axel, it is a way of dealing with the struggles of everyday life, a way of ‘making do’ (De Certeau 1984): Resignation expresses a really strong political tension going on in Australia at the moment. People do not feel that they have agency, they don’t feel that they have any sense of involvement in their lives … [Dolewave] affirms something. It affirms an experience. This experience of precariousness, this experience of lacking agency, lacking an affect, a political effect. (Axel) Members of the scene who are musicians had an array of responses to the rise of the (non)genre of dolewave, struggles which express a wide array of values and practices in the scene that are usually bracketed out by subcultural theory. The politics of naming something dolewave and the cultural meanings it engenders are central to the ways the scene, when thought of as a field of struggle, incorporates a wide array of connected but different social practices. The ‘power to nominate’ was discussed in some detail in regard to the figures of hipster and bogan. For Bourdieu processes of naming occur at three hierarchical levels: the personal, the authorised and the State. The naming of dolewave challenges the simplicity of Bourdieu’s model, where the levels are blurred. There is an ironic and critical inversion of the ‘State’ level category of welfare, done by individuals at both the ‘personal’ (blogs and discussions) and ‘authorised’ (journalistic pieces) levels. But the authorised level here, especially the bloggers, are relying on subcultural capital to legitimise their ‘authority’, not State-consecrated forms of legitimated cultural capital. In an ‘underground’ struggle such as this, these struggles are mostly played out away from mainstream media, although they have made some forays into that

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space with stories on dolewave reaching mainstream media such as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian. 11 It will be interesting to see who is in the canon of Australian underground music in 10 years’ time. Will the discussions about dolewave and those included under the moniker appear more prominent than they really were? Or will dolewave be irrelevant to Oz rock history? It is likely that these media discussions will form the corpus for the future research that will do the work of creating a canon.xiv Journalists and opinion writers in traditional media are ‘professional producers of objectified representations of the social world’ (Bourdieu 1985: 730). Or more accurately, they are professional producers of representations of their own social world. The rise of blogging and the return of zines, especially in underground cultures, affords a rise of authority based on subcultural capitals rather than the legitimised cultural capital needed to take up high positions in the fields of representation in cultural production. The policing of genre boundaries and discussions over the politics of scenes are where distinction happens; ‘matters of distinction are always context-based’ (Skeggs 1999: 216). These are struggles over legitimacy, authenticity and identity and they take place within alternative and underground media, while at the same time DIYers are also doing distinction work to separate themselves from the so-called ‘mainstream’. Bourdieu writes: Analysis of the struggle over classifications brings to light the political ambition that pervades the epistemic ambition of producing the correct classification … to set forth the frontier between the sacred and the profane, good and evil, the vulgar and the distinguished. (Bourdieu 1985: 735). Dolewave is not really a ‘consecrated’ genre and we will not really know of its actual historical cultural importance for years. Nevertheless, it is through classification struggles around notions like dolewave, that symbolic ties are made and unmade. It is through this work of remaking that young people struggle to make the world in our own image and how the very doxa of a field evolves. Recognition struggles and social change: The story of Noise in my Head and LISTEN LISTEN LISTEN Jimi Kritzler’s book, Noise in my Head: Voices from the Ugly Australian Underground, contains interviews with 50 bands in the underground scene, all with an introduction written by the author, who has been involved in many bands in the scene for well over a decade.12 When I pre-ordered the book, I had no idea that it would become an object of study and certainly did not think that it would provoke the controversy and subsequent action that it did. xiv And maybe this chapter will be part of that.

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I was happy that someone was actually documenting what is going on, as I assume many others were, and looked forward to reading about many of my favourite bands. The book is hard bound with a removable dust jacket. It has large print, lots of photos and is heavy like a coffee table book. The ‘ugly’ that the book refers to reflects the fact that being in a band is not the glamorous and ‘hedonistic existence that most people imagine. Often it is thirteen hours driving in a van, only to play a show to fifty people. It is being ripped off by promoters, fighting with your band mates and being consistently broke’ (Kritzler 2014: 8). The introductions to each interview tell a story about the band or an anecdote about Kritzler’s engagement with them, drawing upon the ‘sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll’ lexicon of desperation, blood, sweat, outsiders, addiction, hedonism, damage, violence and death. For instance, Brisbane is described as ‘a cultural swamp. It is a town of sweltering heat, cheap speed, cowboy rednecks who drink beer like water, nuclear families and a pace of life that moves slower than a pensioner’. The punk scene grew there as a reaction to the ‘hillbilly tyranny’ of a former conservative State Premierxv (Kritzler 2014: 41). Many informants saw the book in a positive light even if they also had criticisms, in the sense that it was good to have something that documented what was going on: I liked the book, I think it’s good that someone put together that document. Must be heaps of research and effort into it. I’m definitely into the book, I think it was presented beautifully. I’m definitely into people putting together things like that. (John) John would like to see more of this work. He liked the way the book looked, but was also concerned with some aspects. Noise in my Head is currently the only book that is about the scene. In contrast to the many zines, blogs and websites, it feels important. It was common for interviewees to see Kritzler as taking artistic licence with how the stories were presented. Some people saw this as his right, while others saw it as a problem: If there were more histories [of the scene], it wouldn’t be so exclusive or something. I’ve heard a lot of discontent with how people were presented in the interviews and I wondered to what extent Jimi was selective in the stuff that he printed. That’s a very interesting role for him to have. (John) xv Some Brisbane participants thoroughly agree with this description. This refers to the Queensland Bjelke-Petersen state government, who held office from 1968 to 1987. It was a very conservative government with constant accusations of police and political corruption and brutality, some proven to be true. See Stafford (2006).

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Like other scene members, John was concerned with the ‘rock’n’roll mythologizing’: The introductions to each band, they were very emotive, very mythmaking, which I don’t really agree with. After the first 10 you get sick of reading about these rock and roll bands as gutter drinking, drug taking whatever. Yeah, that’s not necessary. It’s just silly because Kritzler does have a fascination with the myth of Australian music and he’s deeply into all of that early Australian punk and that image. So yeah, I guess I dislike that about the book, but I did like the fact that he put it together and the book exists. (John) Other informants expressed issues that were about authenticity, especially about how they situated the content and style of the book with Kritzler’s previous musical output: Jimi always made music that was style over substance for me, I was never really thrilled by any of the music he was making. I hate to put ‘authenticity’ on a shelf and say, ‘This is what needs to be achieved’, but going to gigs, listening to his records, there was such an immediate awareness of the style that was trying to be emulated. I think Jimi’s a nice guy and he’s supported me for years, but he’s someone who is like the world’s best set designer, he was Brisbane’s interior decorator, he has a real panache for it. (Elliot) For Elliot, this was the lens through which he read the book, which was not to his taste: It was obvious that he was also trying to put Brisbane music and a lot of other musicians into a certain light. When we read histories of punk bands and post-punk bands, there’s danger and there’s risk and there’s uncertainty, there’s a lot of really negative vibes that come off it and he was trying to do the same here. (Elliot) The effort to mythologise is a ‘big problem’ because ‘you don’t need to invent those negative vibes; they are already there’. The ‘already there’ that Elliot is referring to are a motley collection of likeminded Brisbane musicians and artists that perform in suburban houses and desolate urban spaces, making weird, skewered, noisy and often melancholy music and producing a wide array of art (Leach and Watson 2016; Watson 2012; Rogers 2008, 2013; Bennett and Rogers 2014a, 2014b, 2016; Brennan 2007). Elliot sees the mythologising as unnecessary because these people live it, and therefore the emotive writing

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threatens the authenticity of the representation of those artists’ actual day-to-day practices. Most people saw the book as documenting a specific time and place. From my academic perspective, I assumed that the book would be understood as an exercise in canonisation. Some did think this, but there was also ambivalence around this idea: No, I severely doubt that that book will be a defining thing. I think that it will represent an attempt and I think ultimately, stronger attempts will be made within the next few years. (Axel) For Axel, the book does a good job of pulling together a group of important bands, but he has problems with what he sees as ‘incongruent elements … Like, saying “ugly Australian underground” really doesn’t point to anything’. Axel sees it as one person’s attempt to put a book together about something that he loves, but it could ‘be done better, and it will be done in a way that’s a lot more specific and a lot more focused’ – in the future. Jemima, who is more negative about the book, had similar thoughts: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s very good. Yeah, I’m not sure it’s going to have as much … I don’t know. It’s in hardcover and it looks flash and I guess that can be persuasive, like the form is persuasive, but I’m just not convinced it’s going to remain, or ever be an important text. (Jemima) She thinks that fans of the scene may ‘get it’, but doesn’t think that many people will buy it and thinks that there will be ‘other documentations’.xvi Noise in my Head was released in April 2014. Shortly after, Evelyn Ida Morris, who performs under the moniker Pikelet,13 wrote a Facebook post about how she thought women were written out of the picture of the scene that Kritzler was painting, with a dominance of male voices in the book. Where women were present, they were mostly given secondary rolesxvii or written about from a masculine perspective. This was indicative of wider problems with the place of women in music. The post garnered over 650 xvi There have been several radio and internet stories about the scene, with the most prominent put together by Jeremy Story Carter. The first was a four part series on ABC Radio national called ‘I’m here now’ (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/ i’m-here-now/7048600) and the second called ‘Unintended Consequences’ where members of the scene were interviewed about the effect of lockout laws on live music (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-19/unintended-consequences-australias-live-music-industry/7764008). xvii This has long been a critique of subculture theory, even since its genesis (McRobbie and Garber 2006).

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responses, most in the first few days after, and was then developed into a piece for The Lifted Brow magazine called, ‘Noise in our Heads’ (Morris 2014),xviii the title of which alludes to DIT by shifting from ‘my’ to ‘our’. Her post was: intended as an expression of exasperation about something far more insidious and pervasive that has bothered me periodically through my ten to fifteen years of involvement in music. I’ve been repeatedly frustrated to see women’s omission from musical history and musical activities. Morris then formed a collective, LISTEN LISTEN LISTEN which is ‘committed to bringing feminism and equality into music in Australia, and will allow the conversation to grow and change however it needs to’. In a statement in an online story about the initial Facebook post, Kritzler responded by saying that to be painted a misogynist for writing a book about music that he loves from his own perspective is ‘somewhat thoughtless’. He argued that if ‘your friends’’ bands were left out it had nothing to do with gender but that he either doesn’t like the band or there was no space. In 500 pages, he could only cover 50 bands. I think the book captures something special (you may disagree) … I thoroughly agree a book on Australian music from a female perspective would be really interesting however this is obviously not the book I intended to write or could ever write.14 In the same piece, Morris said that the book itself is not a bad thing, that it has sparked discussion, and in those discussions Kritzler had been helpful. The Lifted Brow piece itself and watching the responses to it play out, provoked an intense moment of reflexivity as it made me question my own practice; it is certainly a moment where I was affected in a way that changed my disposition. As a sociologist, I felt that I had a good handle on the contours of inequality in the field: my reading about the histories and mythology of rock has always been through a sociological lens, at least since the early 2000s. I understand the gender and race critiques of what is left out of the canon; I know that subcultural analysis has shown how women are nearly always excluded, moved to the side-lines or given secondary roles. My observations of this scene have always been informed by this: it is mostly white and dominated by males. I have also always been wary of the way that I take up xviii I decided not to seek out Morris or Kritzler for interviews. Firstly, it would have been impossible to anonymise them, which is an Ethics Committee requirement of the research. Both have made public statements, with Morris’ writing and Kritzler quoted in some stories on the controversy. More importantly, for the analysis of struggle in the scene, I thought it was more important to focus upon the struggles about the controversy as it reflects more of the ‘day-to-day’ nature of what I’m interested in, rather than hearing from the two key players who were heard in the media.

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space at gigs (Miller 2016; Driver 2011) (at least until a certain level of sober is surpassed) and have always sought out music made by women (even though my collection is certainly dominated by men). Accordingly, while I felt that my practice in and consumption of the scene was at least relatively informed (and therefore blameless), it seems that this was more a theoretical understanding, rather than an affective one. When I began to read Noise in my Head, I noticed that the book was dominated by men, but I thought that this was just probably reflecting the gender ratio in the scene. I found the ‘sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll’ introductions to the interviews funny: that’s how music is written about, right? I certainly didn’t think about how the stories are told from (mostly) a masculine perspective and did not consider who or what was left out. When LISTEN began to form, I supported the Indiegogo campaign and joined the closed Facebook group. And then I listened. This was all happening at a time where there was a growing discussion, both in music related media15 and academia, about the challenges faced by women and LGBTIQA people in punk and the music industry in general (Sharp and Nilan 2014; Fatal 2012; Ensminger 2010; Halberstram 2003; King 2012; Paris and Ault 2004), and in general cultural circles such as the harassment faced by women online,16 Gamergate (Braithwaite 2016) and rape culture.17 The women in the scene all had a vast array of stories about the sexism they have deal to with, from obvious exclusion, media bias to everyday micro-aggressions (Sue 2010). Ughhhhh … Yeah, all the time. Fuck yeah. Just finding the language to speak about it, where you go, ‘hang on, why do I feel like an outsider on this tour or at this gig?’ (Fanny) Fanny talked about being called a ‘tomboy fucking lezzo’ when growing up in the suburbs, then moving into the city: Then you grow up and you start playing guitar, you start playing the drums and you’re still part of this anomaly sometimes, in certain crowds. I mean, even the first bands I was in, I felt like I was treated differently. (Fanny) Jemima played a quite prominent gig where a reviewer on a music site wondered why she didn’t smile while playing on stage. This caused an outcry in the scene, which then provoked op-ed pieces in national newspapers. There was a bad review about when we did [Festival] and [the reviewer] was really pissed about me. And he was like, ‘she never smiles’ or whatever. I didn’t know about it and my friend texted me about it while I was

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at work, because I don’t read reviews. She was saying ‘hey, can I call you so we can talk about this review?’ (Jemima) Jemima explained that she does not smile on stage for a variety of reasons: shyness, not caring, staying focused and ‘always trying to do things that are outside of my technical abilities’. She has had half a dozen reviews ‘where people have been like “she never smiles on stage”. And I think, after a while, I stopped reading reviews’. Men do not get asked this question. By the time Jemima could read the review, it had already garnered quite a response: It’s clear that it is a dude who is expecting a specific performance from a female on stage or a specific kind of engagement. People had gone apeshit about it [in the comments under the online story and in other forums]. It was really super heart-warming. (Jemima) Jemima’s experience resonates with a long history of, and a mounting struggle with, the treatment of women in music writing as being less skilled, more ‘pop’ than ‘rock’, with a focus on the body and appearance, rather than the music (McCarthy 2006; Pompper, Lee and Lerner 2009). This was illustrated by an incident at a venue with a sound engineer that Debbie recounted: I had a transgender friend who I asked to come play at the [venue] and they were anxious about it. I was anxious about it, because I couldn’t trust that it would be a safe environment for her. And then she came over for a glass of wine at my place afterwards and was just like, ‘That was really shit, we knew as soon as you left, the sound engineer was like belligerent to me and laughed at me, started telling me that I needed these different pedals. He was not hiding the smirk about what I was doing or wearing or looked like’. (Debbie) The male sound engineer just assumed more knowledge than the trans performer. These experiences are very common in music scenes where women must deal with condescending attitudes by male booking agents, and sound and lighting engineers (Sharp 2017). Debbie says that ‘this is exactly what I feared’. All she wanted was an environment where ‘it’s actually a punk scene, where anyone could be anyone and everyone could be themselves’. Debbie then made a critique of the ‘progressiveness’ of the scene given that this kind of thing still takes place: We’re anti-establishment, we’re anti-capitalist, we’re people that don’t believe in a regime that oppresses people or their creative abilities or their

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ability to even live happily and truthfully. And I hate it that I would invite a friend to come and be in the environment where she normally wouldn’t be accepted and some fucking dude who is uncomfortable unless it’s a man playing some form of rock decides they have the fucking right to do that. I was absolutely cut. (Debbie) Debbie’s example highlights the myriad of practices and dispositions in the scene that are bracketed out when treating it as a unified subculture. Women in the scene are faced with verbal abuse, violence and sexual assault. This is hardly the resistive politics usually associated with punk as a form of counterculture. Debbie talks about some bands that she now refuses to play gigs with because they are so ‘male’ oriented: ‘it’s literally like footy players or skateboarders. It’s actually like heightened testosterone, rape culture’. She describes the rise of a form of ‘Australiana’ punk, where it is performed ironically, giving ‘licence to be like a piece of shit’: Call me a fucking lemon faced feminist but I just don’t find it funny. They all sit there and they like these old throwback Australian bands like Cosmic Psychos and that kind of stuff. It’s like ‘WE LOVE PIES, LOVE THE PUB, PUNCHED A GIRL!’, all this kind of shit, which is fine, whatever you wanna do. But the environment it creates is an unsafe one and it involves, ‘oh, I grabbed a sheila’s tit on my way to scull a beer’. It’s like, fuck off. You’re not punx, you’re literally awful, heterosexual, bogan men and just because you’re wearing some kind of interesting t-shirt doesn’t mean you’re not behaving like that. (Debbie) Debbie tells of a specific incident where she played with one of these bands where she was physically harassed herself: They just heckled us on stage. I was like ‘I’ve got to get out of here’, it was so unpleasing. I went to leave and grab my gear. My [male] friend, who is really quite femme, was like, ‘I’m just gonna wait outside, I actually can’t handle this’. People started pouring their own beer on their head and all this kind of shit. And I was like, ‘I’m gonna grab my gear’, went out into the back room to grab it, and there was just some random dude in there who holds the door and was like, ‘You’re not leaving until you kiss me, I’m not gonna let you go’. I was just like, ‘I will fucking kill you’. (Debbie) This left Debbie in a bind in terms of what to specifically do, especially as her own punk sensibilities made her reluctant to get any kind of authority involved, let alone the police:

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In my head, I was just like ‘maybe tell someone’, but I’m not a cop caller. It would literally take someone sawing my head off for me to call the cops. I hate cops, so it’s never in my head to go tell somebody. The first thing was to go tell my mates and go punch their heads in. (Debbie) This is a significant pedagogically affective moment for Debbie, where affect accumulates ‘to form dispositions and thus shape subjectivities’ (Watkins 2010: 269). As Watkins (2010) argues, if we maintain the distinction between affectus (the force of an affecting body) and affectio (the impact it leaves on the one affected), we can see how this experience changed Debbie’s disposition. The force of the affecting body, that is, the abusive male, leaves an impact on the one affected, where she will no longer play with bands of that ilk. This incident will mark her future encounters in this space, but also intensifies her orientation to do something about these problems in the scene. Prior to the existence of LISTEN, it was doxic that Festival and gig line ups would be dominated by males: The other day was a really big punk show thing. Why are there no women on this bill? What reason? And poor [organiser], he’s a good friend of mine, I just put him on the spot. He’s just like ‘Oh, well, we asked some women and they said no’. It’s like, [sarcastically] ‘well I’m sure they did’! They were busy asking every woman, and every woman had her period or had a child to take care of and just couldn’t do it. (Debbie) The organiser then asked Debbie for advice about what he should do in the future. Her response: ‘Put some fucking women on the bill!’ Debbie says that while equal representation and participation is important, it is not just about that: You want to have it so it’s a space where women feel safe because there’s other women there and they feel like they’re welcome. And not only because they feel like their own gender is being mirrored, but also so they don’t feel like it’s just a space where only men are there and all of sudden they start getting their cocks out and start hitting people. (Debbie) She also points to the fact that what she calls the ‘gatekeepers’ in the scene are men, that the ‘glass ceiling’ in the scene will remain while men are in the dominant positions: ‘they’re dictating the sound and the environment’. Debbie then embraces the DIY aspect of the scene, arguing that if things are to change then those within the scene must do it. It is not just going to happen. For the scene to change, it needs women to get together and do it themselves:

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You do have to do it yourself, because you can’t just walk off the street into any bar and it’s [safe], cause it’s not. It’s unsafe. You know, there’s unsafe music, there’s unsafe men, the opposite of what I want. Which is a safe environment where people feel like they don’t feel like they could be assaulted or harassed. (Debbie) As Fanny says: ‘A lot of people talk, not enough people doing’. All the DIYers reported that the existence of the LISTEN collective was making a positive difference about this kind of thing: So as soon as that happened [the original Morris Facebook post], I thought, someone stuck their neck out and said a valid thing. There needs to be a kind of unionising of women. Cause I think Jimi Kritzler is viewing through a Jimi Kritzler prism and I feel like lots of women feel like there is a different prism that definitely needs to be spoken for. But I’m just more concerned about this in real time, in real life. So, events are starting to happen and a unionising, and that has been in the last year. I’ve felt that so strongly. (Fanny) There has been an increase in activity and responsibility by venues and those that run them, especially in Melbourne where LISTEN is based. Debbie tells of an incident at one venue where ‘a man tried to smash his way through a window to beat up a transgender woman’. The manager of the venue met with the transwoman to see what he should do about making the venue safer. On this advice, the manager contacted the security firm to ensure that the guards who were working that night were not sent to the venue again because they did not take the attack seriously. The venue ‘now has a release form when anyone comes to work there about inclusiveness and about the fact that they have to protect women and trans people in the pub. So yeah, stuff is getting done’ (Debbie). There has also been an increase in the presence of women on gig bills and even women only line-ups. One of the bar staff interviewed at the above venue told me that they now consider the gender ratio of gig line ups, and even though it has not reached parity, they are trying. These developments stimulate an altered affective atmosphere (Anderson 2009) at the venue: So different, the way the women held themselves, being allowed in the space. You know, it wasn’t somebody with their jacket on, sitting the corner. It was women wearing bra tops with huge hair and heaps of make-up, giant nails and platform shoes. Talking loudly and sitting loudly and hugging their friends. And you could see it was almost like the opposite, the men were sitting on the outsides, apologising for bumping

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into someone on their way to go get a beer. It’s like wow, you can just see it shifting people. (Debbie) These improvements have also led to individuals in the scene creating their own actions about gender politics. Fanny spoke about how the rise of LISTEN opened her eyes to things that she was already feeling, but couldn’t quite put in to words. It also inspired her to take her own action, where she began taking part in a programme that is like the ‘Rock’n’Roll High School’ (see Strong and Rogers 2016): You know, and I’ve started working towards doing this girls rock camp thing that’s big in the [United] States.xix And there’s a woman in Wollongong and a woman in Canberra who are starting these camps and I’m going up there to build one and hopefully learn something. It’s for primary school aged girls, who’ve never played music before, to pick up instruments. (Fanny) Fanny was critically oriented towards these problems before the rise of LISTEN, but its existence affected her in such a way that she intensified her disposition towards gender issues in the scene and changed her own practice. For Debbie, who has been in the scene for over five years, it is only with experience, alongside these recent positive developments, that she has started to feel that she has a legitimised position in the scene: I’m allowed not just to participate but to create it, create the scene, choose how it should be and what it should look like. And that I can be like Stan and Axel, when we’re in the bar and we’re talking about who should be playing what show, what records are important, what records are good, whether somebody should or shouldn’t do this. My opinion is relevant as well. (Debbie) It is only over time and following a heavy investment of time, energy and emotion that Debbie has established a feeling of having enough capacity to play the game at a level that she sees males more easily achieve. The capitals that she has accrued in this time are affective; they make her feel confident and recognised. Ironically, like instances where people made judgements about Noise in my Head based on their interactions with its author, there were observations that some of the criticism in the scene towards the LISTEN collective itself was xix See Schilt and Gifford (2012).

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based on personal judgements of the individuals running it, usually repeating the same gendered abuse tropes that women receive in public forums. This is the politics of naming at the personal level: They deal with it by making jokes about [Morris] thick and fast. Whether it goes from kind of alluding to the fact that she’s insane, alluding to the fact that she’s gay, alluding to the fact that she’s unattractive, I’ve just heard it 1000 times. It’s what they like to do I guess to be able to make it so that [discussion] is not so heavy, so that it’s lightened up. But what she’s highlighting, because she has an aggressive approach, it’s easy for people to make it into a joke. (Debbie) Further, the ‘divisive’ nature of the discussions around LISTEN, especially in regard to its genesis in response to Kritzler’s book, has created some ambivalence about the nature of the LISTEN collective as well, even from women who strongly self-identify as feminist. Even within a small scene such as this, relations of social distance and homology matter. For instance, Rachel is friends with Kritzler: It’s a bit too divisive for me. We just kind of stay on the outer of [LISTEN] and I don’t want to pass judgement on anybody for anything. I didn’t even end up reading the whole book, I only read the bits that involved my friends. (Rachel) Rachel acknowledges that she is ‘not very objective’ due to her friendship with Kritzler, so she wants to let people make up their own minds. She sees the activity of LISTEN since as being ‘really positive’, but felt the condemnation of Kritzler was too personal: There were a lot of women interviewed for that book. I just feel like it was um, a bit niche, perhaps. He’s a commentator, you know, he’s not responsible personally for injustice in the world. (Rachel) Several respondents thought that it was unfair to paint Kritzler as a misogynist just because he was presenting the things he likes and was writing from his own perspective. Again, these responses came from people socially close to Kritzler. Samantha, also a friend of Kritzler, thought that he ‘got made into a scapegoat for the last 50 years of rock and roll’: I feel like LISTEN is amazing and needed and such a breath of fresh air. People were dying for that to be said. But I feel like it was born of so

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much negativity that I just couldn’t get on board. The impetus for it starting was towards Jimi and I just can’t get on board with that. But I think [LISTEN is] amazing. I just personally felt like Jimi had put so much work into that book, and it’s an incredible book, and to rip it to shreds and to have people pick sides, and not read to book cause it’s ‘misogynist’. It’s not. It is a reflection of the scene and yeah, more ladies need to be involved. (Samantha) Jemima, who is a member of LISTEN but also socially close to Kritzler, also had initial suspicions about its genesis: At first, I think I was a little bit suspicious of it because it seemed personal, it seemed like an ego thing. At first, I was like ‘oh man’, it seemed deeply personal and less political. Sometimes I get frustrated when people turn personal things into political things. (Jemima) Jemima felt bad for Kritzler because: ‘he just wanted to do a thing about the things that he liked. And I kind of have a little bit of a problem with people expecting inclusiveness at all times, because some people just have an experience, and that’s what they wanna document, and that should be fine’. Jemima argued that Kritzler was not at a level where he needed to be responsible for including everyone, implying that he was writing from a personal level in Bourdieu’s terms, not from an authorised level: ‘it was a passion project in which he put a lot of his own time and money’. By positioning Kritzler’s book as a passion project at a personal level, she disavows him the political responsibility that would have been implied if it was written from the authorial level. Jemima thinks that gender issues are a real problem in the scene, she has experienced them many times herself, and it would be great if ‘a big, positive project come out of it’. Like Rachel and Samantha though, she thought that the initial issues raised about the Noise in my Head book were personal rather than political and ‘it kinda got a bit fucked up in the process’. I think that was just an unfortunate thing to attempt for a dialogue that needed to happen, and perhaps it a little bit unfairly picked on one person. I can’t really handle egos and things like that, and I think a lot of it was ego driven. (Jemima) Other points that were raised by women in the scene were that LISTEN would not work if it excludes men; that some people were just complaining because they were not included in the book; and that it was a ‘Facebook thing’ that should have stayed there.

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Ironically in this regard, the LISTEN Facebook private discussion group, of which I was a passive but listening member, was shut down after there were transphobic comments posted. There was subsequent debate about those comments; an apology; a rejection of that apology; then it was decided by the LISTEN administrators that Facebook was not the place to be having these discussions (Strong with Morris 2016). For Jan, this was reflective of the ‘beginner level’ discussions that engendered LISTEN in the first place: ‘Don’t work through it publicly! It started out at such a low level that it was degraded even further’. Jan was asked to be on a panel at a LISTEN event and was concerned that there seemed to be some panels where the speakers did not seem to be experts in what they were talking about: I think, so long as it’s well curated and you’re actually getting people who know what the fuck they’re talking about … I got asked to be on a panel for them, and I was like, I just need to know what it is! I just would hate to be involved in a conversation I know nothing about and talking shit. People should contribute if it’s productive, and don’t contribute just for the sake. (Jan) In the aftermath of the public struggles about Noise in my Head and the rise of the LISTEN collective, Elliot was concerned about the emotional and psychological cost to individuals who were having their private lives discussed in public forums. There have been several suicides in the scene over the previous decade, including Sean Stewart from the band HTRK,xx Brendon Annesley, who wrote the legendary Negative Guest List zine and started the subsequent record label of the same name, Sean South of the influential Nihilistic Orbs label, and Fergus Miller who performed under the moniker of Bored Nothing. Elliot was concerned for someone who was called out about sexist behaviour in the online debate following the Morris Facebook post. He describes his friend as being depressive, lacking general social skills, sometimes guilty of being self-interested and narrow minded, but also cognisant of his problems and trying to do something about it; he is ‘doing the best he can’: I’m actually thankful that I know him every year still, because for some years I didn’t know how many years he’d have left. … Brendan was the first major death of someone I really know within the scene and then a year later it was Shaun South … So yeah, I was just ready for number three. (Elliot) Overall, while there are various troubles and critiques, the formation of LISTEN and subsequent activity was seen as an overall positive development, xx Pronounced ‘Haterock’.

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even by those with some reservations about the personal nature of the interactions. The LISTEN development has the potential to develop the doxa in a progressive and more inclusive manner. Males in the scene saw LISTEN and its burgeoning influence as a positive step, even if they tended to have much less to say about the matter. [The book] was written by a dude and you know, I can’t say, as a dude, that I disagree with everything [Morris] says. A lot of women say that there was definitely a male focus in it. I think some of the female interviews in that book are some of the most interesting ones … It’s a sexist scene, even the underground scene. Definitely the rock music scene in Australia is very male focused. (Stan) Stan was also keen for a book about the scene to come out of the LISTEN collective, as he sees that the more documentation of the scene there is, the better: ‘I really wanna see what comes out of [LISTEN]. I don’t see how anybody could be opposed to more documentation of this period. It just seems really productive’. He points out the difficulties though, in terms of time and expense, for ‘not much payback’. ‘Because you’re not gonna make money off it. Jimi certainly didn’t do it for money, he did it out of his own interest’. John was also adamant that the gender criticism was fair. He says that there are obviously a lot more men in the book, and while he wasn’t sure if that was reflective of the overall numbers in the scene, he thought that the ‘masochistic feel of his writing’ was a key to the gender criticism. John sees this as the possible genesis of more gender equity in the scene: It’s funny, obviously, that’s in everybody’s minds lately. Since he’s released the book, people like Chapter Music put on a show a few weeks ago, and I have no idea whether this is a direct decision as a result of the book or whatever, they aimed to present a line up which was all female musicians. So, I think it’s definitely in everyone’s mind. (John) But while John has not thought about this in depth, he is ambivalent about whether it is his duty to promote female musicians on his label: Is it my responsibility as a label guy to present more female artists? Maybe the answer is yes, maybe I need to be really aware of what we are releasing and to make sure that people are represented fairly. But, I predominantly release things that I get excited about and that I think are important in the current Australian music context. Recently that just happens to have been [female artist]. That’s just what’s been there. You know, like I didn’t go out looking for a female record, they were just

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there, they were making those records. But yeah, perhaps I need to consider more my responsibility in making sure that gender is represented fairly. (John) Up until this point, John did not really consider it his responsibility to maintain a gender balance to what he releases, downplaying his role as influential tastemaker by saying he just releases music he likes. He wants his label practice to be an effortless reflection of his own taste, not to feel like work. But the struggles about gender that these debates have raised in the scene prove the effect of reflexivity: since the interview, John’s label has released more female artists. Axel is considering writing his own response to what has been going on since the release of Noise in my Head, especially since he is quite reflexive about the ways his own masculinity affects his practice: I think what [Morris] said is completely reasonable. There is always a marginalisation of women in music, when the focus or the language being used triumphs masculine values and I can understand that. As someone who does triumph masculine values quite a lot, I can see myself doing this and I can see that it’s a marginalising thing. That a lot of the interviewees are men is a fact. That a lot of women participate in Australian music is also a fact, so she’s got a great point there. Why were they not interviewed, why were they not spoken to? (Axel) Axel points out that it was not Kritzler’s deliberate intention to write a marginalising book: ‘it’s just that we live within a time and within a scene or culture in which these things are ignored or marginalised. These are facts about culture in general’. Axel is referring to doxic elements of the scene here. He says that while he saw the Morris response as somewhat personal and ‘heavy-handed’: [Kritzler] asked for a heavy-handed approach because his language is often quite obnoxious. I have no problems with what she’s written and I think that’s a reasonable response. That it’s the main critical response kinda tells you a bit about the audience of people reading it and I think that’s important that women feel they should be represented in these things. If they’re going to be reading about people making music, they wanna read about people they can relate to, that makes sense. (Axel) He too is hopeful that Morris and the LISTEN collective produce their own book, because it would be specific and focused. It wouldn’t necessarily be an act of canonisation, but for Axel, it would be a problem if this was the intention anyway:

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I think when you’re involved with this stuff, if you pay attention to canonisation or the consequences of this stuff when you’re creating, I think you can put yourself off track or you can become waylaid by questions of legitimacy, relevancy and authenticity. (Axel) For Axel, what ‘matters to someone like you’ – referring to me as a sociologist – who is ‘attempting to tie together class relationships, race relationships, these things matter’, so legitimacy and authenticity may be important things to consider. But to worry about these things at the moment of creativity and to attempt to historicise the scene as it is happening is a problem: ‘I think it’s too soon to speculate on it’. To sum up: a scene forms, it develops a doxa that is influenced by the logics of articulation (Straw 1991) of the global histories of similar scenes in the past and from all over the world. It incorporates the dominant discourses that have plagued pop culture and rock music: the dominance of a male perspective; women treated with less respect and legitimacy even when doing the same thing as males, and even when doing it better; a media that reproduces sexualised and body-centric portrayal of female artists; the exclusion of nonbinary genders. At the same time, the scene as a whole is increasingly celebrated in Australian and international press as a hotbed of critically endorsed creativity. Then a book comes out that documents this activity. It provokes a reaction that seems, at the time of writing, that it may have actual permanent consequences in a wider acceptance, participation and legitimacy of genders and sexualities. These are the kind of struggles that Bourdieu proposes are at the centre of our social existence. The fields we participate in have a doxa, the common sense, taken for granted stuff, which is misrecognised as ‘natural’. There is also an illusio which corresponds to why we think pursuing something is worthwhile, the intensity of how we invest ourselves in it, and the rewards of that investment. The struggle about Noise in my Head challenged the doxic gender norms that have become ‘normal’ over time. Females in the scene experience those norms as a form of symbolic violence and, as documented in the efforts by the LISTEN collective, are sometimes faced with physical and sexual violence and harassment. Importantly, the consequences of these struggles are how social change transpires. The struggles in the scene over Noise in my Head, the activities of the LISTEN collective, and the endorsement of these developments by many key players in the scene may all lead to a change of doxa that opens it up to wider participation and practice. Of course, these kinds of emancipatory activity have happened throughout the history of popular music scenes, with Riot Grrrl a prominent example from the Grunge era (see Strong 2011a, 2011b). It does seem that despite feminist practice and influence becoming part of these scenes, it doesn’t necessarily stick, the

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logic of articulation can stall, and the work needs to be done again and again in different times and places.xxi

Conclusion The writing about punk through the analytical lens of subcultural theory has resulted in it being presented as too homogenous in a way that brackets out the everyday struggles, differences of opinion and politics, the different reasons people get involved in the first place, and the way they continue to invest themselves. From the outside, the meaning of punk, the naming of a genre, or the inclusion of women on the bill of a gig may seem trivial. But by thinking about punk or DIY as a practice (O’Connor 2016), or better still, an affective practice (Wetherell 2012) characterised by struggle, it opens the analysis to consider that these are very things that bring meaning to our lives. ‘Bourdieu’s approach to class embodies his relentlessly relational conception of social life’ (Wacquant 2013: 275). The participants in this research live and breathe the relational practices of the way punk has come to be an attitude and aesthetic that moves beyond the boundaries of the music field. This is expressed in Chapter 7 where I go on to discuss how punk attitudes influence career decisions. Even within such a relatively small DIY scene, there are struggles where the relational positions of the people practising in the space, and the ways people struggle to fit in, or make the space change to fit them, are the very processes by which doxa is reproduced, challenged and changed. Caring about your record collection does not make one an ‘obsessed loner’ (Adorno 1991; Shuker 2010). Thinking about the implications of letting your song be used in a skate video reflects key debates going on in the art world. Fighting to get more recognition for women’s work in a male dominated space seems to be an important and effective way of making real emancipatory social change. These are the everyday struggles in a DIY scene.

Notes 1 Don Letts. 2015. This much I know. The Guardian. 8 February 2015. Viewed 10/ 10/16. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/07/don-letts-this-much-i-know 2 Joe Kennedy. 2011. Big Society, Little Hope: False Folk Culture in 2011. The Quietus. 19/12/11. Viewed 11/10/16. http://thequietus.com/articles/07603-2011brit ish-politics-folk-music Luke Turner. 2013. Mumfords: ‘Not Posh! Classless & Picked On’. The Qu. ietus. 01/08/2013. Viewed 11/10/16. http://thequietus.com/arti cles/12961-mumfords-not-posh Billy A Reeves. 2012. Mumford & Sons know which side they’re on. And it ain’t yours. Collapse Board. 16/03/12. Viewed 11/10/ 16. http://www.collapseboard.com/music-b logs-3/mumford-sons-know-which-sidetheyre-on-and-it-aint-yours/ 3 Justin Edwards. 2011. triple j vs the Brisbane Music Scene Part 2. Collapse Board. 03/06/ 11. Viewed 11/10/16. http://www.collapseboard.com/features/brisbane/triple-j-vs-the-b xxi For more on Riot Grrrl see Eileraas (1997); Attwood (2007) and Marcus (2010).

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risbane-music-scene-part-2/; Whaley. 2011. Triple J Unearthed and the Great Monopolisation of Australian Music. Polaroids of Androids. 19/10/11. Viewed 11/10/16. http://polaroidsofandroids.com/articles/triple-j-unearthed-and- the-great-monopolisa tion-of/6224.html; Andrew McMillan. 2012. Rolling Stone story: ‘The Discovery Channel: triple j’s power over Australian music’, December 2011. 06/01/12. Viewed 11/ 10/16. http://andrewmcmillen.com/2012/01/06/rolling- stone-story-the-discovery-cha nnel-triple-js-power-over-australian-music-december- 2011/; Everett True. 2012. Triple J. Setting music back for a new generation. Collapse Board. 10/01/12. Viewed 11/10/12. http://www.collapseboard.com/everett-true/triple-j-setting-music-back-for-a-new-genera tion/; Ed. 2012. Triple J Blamed for Homogenisation of Australian Music Websites. 14/ 01/14. Viewed 11/10/16. http://www.collapseboard.com/music-blogs-3/triple-j-blam ed-for-homogenisation- of-australian-music-websites/; Nick Clarke. 2014. Calling the tune. The Age 11/01/2014. Viewed 11/10/16. http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/m usic/calling- the-tune-20140111-30nmk.html; Helen Razer. 2014. Razer’s defence of Triple J: it’s all in the mix, and the kids like it. 17/01/14. Viewed 11/10/16. https://www. crikey.com.au/2014/01/17/razers-defence-of-triple-j-its-all-in-the-mix-and-the-kids-li ke-it/; Greg Moskivitch. 2016. THE SONG TRIPLE J WOULDN’T LET CAMP COPE COVER FOR LIKE A VERSION. Tone Deaf. October 12. Viewed 07/11/16. http://www.tonedeaf.com.au/490078/the-song-triple-j-wouldnt-let-camp-cope-coverfor-like-a-version.htm For music from these bands go to: Dick Diver: http://chaptermusic.bandcamp.com/ album/calendar-days; Twerps: http://chaptermusic.bandcamp.com/album/twerps; Kitchen’s Floor: https://kitchensfloor.bandcamp.com/album/look-forward- to-nothing; Bitch Prefect: http://bitchprefect.bandcamp.com/album/big-time; The Ocean Party: https://theoceanparty.bandcamp.com/album/the-sun-rolled-off-the-hills; Lower Plenty: http://bedroomsuckrecords.bandcamp.com/album/life-thrills; The Stevens: http://chap termusic.bandcamp.com/album/a-history-of-hygiene; School of Radiant Living: https:// soundcloud.com/school-of-radiant-living http://www.oystermag.com/interview-author-jimi-kritzler-on-australia-s-musicalunderground https://discussions.messandnoise.com/search?q=dolewave&searchJSON=%7B% 22keywords%22%3A%22dolewave%22%7D See http://www.collapseboard.com/features/columns/everything-is-plastic-%E2%80% 93-the-corrupting-ideal-of-authenticity-in-music/; http://www.collapseboard.com/fea tures/columns/everything-is-plastic-%E2%80%93-the-corrupting-ideal-of-authenticityin-music/; http://www.collapseboard.com/music-blogs-3/wallace-wylie/hating-hipstershow-the-mainstream-hijacked-authenticity-and-made-non-conformity-a-joke/ http://max-easy.tumblr.com/post/76911569550/bad-beer-and-guitar-pop-a-continua tion-of-shaun http://iankeithrogers.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/ive-never-known-the-morning-do lewave-as-reaction/ http://messandnoise.com/articles/4643884 https://www.theguardian.com/music/australia-culture-blog/2014/mar/28/dolewave-a ustralian-indie-music White Hex: https://nihilisticorbslabel.bandcamp.com/album/white-hex-heat-lp; Slug Guts: https://slugguts.bandcamp.com/ Meat Thump: https://negativeguestlistrecords. bandcamp.com/album/box-of-wine-feel-good-7 Pikelet: https://chaptermusic.bandcamp.com/album/tronc The Music. 2014. Music Sexism Debate Erupts Over New Australian Book. Viewed 21/10/16. http://themusic.com.au/news/all/2014/05/16/music-sexism-debateerupts-over-new-australian-book/; See also the interview with Kritzler about the personal aspects of the book. http://messandnoise.com/features/4650116

180 DIY cultures 15 Fry, C. 2016. The grrrls are back in town: A look at the movement dismantling music’s boys’ club. Junkee. September 16. Viewed 03/11/16. http://fasterlouder. junkee.com/the-grrrls-are-back-in-town-a-look-at-the-acts-dismantling-musics-boysclub/865741; Styles, A. 2016. Australian bands Luca Brasi and High Tension condemn sexual assaults at concerts. Sydney Morning Herald. August 23. Viewed 03/ 11/16. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/australian-bands-luca-brasi-a nd-high-tension-condemn-sexual-assaults-at-concerts-20160822-gqyjcw.html; Jackson, J. 2016. Punk Was Always Gay: Kid Congo Powers on the Genre’s Queer Beginnings. Remezcla. June 30. Viewed 03/11/16. http://remezcla.com/features/m usic/kid-congo-powers-interview/; Forster, T. 2015. Punk attitude, riot grrrl aesthetic, queer feminist rage… meet Not Right. Freedom. February 18. Viewed 03/ 11/16. http://freedomnews.org.uk/punk-attitude-riot-grrrl-aesthetic-queer-feministrage-meet-not-right/; Kebby, L. 2016. G’day mates, fellow Novocastrians, gig goers and everyone in between. Newcastle Live. October 17. Viewed 03/11/16. http:// newcastlelive.com.au/gday-mates-fellow-novocastrians-gig-goers-everyone/; It Takes One. 2016. Viewed 03/11/16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-d6kmnZaKg& feature=youtu.be 16 Ford, C. 2016. Abusers rely on silence to succeed, and that’s why women must not stop speaking out. Sydney Morning Herald. October 21. Viewed 03/11/16. http:// www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/abusers-rely-on-silence-tosucceed-and-thats-why-women-must-not-stop-speaking-out-20161020-gs7cba.html; Ford, C. 2016. Sexual assault in virtual reality is real, and it needs to be taken seriously. Sydney Morning Herald. October 27. Viewed 03/11/16. http://www.smh. com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/sexual-assault-and-harassment-in-virtualreality-is-real-and-it-needs-to-be-taken-seriously-20161027-gsc6vb.html 17 Ford, C. 2016. Rape culture is caring more about protecting an offender’s future than his victim’s. Sydney Morning Herald. September 12. Viewed 03/11/16. http:// www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/rape-culture-is-caring-more-a bout-protecting-an-offenders-future-than-his-victims-20160911-grdygb.html; Ford, C. 2016. TV shows need to quit peddling the rape myth that ‘no means yes’. Sydney Morning Herald. October 25. Viewed 03/11/16. http://www.smh.com.au/ lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/tv-shows-need-to-quit-peddling-the-rape-myth-thatno-means-yes-20161024-gs9r7f.html; Redden, M. 2016. Oklahoma court: oral sex is not rape if victim is unconscious from drinking. The Guardian. April 28. Viewed 03/ 11/16. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/27/oral-sex-rape-ruling-tulsaoklahoma-alcohol-consent

Chapter 7

A DIY career? Labour and creativity struggles

Introduction Young people all over the world are at the vanguard of the precarity produced by neoliberal developments in the global economy. A key modality of everyday struggle in young people’s lives takes place in the ever more complex trajectory from school to work, where anxiety, insecurity and uncertainty permeate the affective atmosphere of the fields in which they are immersed. This chapter looks at how the young people from the DIY scene discussed in Chapter 6 strategise methods to get by and make do in these conditions, while trying to maintain space for their creative activities. We begin with a discussion of the nexus between class, creativity and labour, in terms of both the labour market and new theories of labour. The rise of the so-called ‘creative’ in the culture industries is outlined as a way of thinking about what many of the young people in the DIY scene are actively struggling to avoid. We then move to an analysis of modalities of everyday struggle. Specifically: How do these young people negotiate economic pressures in terms of rent and food? How do they approach career pressures in terms of the call to ‘grow up’, get a ‘real’ job, and become ‘responsible’? How do they struggle with their own needs to maintain space in their lives – temporal, mental and physical – to pursue and invest in their artistic endeavours? This chapter considers the temporality of youth, where strategies are used to balance current passions with the pressures of ‘adult’ responsibility. The young people in this research invoke a punk ethos. That is, the illusio from their cultural practices is imported into more legitimised fields to strategise about career decisions. In that sense, the affectivity of the punk illusio is constituted with more social gravity than the more normative illusio, which informs their dispositional orientation towards making ethical life decisions. Punk practice is therefore a strategy for dealing with an array of modalities of everyday struggle.

Class, labour and creativity Across the world, high rates of unemployment and underemployment are the norm for young people, even those with relatively high education

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qualifications.i Low youth wages are now an accepted and largely unquestioned part of the labour market, essentially legislating discrimination. Youth unemployment has been entrenched in Australia and much of the world for decades. In February 2014, the Australian national general unemployment rate was 6 per cent, while the youth unemployment rate (in the 15–24 age group) was more than double at 13 per cent. In Newcastle, a de-industrialised regional centre on the east coast of Australia where some of this research was conducted, it hovers around 20 per cent. In 2008, there were 92,000 underemployed young people in Australia. By the end of 2013 there were 155,000 (ABS 2014). Trends point to these numbers increasing and while these statistics paint a picture, it is an incomplete one, especially considering the constant adjusting of categories where working for one hour a week now means that you are ‘employed’. The casualisation, upward-credentialising and education inflation in the youth labour market has led precarity to be experienced even by those in the well-educated middle classes. Casual, short-term and non-standard work is an accepted reality for most young people (Cuervo, Crofts and Wyn 2013), meaning binaries such as employed/unemployed or studying/working are too simplistic to convey contemporary youth labour market experiences (Furlong and Cartmel 2007). This has also led young people to separate the notions of ‘job’ and ‘career’ (Andres and Wyn 2010), with job denoting something that you do to get by, and career meaning more long-term plans. Generally, the trajectory from school to labour force is increasingly complex (Wyn, Lantz and Harris 2012), certainly much more so than for previous generations (Woodman and Wyn 2015). Beck’s (1992) work has been key to understanding these processes. One of the essential characteristics of risk societies is an intensification of individualisation processes where social actors are impelled to create their own pathways towards social identity, inclusion and belonging (see Woodman, Threadgold and Possamai-Inesedy 2015). An increasing number of young people, even those from middle class backgrounds, experience aspects of poverty in the trajectory from high school to the labour market (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 156–171). This is the case for many of the DIY scene participants in my research. Standing’s (2011) work on the precariat has opened a way of thinking about the increasing number of people all around the world positioned in an insecure and anxious subject position due to rapid changes in the labour market. Whether ‘precariat’ has utility as an actual ‘class’ is up for debate (see Furlong et al. 2016; Wright 2015). My own thoughts are that the feeling of precarity is common for a wide array of people with differing levels of economic and cultural capital. This makes it far too opaque to work as a class category, even as a ‘class on paper’. A migrant domestic cleaner in Hong Kong has a very different subject position than a British, zero-hours contract, commercial i See Sukarieh and Tannock (2015) for the use, misuse and manipulation of youth unemployment statistics.

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pilot. But precarity is a particularly useful concept for considering the key sensation of labour market participation. Precariousness permeates the affective atmosphere (Anderson 2014) of the fields that young people traverse. While many of the people cited here from the DIY scene fit some of the description of Standing’s ‘precariat’ class, where I use the term ‘precarious’ about them, it denotes an ‘affective structure’ (Butler 2004, see also Ross 2008) rather than a class per se. I understand a state of insecurity (Lorey 2015) to be a form of governmental discipline. Precarity, in that sense, is doxic. In this chapter I look at a group of young people who are struggling and strategising in this precarious doxic atmosphere. In the previous chapter, research participant Stan hints at broad global labour market processes when he makes the comment that ‘someone’ is getting value out of using his song in a video, and it is not the South East Asian worker who made the shoes being advertised. In connection with the demands of the global labour market, there have been several developments in theories of labour that work to incorporate the burgeoning aspects of human life that are exploited, commercialised and monetised, where the production of subjectivity itself is critical to capital accumulation. These include immaterial labour (Lazzarato 1996), free labour (Terranova 2000) and affective labour (Hardt 1999). Another form of labour that is useful for thinking about the merging of subjectivity and labour is Hochschild’s well-known theory of emotional labour, which requires the worker to ‘induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ (Hochschild 2003: 6). A group of theorists loosely called the Italian autonomists have been key to thinking about the ways practices that were previously deemed domestic, leisure, creative or artistic are now extracted in what they call the ‘social factory’, which denotes how work practices have moved out of the ‘factory’ of Marx’s time into all other fields of social space (Gill and Pratt 2008). Immaterial labour (Lazzarato 1996) refers to two different aspects of labour. Firstly, it involves how information itself is produced and maintained as a cultural commodity, which changes labour processes and the worker’s relation to their product. ‘Skills’ are increasingly about being in the right networks of communication and negotiating relationships with other people. Secondly, in terms of the actual production of cultural content, immaterial labour is an array of activities not previously considered ‘work’, ‘in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion’ (Lazzarato 1996: 33). That description resonates with the work of those Bourdieu calls cultural intermediaries and one of the processes in the culture and creative industries that have increased the precarity of that labour market is the rise of immaterial labour as a key creator of online content, fashion trends and the ever-slippery notion of ‘cool’. Immaterial labour is not practised by one class or limited to knowledge workers; it is ‘a form of activity of every productive subject within

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post-industrial societies’ (Terranova 2000: 41), but it is felt with differing intensities by those in different positions in social space. For Terranova (2000), free labour builds on the concept of immaterial labour. It is voluntary, unwaged, exploited and, importantly, often enjoyed.ii The internet is a key site of free labour, which includes building websites and virtual spaces, and participating in online forums and chat groups: Far from being an ‘unreal’, empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large. (Terranova 2000: 33) The online and media discussions about dolewave, for instance, are examples of this free labour that permeate the scene’s affective economy of what is good, bad, cool, uncool, authentic, inauthentic and so on. Importantly in terms of class analysis, if the internet, and the creative industries in general, are made up of so-called ‘knowledge workers’, ‘then it matters whether these are seen as the owners of elitist cultural and economic power or the avantgarde of new configurations of labor that do not automatically guarantee elite status’ (Terranova 2000: 40). The concept of affective labour takes these processes further. Affective labour: involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact … The labour is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 292) The labour itself is not immaterial, in that it involves brains and bodies (Hardt and Negri 2000: 109), but the product of affective labour is immaterial as it produces ‘social networks, forms of community, biopower [where] the instrumental action of economic production has been united with the communicative action of human relations’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 293). Examples of these forms of labour range from blogging about your favourite hobby; reviewing a product on Amazon; arguing with your friend online about which band is better (Kinzey 2012: 54); a young person’s fashion or beauty adding to the ‘vibe’ of a bar; a cool waiter helping the owner decorate a café; a service worker managing sexual harassment from patrons; to your ii

See Bown (2015) for a discussion of how ‘productive enjoyment’ (such as reading Deleuze!) and ‘unproductive enjoyment’ (such as playing Candy Crush) can both reproduce capitalist ideology.

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song being used in a skate video. Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011: 159–180) offer a most useful critical overview of these concepts and their applicability for the cultural industries. Unlike the traditional conception of labour in youth studies that focuses on exploitation alone, affective labour is not just about developing and selling ‘skills’, often theorised as forms of capital, to get a job. It involves the very construction of personhood (Adkins 2005b). Young subjectivities are produced and unfold through labour, rather than young people bringing their subjectivity to work to be exploited, especially where aspects of the labour itself may well be pleasurable. Thinking about labour in this way moves the understanding of ‘work’ or ‘career’ from a space of youth inequalities (which it no doubt is), to a place where ‘youth’ itself is produced (Farrugia, Threadgold and Coffey 2017). Crucially, this may lead to exploitation without alienation, or at least a minimisation of it. Thinking about young people’s work through new theories of labour destroys the false dichotomy between youth transitions and youth cultures. It demonstrates how the new economy blurs the lines of work and leisure, production and consumption, and productive and non-productive labour (see Oksala 2016). Bourdieu (2000: 202–205) hints at these developments when he writes about the symbolic violence inherent in new workplace management techniques. Such techniques echo the Foucauldian notion of ‘governing through freedom’. Here workers can ‘create areas of freedom and … invest in his [sic] labour all the additional commitment not provided in the employment contract’ (Bourdieu 2000: 203). Contemporary versions of Bourdieu’s ‘cultural intermediaries’ – ‘creatives’, ‘knowledge workers’, and those who work in the arts, media and culture industries – all practice immaterial labour. As argued previously, Bourdieu’s forms of capital are imbued with affective elements. New theories of labour gesture towards these affective elements as increasingly important in the new economy. In those terms, the lifelong freelancers of the creative industries appear to participate in their own exploitation, ‘not because they are stupid and do not know any better, but because it is a necessary illusion within our current system’ (Kinzey 2012: 53). As the informant Stan’s comment pointed out earlier, new forms of labour are practised in the DIY scene, sometimes reflexively. Young DIY people may do so too, even if they are trying to avoid working in what has come to be known as the creative industries. Cultural and creative industries: The rise of the ‘creative class’ The young DIY informants here are positioned mostly outside of what have become known as the ‘creative industries’iii (Flew 2013, 2012), yet there are iii

I am treating the creative industries as a sub-section of the broader culture industries, or in Bourdieusian terms, as a sub-field of the field of cultural production.

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times when they do cross over into that field. The creative industries and those deemed ‘creatives’ have received considerable analysis in recent times. Some theorists have positioned them as a key site for the development of new forms of labour outlined above, with studies about fashion modelling (Wissinger 2007); retailing (Carls 2007); television, music recording and magazine publishing (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011); advertising (Arvidsson 2007); and photography and brands (Carah 2014a, 2014b), all pointing towards the ways individual subjectivity is both produced and put to work in creating and maintaining an image, a brand, a feeling, or a vibe. More broadly, Florida’s (2002) work on the revitalisation of cities has emphasised the ‘creative class’ as he calls it. In his view the important process of popular patronage in the revitalisation of cities is achieved by attracting what he called the ‘creative class’. This has led to the gentrification of many bohemian and working class hubs throughout the world (see Trinch and Snajdr 2016; Paton 2014; Wacquant 2008b; Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008; Atkinson and Bridge 2005). This kind of ‘creative’ gentrification is the very same process associated with the inner-city hipster. From a more conservative perspective, this is claimed to herald the rise of inner-city ‘bobos’ – bourgeoisie bohemians (Brooks 2000). The young DIY informants here begrudge such developments because they too are pushed out of the gentrifying areas. If they want to remain there, they must strategise by leading a relatively materially impoverished existence in share houses. In critical terms, the creative sector has been shown to be ‘socially and spatially restricted, characterised by unclear entry routes, exclusionary working practices and uneven geographical concentration’ (Allen and Hollingworth 2013: 499). The apparent autonomy of creative labour, to be able to work from home, cafés or in the new ‘creative hubs’, blurs work-play boundaries. Arguably, this broadens employers’ means to extract value from their employees (Thompson, Parker and Cox 2016). For instance, McRobbie’s (2016) analysis of the fashion industry outlines a Foucauldian form of governing through freedom, where the dispositif iv of creativity aligns the creative economy with the market demands of cheap labour, flexibility, internships, and individualised entrepreneurialism; where the self becomes an ‘enterprise’ (Kelly 2013). Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) maintain that the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism, of which the summons to be creative is central, has been co-opted and folded back into its very logic. (see Lazzarato 2005 for a critique). For the most part, the young people in this scene are actively struggling against these pressures, or they are trying to make do within these precarious and commercialised fields. Participants do not refer to themselves as ‘creatives’ and were likely to hold a cynical disposition towards the creative industries and their association with so-called hipsters. But some end up working there iv The Foucaultian understanding of dispositif alludes to embodied forms of administrative and institutional knowledge and techniques that create and maintain power relations within a particular discourse.

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nonetheless and express a fully reflexive understanding of the irony of this. The risks and obstacles encountered in these struggles are negotiated using strategies that rely on the investment and transformation of forms of capitals – cultural, social, economic (Bourdieu 1984). They also depend on subcultural capital (Thornton 1995); gender capital (Huppatz 2012) and network capital (Urry 2007). Unlike many of the so-called ‘creatives’ (Jones 2013; Kinzey 2012), from the interviews I conducted, none of the participants in this scene are getting regular financial support from their families. They are all financially independent but they are far from financially secure. For the most part, DIYers are not creative labourers in the culture industry; their punk and DIY attitudes see them reflexively trying to avoid these commercialised realms, they are fully aware of the problems endemic in this unstable workforce, and of the exploitation of immaterial labour. But some participants were seeking work in these fields, especially in the art scene. As discussed below, they were experiencing the competitive nature of securing any paid work at all, alongside the ever-increasing demand to work for free by undertaking internships. Importantly, the DIY ethos saw several participants attempt to parlay and transform their subcultural capital into small scale businesses.

DIY cultures to DIY careers Young people investing themselves in DIY cultures must negotiate the complex but now normalised nexus of study, employment, unemployment and underemployment to make ends meet, while maintaining space in their lives to pursue their creative and artistic passions. The following presents discussions with some young people balancing economic pressures with their desire to generate and uphold DIY and punk influenced activities in a community of likeminded friends and collaborators. Many of the participants reflexively ‘choose poverty’. At the time of writing, the poverty line in Australia, defined as 50 per cent of median income, was for a single adult just A$426.30 a week. For a couple with two children it was just A$895.22 a week (ACOSS 2016). Most of the research participants earned under or around the single poverty line. In that situation, they knowingly and strategically make decisions that ‘keep overheads low’ to free up temporal and mental space to be creative. Their ideas of being successful were not expressed in material terms, but were contingent upon a future where they continue to invest themselves in their interests, even if that meant living in relative poverty. Presented below is a snapshot of some of the ways young people deal with the risks and opportunities of a precarious existence. In this case, living an ethical life trumps material concerns, projecting an ambivalent but hopeful attitude towards the future (see Threadgold 2012). The possibility of creating sustainable creative work is shaped by possession of capitals and how heavily one invests, through illusio, into the field. Against analyses from the political right that position young people as the ‘anthropological monster’ called homo-economicus

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(Bourdieu 2009) – rational, self-interested decision makers – or analyses from the political left that position young people as cultural dupes with a false consciousness (see France and Threadgold 2015), I invoke Bourdieu’s concepts of struggle, strategy, illusio and social gravity to help foster an understanding of the ways young people are pushed and pulled in certain directions while reflexively (Threadgold and Nilan 2009) understanding the ‘gravity’ of their own situation. DIY trajectories: Punks, artists, hobbyists and downsizers ‘DIY’ is used here in two interconnected ways. Firstly, it resonates with the notion of the ‘DIY biography’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) which has had much critical discussion in youth studies (Woodman 2009; Roberts 2010a; Threadgold 2011). Secondly, it points to the punk DIY ethos, where those specific political and ethical values are drawn upon to make decisions about work and careers that traverse the ever-shifting boundaries between formal and informal labour markets. The data shows that there are some young people making deliberate decisions to opt out of the more formal school to work trajectories, embracing creative cultural modes of existence. This sometimes leads to accepting relative poverty as a part of the bargain. Peter’s trajectory and earnings are at the upper end in the scene because he has changed his commitment over the past few years from hobbyist to full-time investment. He was in his late 20s when interviewed. He has been in bands since he was 16. He studied software engineering at university while setting up his own recording studio. He also opened a live music venue for a few years, which he recently decided to close voluntarily because he saw the writing on the wall that it was about to start losing money. When the gig space was open, and alongside his recording work, he was earning about A$35000 a year, much of which he would reinvest back into the gig space for tax purposes. He currently works full time as a sound recording engineer in the studio that he set up in his own home. This activity is subsidised by his wife’s income. She is also a computer engineer and works in a well-paid salaried position in the private sphere. While there have been some tensions in the relationship due to the financial imbalance, this arrangement has allowed Peter to pursue his passions, despite knowing he is unlikely to make long-term sustainable money. While talking about money directly was awkward in all the interviews, since there is a punk reluctance to even consider it, Peter’s A$35k per annum income is by far the most money any individual participant had earned in their DIY endeavours alone. Most were combining casual work and doing their DIY practice on the side, and even if they were in multiple bands, running record labels or gig spaces, they would be doing well to reach this total. Further, there was a general reluctance to be on welfare payment due to annoyance with the endless red tape and arbitrary demands, as well as the DIY attitude of the need to be self-reliant:

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I never want to go back on the dole or get Austudy. I am pretty adamant that I never want to get money from the government again. I was just, ‘if I’m gonna do anything, I can’t accept government money for it’. In many respects, it was political, but it was just a matter of wanting to be self-reliant. (Axel) In the following sections I sketch out some of strategies of DIYers in their struggles to get by and make do, to preserve space in their lives to pursue their creative passions while ever-present precarity dominated the affective atmosphere of the fields in which they practice. DIY culture and getting by In a similar manner to struggles over the very meaning of DIY in the previous chapter, the participants expressed struggle in their day-to-day lives about maintaining temporal and mental space for their creative endeavours. This struggle was quite often coloured by rhetoric similar to the reported struggle around DIY. That is, they strove to maintain a meaningful and satisfactory ethical sensibility that usually involved rejecting the illusio that are doxic in more legitimate fields. There were numerous interrelated strategies here. For example, Fanny, who once had a quite prominent and reasonably well paid role on a popular radio station, is in several bands and is a graphic artist. She described her recent decision to cut that full-time work back to one day a week so she can pursue her creative passions: My main modus operandi now is to just keep the overheads low, very low. Like my work studio where I screen print, it’s all at my house, so my rent is my studio rent. I go to the markets and buy food for like two weeks at once, you know? I keep the overheads real low. Fix everything yourself. The landlord’s a bit of a rat, but he cuts me a good deal on rent … I like to keep the payments low and I then like to be afforded the things I enjoy doing. Or the things that make me sane, as opposed to the things that make me the worst version of myself. Like having a full-time job! Yeah, I think that’s a cool idea to stick by, and then you’re just afforded more freedom to do the stuff that makes you happy. (Fanny). Fanny sees cutting back on work that earns good money as the best way for her to be happy. She can pursue her creative interests while avoiding the drudgery and demands of a full-time job, even if this means that money will be tight. There was a constant struggle expressed between having the time to invest fully in their creative projects and having enough money. Jan, who once had a job paying about $A45000 a year working for a ‘not for profit’ organisation, recently quit that job to concentrate on her music:

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I kind of worked out that if I was trying to do stuff [making records and touring] while I was working full time, it would be really difficult and I don’t know if I would be able to. And that was timed quite well in that I quit work just before I started doing a lot of [music] things again. Like, it’s quite difficult to do what we all do. I feel like you just want to make choices that make it possible for you to do it for the longest time possible. I don’t know if it is creatively productive to focus 100% on that. I kind of quit and then I woke up one morning and went ‘fuck, that’s where the money came from. What did I do?’ (Jan) Jan points out that even though she earns a lot less money now, she does not really miss it: I just pissed it away really. I kind of lived the same life, I probably just showered more. It’s almost the same if you take that out of it. Like, you live in the same house, you know? It’s not that much of a difference really. (Jan) All the participants outlined the impossibility of making a living from their music making endeavours alone. As Stan says: Nah, can’t make a living. It’s like, I’m in a band, I’m in two bands, one band has six people, other band has five people, so like, getting $300 from a gig at [local venue] on the weekend doesn’t go very far between six people. We play like, a couple of gigs a week but that’s only like, 45 minutes one night and 45 minutes the next night so it’s not a lot of time. But I write a lot of music and stuff, but not a lot coming in. (Stan) Jan pointed out that virtually everyone in the DIY scene works or studies in some capacity aligned with their creative work and punk ethos. She gestured towards a change of attitude towards work from some of the mythology from the grunge era of the 1990s: Yeah, it seems like if you want to take it from ‘I have a job and I also do this’ like, you need publishing and you need a booking agent, someone pushing you. Remember how in the 90s there were stories like, how Kurt Cobain wouldn’t wash dishes cause he didn’t want to ruin his hands … People aren’t really like that anymore I don’t think. People are like ‘yeah I have a job’. (Jan) Stan also has an attitude that you need to work to ‘keep you grounded’ and, despite being deliberately unemployed at the time of the interview and being

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backed up financially by a small amount of money earned from his music, he has worked a string of casual jobs since high school, while at university and beyond. This closely resonates with the findings of much youth transitions research (see, for example, Furlong and Cartmel 2007; Woodman and Wyn 2015; France 2007, 2016). Stan worked as a packer in a warehouse; at a call centre doing social research; then at an ethical food market. When asked about whether he would like to be able to make a sustainable living out of making music, there was caution. Mmmmm … I don’t think … Well, it’s funny you say that cause at the moment I’m not working, I’ve just been doing music and I’m fucking bored out of my mind. It’s like I can only do creative stuff for like two, three hours of the day, maybe four. You become not that useful, or you’re not that great at it because it’s like, I don’t know. I do it a lot. Like, writing songs for six bands, so I feel like I’m pushing it fairly well but yeah, still it’s like there’s more hours in the week. (Stan) Another mix of work and creativity that is common in the scene, and one that speaks to notions of the precariat, is combining paid work in the service industry with making music and touring. Jemima sketches out an example of this. After returning from a European tour with her band, and racking up debt: I’ve always worked in hospitality whether it’s behind the bar or, I’ve done heaps of cooking. So, I’m chef-ing at the moment, a really busy place. 40 hour weeks, 10 hour days starting at six in the morning. It’s so fucking brutal. But it’s like, I need to get out of debt after touring so I’ve been doing that. (Jemima) At the same time, Jemima has taken on two internships: I’ve been working at [Art Gallery], just helping them out with backend stuff for their website, and I’ve got another internship starting soon at the [Local] Art Centre, being a shitkicker there. Ah, the [Art Gallery] one is an internship and now I’m doing a second internship which is not very sensible like, I’d love to get a paid job! I was doing art commission as well, that’s what I was doing last year so that’s just like helping students at uni with their materials and stuff. So I’d like to stick those two things together. Yeah, just materials and tools and stuff like that. (Jemima) At this point I asked Jemima whether she thought either of these internships could turn into a full-time job. This question is difficult to ask because the

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participants know that getting a full-time job is unlikely. When I asked Jemima this, there was a moment of mutual recognition that this was a bad question, that we both knew the answer to it, but one needs to at least try. This is a form of reflexivity that needs to be theorised more thoroughly, an ironic acknowledgement of the absurdity of the doxic conditions of the field, but the social gravity of the illusio is still strong enough for someone to invest themselves, despite knowing that the likelihood of success is low. Jemima gave me an ironic look, then responded: Ah, I think so. I mean, it’s possible at the place I’m starting at. [Local] Art Centre, it’s a community art centre so they have council money. They have money to do some pretty big projects and I feel like it’s a possibility there, it’s not certain. But I’m willing to do it just to gain experience. (Jemima) Despite the precarity of the labour market she is trying to enter, if I was to wager whether Jemima could establish herself in the creative industries, I would back her. She works hard, she has taken on two internships, but most importantly, she has very high subcultural capital from her membership of a prominent band with a niche international following. This subcultural capital is well suited to be parlayed into the immaterial labour so central to creative industry work, and possible employers know this. Overall, the participants were mostly working in the service-based sector or retail, or in jobs that somewhat resonated with punk sensibilities in that they were in the realm of ethical consumption, for example, non-profit organisations, arts, alternative or public media and labour unions. Downsizing careers to make more space for DIY creativity: Choosing poverty? What became apparent, as Fanny illustrated above, is that some people, even with university degrees and good career prospects, are opting out of that trajectory, in a way that parallels what has become known as the ‘down shift’, ‘sea change’ or ‘tree change’ movements of older generations (Hamilton and Dennis 2005). But where those older in life have usually set up a financial situation where they live in middle class comfort, the informants here were often actively choosing to live in relative poverty. The ethics of the DIY punk scene are transferred into decisions about career, both in terms of changing the organisation of the work/life balance and rejecting the unethical practices of employers. As Rachel discusses here, she recently quit a long-term role with a corporate jewellery maker to start her own small business, while working a few days a week in a bookshop and playing in her band: I’ve got a little jewellery studio at home so that feels as punk to me as playing in the band or anything really … I guess I was a bit confused for

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a while and kind of wanted to do all the things at the same time [music and career] and then slowly realised that wasn’t … You know, things get pulled and stretched and you realise you don’t want them to be. And the last job I had was really stressful and made me feel like not a very good DIY punk. You know, selling like, blood diamonds and that kind of shit. Definitely wasn’t an ethical job to have and I just, I was probably the only person in the company who was like, ‘this is not good for my psyche’. So, it was a bit of a leap of faith, when I quit I didn’t have another job to go to, I was just like ‘this is the time’, you know. (Rachel) Rachel spent a month unemployed until a friend of a friend, drawing on her social capital, ‘very luckily’ got her a job in a small local bookstore a few days a week. Rachel did not want to completely jettison the momentum gathered in her training as a jeweller, so rather than completely change direction, she invoked her DIY spirit to set up her own small scale jewellery business, making her own pieces: It’s been hard to work out how to make money and especially like, training so hard to learn how to do something [becoming a jeweller], it feels kind of silly to throw it in the bin. Not that I have, I’m making my own stuff now, but career-wise I felt like, I built up this career and now I don’t even want it anymore. (Rachel) So, while she is earning considerably less money, Rachel says she is ‘feeling a lot better’. In her struggle for finding an ethically satisfying career that pays the bills but also affords the time and space to be creative and ethical, she is drawing on and converting multiple forms of capital. Her career choices are inflected by transferring values developed and maintained around the DIY and punk scene, which outweigh the pursuit of economic capital. She draws upon the social capital of her friends to help to get a job, and she transfers her cultural capital developed as a jeweller from the commercial sector to working on a smaller DIY bespoke scale (Luckman 2015). Rachel also points to the difficulty of deciding to change trajectory, since her previous investment in training to be a jeweller has its own social gravity: it isn’t just a simple ‘choice’ to leave a career after training and building up that momentum. By pointing to next week’s looming rent, ‘haven’t had to pay rent yet, that’s next week. We’ll see how it goes’, she reflexively acknowledged that the struggle will be ongoing and further strategies will be needed. Debbie outlined a similar scenario. She has jettisoned a career as a trade union official to work sporadically in a small business. She says she has had to resort to shoplifting to get by in terms of life’s necessities, but the new time and space open opportunities for committing to her creative practices:

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It’s shit living in a share house, but previous to the way that I’ve been living of late, I’ve worked full time for many years as well as doing music full time but I did feel the burnout, because I had a very very stressful job as a trade union official for a long time. So, I had a lot more money, but in terms of having the space to make music and things like that, the payoff of not having much money is better for me at the moment. Because I prefer to be able to have some space. The downside is not being able to travel and things like that, and having like mad outfits. (Debbie) Debbie sees a downside in not being able to afford to travel or buy cool and elaborate fashions, but sees the payoff in terms of lifestyle as being more than enough compensation. Again, success here is inflected by punk sensibilities, it is about maintaining ethics and values over the pursuit of economic rewards. When weighing up the pros and cons, Debbie says: Either I’m gonna end up 40 and burnt out and not being able to produce shit, or I’m just going to have to live within small means. I mean, I steal a lot, and I’m good at that. So, that’s pretty lucky ’cause I don’t think I could do it if I didn’t know how to shoplift. And yeah, at the moment it’s worked out. I mean I’ve been doing it for almost a year now, like working and living off crumbs and op-shop living and just concentrating on getting better and playing and writing songs and stuff. (Debbie) Debbie also points out that much of her creative endeavours, particularly touring with her bands, actually costs her money. It is a struggle, but a worthwhile one: Yeah, it’s fucked really. But you do it, you always work out how to keep things going, you know. It’s amazing, the resilience you get. The other day, I lost a 9-volt adaptor, my daisy chain, and a lead, which to anyone else would just be like, ‘oh, I got pissed and lost it’. But I had to spend money replacing that and it just meant that for three days I lived off shoplifting and drinking cooking wine. You make your sacrifices you know? But, I would prefer to have reliable equipment and not be anxious about it than not, you know? (Debbie) Debbie forgoes luxuries and even meals to keep her punk practice alive. This is a serious investment in the illusio of the scene. For Debbie, the affective pull of maintaining punk practice, its social gravity, is more attractive than pursuing the more doxic ‘responsible settling down’ trajectory.

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The data reveals some broad typologies in the different trajectories of young DIYers. In between leaving school and approaching their 30s, the illusio of the DIY scene can fade in and out of intensity. Most maintain a ‘hobbyist’ orientation (Rogers 2013), where they patch together casual jobs or shortterm contract work while continuing to play gigs or record albums. Some remain hobbyists while undertaking full-time work, while other hobbyists will fade out of the scene towards their late 20s and early 30s. Their commitment diminishes as their ‘real’ jobs or new family commitments take precedence over their creative practices. It seems the illusio of more legitimised and normalised fields starts to dominate their trajectory as the social gravity of family and economic security beckon. Other participants seem to reverse this trajectory. They have done the study, got the career, and find it unsatisfying. They expressed how their punk attitude does not fit demands of the general labour force and even general mainstream society. In their mid to late twenties they have decided to downsize their work commitments to free up space in their lives to heavily invest in their creative practices. Here, the doxa of one field bleeds into another, where punk and DIY attitudes inform career decisions. The illusio of the DIY scene radiates more social gravity than the governmentalised illusio of the normalised life trajectory: school to work to relationship to children to career to retirement. The rewards of punk practice trump what feels like selling out, whether it is working long hours in a high-pressure job, or having to participate in the multitude of unethical practices that are doxic in global capitalist production. Punk practices are a reflexive way of maintaining a strong sense of self in the face of the ever-increasing contradictory demands of competing fields and institutions; a way of searching for ontological security in social conditions that make any form of security difficult to achieve at best, impossible at worst. As the realistic possibilities of achieving workforce illusio such as financial security and a stable family reduce, their social gravity fades and is reflexively replaced by more pragmatic and gratifying ambitions. By focusing on creative outlets and living within modest means, these young people struggle to practice a more ethical and satisfying life.

Subcultural capital and illusio The notion of subculture had its genesis in attempts to understand crime and deviance and, later, symbolically spectacular and subversive cultural activities (Cunneen and White 2002; Williams 2009). In her seminal study, Club Cultures, Thornton (1995) develops the concept of subcultural capital to understand what is required for authentically contributing to leisure and artistic based youth subcultures. She also notes that there may be opportunities to acquire and develop those competencies to engage in associated practices of creative labour. Developed from the work of Bourdieu (1984), subcultural capital is useful for understanding and describing notions of authenticity, ‘coolness’ and distinction within subcultural fields. In the interest of maintaining the

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reproduction emphasis in Bourdieu’s work that is underemphasised in Thornton’s developments (Jensen 2006), the extent to which subcultural capital needs to be transferred or parlayed into cultural capital to support an economically sustainable career needs to be ascertained (see Threadgold 2015a). Further, how forms of capital are used, invested and transferred in processes of networking is an important step towards understanding how physical and digital spaces are utilised. There is not a lot of research on how the development and maintenance of subcultural capital constitute forms of immaterial labour, nor on the possible career paths facilitated for a subcultural participant (see Burns 2016). Developing Thornton’s concept of subcultural capital, DIY scenes can be seen as underground creative cultural spaces in which acquired forms of knowledge and practice can produce opportunities for alternative careers: DIY Careers.v But they are also key sites of cultural appropriation into the creative industries. Cultural innovation and creativity comes not from professional middle class ‘creatives’, but from the creative underground; ‘a crucial producer of the kinds of creativity that fuel the increasingly central culture industries’ (Arvidsson 2007: 22). The fluidity of capitals between fields is an important conceptual tool for comprehending how young people can manage to hold competing demands together. When one ‘invests’ a form of capital in a specific field, there are sometimes ‘rigid lines’ that cannot be crossed. That is, subcultural capital knowledge, say, being able to spot a good band at a gig to distribute a record on your label, is not necessarily useful when talking to a bank manager to get a loan. The bank manager is only interested in your economic and, possibly your social capital. What is needed to get your subcultural capital to work is the ability to reflexively package it in a form relevant to niche markets. This ability, itself a reflexive form of cultural capital (Threadgold and Nilan 2009), means that the young person can tell a story using their subcultural knowledge and turn it into a coherent economic business plan that the bank manager can see is economically viable. More likely though is the DIY utilisation of new forms of dissemination of capitals afforded by the internet, such as Facebook, Bandcamp, Etsy, Pinterest, Big Cartel, Squarespace, Shopify and PayPal. This means that the DIY punk can feel a pleasurable affective flow when transferring capitals between relatively autonomous fields such as friends, study and music, but not so much when entering more traditionally rigid fields such as the economic and the bureaucratic. The possession and affectivity of subcultural capital can help to understand how and why some young people in the scene seek out what they see as DIY forms of ‘good’ work, over ‘bad’ work, even if this work is relatively low paid. As Luckman (2012, 2015) has shown, there is an increasing number of people v In 2017, a special issue of Cultural Sociology will focus on DIY Careers. It features the work of Andy Bennett, Miaoju Jian, Silvia Tarassi, Elham Golpushnezhad, Rosa Reitsamer and Rainer Prokop, Ross Haenfler and myself.

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opting to pursue small scale creative practices that emphasise the importance of emotional satisfaction over economic imperatives in career and creative practices. This kind of practice has strong social gravity for DIY minded punks. By working (mostly) outside the creative and cultural industries, and following the broad trend towards micro-economic organisation (Luckman 2015), DIYers can invest in the punk illusio while trying to forge an ethical work-life. This is also likely to rely on affective forms of labour, where one’s very subjectivity becomes woven into the work, and where there will be many instances of performing free and immaterial labour through self-promotion, such as building network relationships; keeping up with what is cool; and supporting other people’s endeavours in the scene.

Choice, struggle and making do: Strategic poverty? Through a Bourdieusian understanding, the idea of ‘choice’ needs to be thought of as struggles over and about the illusio of different fields, combined with strategies to set off on a preferred trajectory. The cultural activities that young people invest themselves in, or the decisions they make about the balance between work and creativity, are coloured by the affective structure of precarity. In some ways, these young people are pursuing a traditional ‘bohemian’ lifestyle, but it is more a result of reflexively having to strategically deal with uncertainty and insecurity. Ferreira (2016), using a Foucauldian perspective, has recently made an argument that youth subcultures and scenes have moved from the traditional subcultural logic of an ‘art of resistance’ to a logic of an ‘art of existence’. This is a convergence between creating an aesthetic and ethical existence in the spheres of consumption with the need for making a living in the production sphere. Creative young people are increasingly reflexive about the commodifying, co-opting and homogenising forces on their activities. Some cutting-edge aesthetics may be seen as expressive forms of reaction which allow them to announce their presence in the world, to live an alternative existence in the world, and to provide a means of subsistence in the world. (Ferreira 2016: 76) This resonates with what McDonald (1999) has referred to as ‘struggles for subjectivity’, where creative and artistic activities are felt to be ‘more than politics of resistance, it is the politics of existence that fuel the aesthetic practices of contemporary youth scenes’ (Ferreira 2016: 76). From a Bourdieusian perspective, the illusio that young people are encouraged to embrace and pursue from an early age is to study and work hard, get a stable and satisfying career, buy a home of your own, and thereby achieve satisfaction and happiness. Yet this is increasingly improbable, even for the well-educated and relatively privileged. The young people in the DIY scene are rejecting the inherent

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‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant 2011) of those illusio by reflexively investing themselves in fields that they find more comforting, creative, ethical and satisfying, by, as De Certeau (1984) has argued, ‘making do’. Those committed to DIY creativity are reflexively aware of this affective relation of cruel optimism and strive to avoid the experience of this form of symbolic violence. The modality of their struggle is with the many governmentalised discourses around the lives of young people: responsibilisation, risk, entrepreneurial self, individualisation and the like (Kelly 2006). In contrast, the social gravity of an underground existence is affectively attractive, comforting, gratifying and satisfying. It has more social gravity for them. There are obvious parallels here to Bourdieu’s notion of making virtue out of necessity. Since habitus involves an internalisation of classificatory systems it ‘continuously transforms necessities into strategies, constraints into preferences, and, without any mechanical determination, it generates the set of “choices” constituting life-styles, which derive their meaning, i.e., their value, from their position in a system of oppositions and correlations’ (Bourdieu 1984: 175, my emphasis). Bourdieu makes the argument that it is taste, in the case of the young people here, their punk attitudes, which colour the choices that they make. While this is likely to reflect their income, it is more about preference, ‘through taste, an agent has what he [sic] likes because he likes what he has, that is, the properties actually given to him in the distributions and legitimately assigned to him in the classifications’ (Bourdieu 1984: 175). A virtue is therefore made of necessity ‘by inducing “choices” which correspond to the condition of which it is the product’ (Bourdieu 1984: 175). We can see this when: [a] change in social position puts the habitus into new conditions, so that its specific efficacy can be isolated, it is taste – the taste of necessity or the taste of luxury – and not high or low income which commands the practices objectively adjusted to these resources. (Bourdieu 1984: 175) This analysis still rings true for the ways in which young people in precarious labour markets make do. Above I stated that there are elements of ‘choosing poverty’ apparent in this scene. It is important to note that the DIY scenesters here are not participating in a form of ‘recreational slumming’ (Coupland 1991: 113) or ‘poverty chic’ (Halnon 2002; Negrin 2015). There are certainly fashion aspects to punk practice, and an authentically punk aesthetic is necessarily cheap. Yet these decisions made about lifestyle are serious, not fleeting, and once committed, create their own trajectory. But ‘choosing’ and ‘poverty’ should be in separate quote marks when I use the term. There is a social gravity at play when people are pushed and pulled in ways sometimes beyond their control, but they have also invested themselves in their passions. This creates a momentum in life that makes ‘choosing’ to change course difficult.

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In terms of poverty, it is relative poverty, because the participants here are not on the streets, although the possibility of that is present for some of them, and some even go through what they call ‘couch surfing’ that may well fit the definition of homelessness (Farrugia 2016; J. Watson 2016, 2011). By opting out of the high pressured, long working hours, and often unreasonable demands of professional fields, the concept of ‘strategic poverty’ may be more apt in that there is a sense that one can opt to scale back full-time work to pay off with current satisfaction. The consequences are acknowledged reflexively and are accepted. The future can wait. DIY careers are precarious, but sometimes insecurity and precariousness are embraced, and a virtue is made out of necessity. We can see how creativity and community become more meaningful for some young people than the pursuit of a career, illustrating Bourdieu’s non-economic idea of interest. This summons the minute day-to-day thoughts and emotions that are the very ingredients of human life, bringing ‘temporality, depth, and desire to the analytic epicentre’ (Wacquant 2014a: 118) where ‘social agents are … suffering beings collectively engaged in embodied activities staged inside circles of shared commitments’ (Wacquant 2014b: 3). While an important aspect of the ‘capital’ metaphor is that any form of non-economic capital can be converted to economic interests, it is particularly helpful for thinking about non-economic interests and passions, that is, how the pursuit and possession of forms of capital is affective. If the experience of cruel optimism is a driver for an affective state of insecurity, strategic poverty seems to be a way of making do that at least goes some way to constructing a worthy and fulfilling subject position.

Conclusion At the end of the interviews I asked the participants whether they would still be working intermittently, living in share houses, playing in bands and investing themselves in DIY Culture in ten years’ time or when they were heading towards 40 years of age. This question provoked ambivalent responses. Some enthusiastically said yes, some were not so sure, and some responded along the lines of ‘I don’t want to think about that’, which is maybe an implicit admission – the ‘double language of disinterest’ – that this lifestyle may be unsustainable. As discussed in the previous chapter, the double language of disinterest is where ‘necessity’ is disguised as ‘disinterest’. The double language of disinterest here may conceal a reflexive understanding of the oncoming difficulties of persistently having to strategise and struggle to get by and make do. The ambivalences inherent in precarious struggles can mean that the future can wait for now, but it will not wait forever. My research indicates that the labour market developments described above provoke some young people to manufacture their own pathways to creating a meaningful life – what I and others are calling the DIY Career. The formalised pathways of education and training are not necessarily where

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attempts to negotiate the route from school to work takes place. DIY Careers are often linked to youth scenes and blur the lines between informal and formal work; between employment, under-employment and unemployment; and between education, leisure and work. DIY careers are also reliant upon intensified immaterial forms of labour. There is some evidence of alternative career patterns developing around creative cultural practices (see Burns 2016; Threadgold 2015a; Bloustein and Peters 2011), but this tends to happen outside ‘official’ youth transition spaces such as schools, TAFEs, universities and even the conventional labour market. Or at least it blurs the lines between them. Overall, there is not a lot of research on these strategies and whether they are a viable way of negotiating the precarious material and affective structures of the labour market. Bourdieu conceives illusio as largely taken for granted. It is doxic in the fields in which we struggle and is rarely critically engaged, other than in the struggles over defining the dominant forms of capital as the field transforms and reproduces. But what does the emergence of reflexivity mean for the notion of illusio? If the normative transition narrative – study hard, get a good career, settle down, buy a house – is a ‘zombie’ category now, what will this mean for youth studies? These will be important research questions in the future (see Farrugia and Woodman 2015). The concept of social gravity implies a tension between being pushed and pulled. Pushed in terms of being impelled to pursue doxic activities and goals such as getting a good job, finding a partner, and settling down with a partner to start a family, all the while reflexively understanding that these things are ever more difficult to achieve. Pulled in terms of being drawn to particular pursuits that may be at odds with normative demands but which affectively resonate with one’s own concept of morals, ethics, values and passions. These are the tensions doxic in the affective space where young people’s everyday struggles occur.

Chapter 8

Coda Hipsters, bogans and class in the DIY scene

In this coda to Parts 2 and 3 of the book, hipsters and bogans make a brief comeback to discuss the symbols of class in and around the DIY scene. They are also used to show how in personal discussions about these figures, as opposed to their use in mediatised representations, they may be drawn upon in an ironic and self-referential manner. Where media representation involves vertical hierarchical positionality (see Bottero 2004), as Rossiter (2013) notes, the everyday conversational use of these figures may not be as fraught with symbolically violent antagonism and can be used to express a self-deprecating horizontal positionality. The creative industries are associated with so-called hipster culture, as are aspects of the rise of the craft economy (Luckman 2015). The figures of hipster and bogan imbue the affective atmosphere of the DIY scene. For instance, iconography in the scene blurs the class boundaries between the two figures. In dolewave for example, the symbolic aspects of hipster and bogan become blurred. Dolewave has bogan-esque iconography – VB beer, ‘wifebeater’ singlets and flannos,i the dole, and broad Aussie accents. But dolewave actually produces things more associated with the hipster: LPs, tapes, small underground gigs, and ‘buzz’ on internet sites such as Faster Louder, Vice and Noisey. The mullet haircut has always been associated with bogans, but for some has become an ironic hipster fashion move. As Jim put it in an interview, ‘the bogan thing has become kind of hipsterised’. In conversation, DIYers sometimes used the figures of bogan and hipster as straightforward class markers. But these figures were also employed in an ironic and selfreferential manner, which points to a more horizontal positioning (Rossiter 2013). Sometimes it is difficult to tell if the informants were talking about i VB is a brand of beer associated with manual labourers. The tagline for the beer used on advertising for decades is: ‘A hard earned thirst needs a big cold beer. And the best cold beer’s VIC’. A ‘wife-beater’ singlet is a plain, usually blue, cheap singlet worn without a shirt. Note that the working class iconography is associated with domestic violence. A flanno is a long sleeved shirt made out of flannelette, usually with a coloured tartan pattern, associated with tradies, loggers and Grunge.

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actual living and breathing humans or about their figurative representations, but notably, there was always a prevailing atmosphere of mirth. Debbie points out that bogan can mean at least two different things: One of them is almost complimentary and one’s like an insult. Bogan just means that you’re down to earth, working class, maybe a bit like the old idea of an Australian bogan would be wear a Metallicaii shirt and maybe you’ve got a mullet and you’re kind of a good guy or something. (Debbie) The ‘complimentary’ version Debbie is pointing towards invokes traditional and harmless Australian working class tropes, but for the ‘insult’ version she makes a more specific analysis of a threatening form of masculinity: And then there’s a bogan which is like, a guy that’s got like a horrible haircut like David Beckham, and fashion sleeve tattoos, wears thongs with shorts with like zips on them, and like a horrible singlet. Maybe works out at the gym and listens to Foo Fightersiii or something and is just like a sexist piece of shit. That’s the scarier bogan, the bad bogan, you know. Which is just like, your run of the mill, stereotyped, advertising or advertisements have almost created them, you know. Love Australia, love drinking a Big M,iv you know? (Debbie) Similarly, Fanny, who says she was a tomboy in her childhood, associates bogan with a certain kind of Australian masculinity, but also situates herself as such: How else can you be a tomboy that’s not a bogan? I don’t know. I’ve thought about this a lot lately, Australian-ness is tied in a lot with this masculinity. You can think of other countries I suppose that aren’t so intensely that way, their national identity isn’t so tied in with masculinity or something like that. I guess the tropes that people have been talking about, like beer, football loving, that kind of thing. I enjoy football, I ii

Metallica are one of the biggest and most influential heavy metal bands of all time, one of the ‘big 4 of metal’ along with Megadeath, Anthrax and Slayer. They have become emblematic of the hubris of huge bands, especially after suing Napster and the release of the documentary Some Kind of Monster that depicted the band in therapy. In one scene, drummer Lars Ulrich frets that he may have to sell a Basquiat if the album does not make enough money. iii Foo Fighters are one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Formed by Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl in the 1990s, they have sold millions of records and are a constant staple on commercial radio. iv A brand of flavoured milk sold in square cartons.

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don’t froth over it but I actually like playing it more than I like watching it. I guess I do associate with masculinity. (Fanny) For Fanny, the hipster figure has semiotic meanings, but less so: ‘if we are talking tropes, I’d say beards would pop up a lot, wouldn’t they? And fucking tight jeans often exist on boys’. Elliott is disparaging of both terms as ‘very dismissive, closes down arguments, but also [they are] not very cool pejorative terms [laughs]’. Elliot sees bogan as a classist term, while hipster seems to have replaced ‘metrosexual’ to categorise creative urban males. Debbie perceives the hipster as being part of a ‘smug subculture’: No-one in the working class would be a hipster, they wouldn’t do it. To me, they’re like a smug, middle class person who kind of follows trends but pretends they came up with it themselves [laughs]. You know what I mean? It’s a very smug subculture. In Melbourne, it’s a very big subculture! [laughs]. (Debbie) Debbie then makes further points about the hipster, pointing to inauthenticity in politics and lifestyle. She is talking quite sarcastically in the following: It’s like a green voting, ‘politically conscious’, middle class person, before they start their family, they’re a hipster. So, they’ll drink boutique beer, they have a little bucket where they put their scraps after their dinner to put in their compost or to put in the worm farm and they’ve got expensive pants that look like they aren’t expensive. (Debbie) She then notes the collateral affordances that the hipster’s immaterial labour creates: They know all the nice places to get breakfast. I always say when people are looking for good breakfast, all you gotta do is look for the hipsters, they know all the best places. I don’t trust a café unless it’s owned by someone who is in-between the ages of 25 and 40 who like, is a hipster. ’Cause they literally are following food blogs, trends, they know where to get … Basically they’re like, putting a thermometer into their own sourdough. They love that shit. I mean, it makes for good eating having so many hipsters. (Debbie) Debbie and Elliot employ both hierarchical positionality to note the classed aspects of the hipster and bogan figures, but also invoke vertical positionality

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to place themselves in relation to the figures, drawing on the obligatory ironies. The blurriness between the two figures was also commented upon. For instance, Peter feels like that there would be people in the punk scene that would place him in either ‘camp’: I feel like some of the people from your weirder, like Real Bad Music and Bedroom Suck, would consider me to have a bogan thing happening, and I’m sure there’s other people who would go ‘Peter is a total fucking hipster’. So yeah, I’m in that weird middle ground. (Peter) Stan mentions that he has been called both a hipster and a bogan by different people in his life. Remember in Chapter 6, Stan said that he couldn’t call himself working class as his parents had never worked. In terms of being a hipster: My brother and his mates might call me a hipster, or something, just because I’ve got tight, black jeans on … I worked at the Reject Shop distribution centre for a summer and I got: ‘Stan is into that fucking hipster stuff!’ … Everybody uses it now and it’s a negative term to call somebody who’s different and pretentious, who seems pretentious to you. (Stan) He also mentions that he has been called a hipster by punks in the scene: ‘“Oh, this fucking hipster fag” or something. I don’t know, maybe because I wear jeans but I don’t wear a Sex Pistols shirt and I have a mullet’. After discovering the music of Lobby Lloyd and seeing images of the Sharpie subculture from the 1960s and ’70s,v Stan grew a mullet. But rather than being associated with the ‘super alternative’ Sharpies, his family associated it with much less cool signifiers, such as 1980s singer John Farnham and AFL player Stephen Kernaghan: ‘family members at Christmas will be like “oh, awesome bogan mullet!”’. Stan then acknowledges both a moment of vertical and horizontal positionality: People like to call themselves a bogan now, I think. There a bit of that ‘nah, I’m a total bogan’. It’s like saying you’re fair dinkum or you’re Australian or you don’t have pretension: ‘I’m a bogan, I’m not a hipster’. They’re like polar opposites, different people. So, I’ve met some people who would be called hipsters with mullets, something which is like a bogan signifier. (Stan) v The Sharpies were an Australian subculture of the 1960s and ’70s, publically associated with large rock concerts and violence. See Bessant (1995) and Beilharz and Supski (2015a, 2015b).

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Taking this further, and alluding to the Cashed-Up Bogan discussed in Part 2, Stan points out how bogan can seem to blur class lines, especially financially: Like, bogan is associated with tradies and high-vis and fuck, they earn more money than any hipster I know. Or any artist or something. [Bogans] are more middle class now. They’re plumbers and sparkiesvi and are earning much more money than any inner-city person I know. (Stan) Stan sees bogans blurring class lines. By saying that they earn more money than any inner-city person he knows, he is positioning the bogan as suburban. Elliott addresses similar concerns, observing that bogans are earning middle class money, not just in blue-collar, but in white-collar work as well: I think bogans have the money now, it’s not something that’s necessarily lower socio-economic status or class. Bogans are working in a lot of these high-rise office buildings because they’re without the need to ethically judge everything that they do, they can work for a large mining corporate or something like that. (Elliott) Like Debbie’s gesture to the Frankfurt School-esque cultural dupe dressed by advertisers, Axel analyses both figures in their relation to notions of authenticity: Anyone growing up in Australian culture would have experienced the sudden influx of the word hipster and around the same time the sudden influx of the word bogan. I guess most of the discussion revolves around questions of authenticity. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily authentic about a hipster or a bogan, or inauthentic about either of them. (Axel) He then goes on to make a distinction between hipster and bogan in terms of the very possibility of authenticity, where the bogan can be correlated with some people’s construction of self-identity: I think there’s a lot of self-conscious bogans that are happy to be bogans, like they buy the cars that make them look more of a bogan, they wear the shirts that make them look like more of a bogan. That they are authentic or inauthentic, it doesn’t really interest me. (Axel)

vi Sparkies is slang for electricians.

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When it comes to the hipster though, authenticity is impossible and the category is consigned to a form of social identity alone: But there is no such thing as an authentic hipster, and that’s interesting. I mean, the question of bogans often revolves around their level of selfawareness and to be a proper bogan, you must be unaware that you’re a bogan. Or if you’re told that you’re a bogan, you’ll be like ‘yeah, I’m a bogan’. It’s not something that you’re developing purposely as an identity, it’s just something that you are. (Axel) For Axel, ‘that does not correlate with being a hipster’. No-one has stepped forward and been like, ‘yes, I’m actually happy with being a hipster. I want to be a hipster. I want to be more of a hipster than the other people’. It’s more of an insult. (Axel) Axel says that this used to be the case for bogan as well, but recently a ‘selfconscious and proud bogan thing developed’. Nevertheless, both figures are imbued with class positionality: There’s kind of a downward class involved with being a bogan and in some respects, I can see the opposite for hipsters that it was like an identification of a sense of privilege or a distance from manual labour or whatever that makes a hipster appear so untroubled by what’s going on in the world. (Axel) For Jemima, the ‘gap is getting smaller and smaller’ between hipsters and bogans, especially as signifiers are co-opted or made ironic: ‘people have free reign over hipster but not so much bogan anymore’. She begins with an anecdote about a faux pas with her boss at work: I was talking to my boss the other day, talking about his new born daughter. Her name is Viv. And I was like ‘Vivian is a great name!’. He was like, ‘for a firstborn, you just need to consider how a name is going to age, is it going to be cute and is it going to be distinguished?’ And I was like, ‘yeah, you wouldn’t want to be called Cody, that’s pretty bogan’. And he was like, ‘yeah, that’s her middle name’. And I was like, ‘Shit!’ I felt for the first time, maybe ever, like super acutely aware that I’d used the term bogan. It just didn’t feel ok anymore. (Jemima)

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This example illustrates the different incarnations of the bogan figure and the ways it can have very different affects. Jemima crosses several ontological lines here between the media representation of the figure of the bogan, her own use of the term to make class judgements, the hurt that she may have caused her boss, and her reflexive understanding of her own class background: I don’t know. I’m a bogan so it’s definitely murky for me. I got bogan roots like, big time, my family, the way I grew up. Not super bogan but absolute elements of it … I always remember associating it more with long haired, metal, car dudes with bogans. In Melbourne, maybe bogan dudes are those that live on the south side of the river, that wear pink polo shirts and stuff and are just like sports dudes, you know? (Jemima) There is a well-known geographical dividing line in Melbourne that separates two distinct night time economies. North of the river, including Fitzroy and Brunswick, is seen as the more alternative but definitely hipster area, which is where this research was conducted in Melbourne as it is where the underground scene members live and play. The bars there tend to have a quite laid back vibe, a grungy aesthetic, with a focus on original live music. South of the river, especially, the South Yarra area, is more associated with high end brand names, expensive bars and cashed up bogans. The bars there tend to have a more up-market vibe, a shiny aesthetic, and have electronic dance music (EDM), with DJs and cover bands. Jemima then describes how hipster has come to replace the previous middle class folk devil: the yuppie. I was watching a skit show the other day where, it wasn’t something that I had realised, but it was a person who had gotten out of jail, he’d been in jail for like 20 years or something. Obviously not had the internet and he’s like, ‘there’s yuppies everywhere!’ and he’s looking at hipsters. It’s like ‘oh shit. Hipsters are yuppies’. (Jemima) These exchanges reveal many of the vertical class positionality factors discussed in Part 2, where the figures of bogan and hipster are used to create a symbolic and moral economy of class. But where the media representations tend to rely on straightforward techniques of symbolic violence, in conversation, the figures are blurrier, provoke moments of reflexivity, and are used ironically to express horizontal positionality. The hipster is used in a way that reflects the media construction of a middle class ‘straw man’, where the inauthenticity of other people’s consumption practices can be judged and categorised as vapid, pretentious or silly. As discussed previously, DIY has been co-opted in consumer culture, but the punk attitude in this scene makes one’s own practice feel relatively authentic, so the hipster figure works to have

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something to compare and create social distance from. The DIYers do this, even if they reflexively understand the social hypocrisies inherent in these generalisations. Meanwhile, the bogan figure seems to be more appreciated, there’s a stronger sense of identification and even affection for the bogan from the young people here who are themselves mostly from working class backgrounds. The bogan has more social gravity. The affectivity of the bogan figure pulls in more than one direction, instilling a sense of ambiguity (Rossiter 2013) and ambivalence. The observation that bogans are now earning good money also speaks to the very positionality of the individuals in the scene, who are struggling to maintain their own creative endeavours while earning enough money to get by. This seems not so much based on resentment, but on a stoic reflexive acknowledgement of the consequences of their own choices and taste.

Chapter 9

Conclusion

Introduction I make some significant conceptual claims and theoretical developments in this book. I hope those new developments will contribute to youth studies, and more broadly, to a better understanding of cultural aspects of class in everyday life. The first point is to advocate for the concept of struggle; to acknowledge its different modalities; to use the idea of struggle to think about young people’s trajectories through social space and the way they make strategies to deal with the present and engage with the future. The second point is the theoretical intervention of bringing a Bourdieusian perspective to understandings of affect and emotion. The book concludes below with an invocation of the ‘future’ as a concept in and of itself. The proposal is made that the future should be considered as an affective element of the very notion of ‘youth’ in relation to struggle, and an indicator of possible considerations for attention in the field of youth studies.

Modalities of everyday struggle Understanding young people’s lives through the prism of struggles and strategies can help overcome some of the problems with relying on concepts such as choice, and the inherent simplifications of the structure/agency dichotomy. We need to think about young people as strategising actors who create a trajectory through an array of fields as they reflexively struggle with their doxa. If we do this, we move readily beyond models of the young rational actor, the youthful homo economicus, and the juvenile cultural dupe with a false consciousness. The concepts of illusio and social gravity can enlighten us about how young people are both pushed and pulled by forces beyond their own control, while, at the same time, making reflexive strategies to invest themselves in specific endeavours. These endeavours include pursuing a career, starting a family, or rejecting normative forms of doxa to create their own space to live the life they wish to lead. In the case studies presented in the book, I have illustrated several modalities of struggle. The first case study looked at the struggles of media writers,

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filmmakers, comedians and the like, and their efforts to represent the world, and their own class position in it. The figures of hipster and bogan were argued to constitute the doxic affective atmosphere of how cultural aspects of class are discussed and debated, often without appearing to debate them at all. This creates the framing of cultural tastes, values, morals and inequality itself primarily from the perspective of the middle classes. It draws the discussion of inequality away from the material and economic towards morals, tastes and values. This struggle over representation serves to make class, in that a symbolic order is created that reflects and buttresses the objective order of material inequality. At the same time, these representations can trouble class boundaries if lifestyles are deemed inappropriate, even for the rich, especially if they do not reflect the self-perceived dignified tastes of the middle classes. Importantly, this symbolic representation is not consumed passively. It is used to constitute framings of identity. The figures of hipster and bogan play many roles in these struggles: stereotype, folk devil, clown, meme, and scapegoat. But this appearance of complexity is central to the making of class because it gives the appearance that genuine debate is occurring, even though the representation itself is framed from homologous positions in social space. Broadly speaking, this framing promotes the lifestyle of the middle classes as doxic. Significantly expressed in these media representations are anxieties over position and status. These anxieties speak to struggles that the middle classes are embroiled in over their very place in the world. The very different positions of bogan and hipster are marked by social homology and distance. The hipster in the mirror, and the uncouth bogan, represent struggles over social changes where the illusio of the fields in which the middle classes dominate – education, consumption, careers – do not seem to be paying off. The promise of happiness via buying the right things, studying hard, and getting the right job seems to be enveloped in cruel optimism as ironic and retro consumption, education inflation and labour market precarity come to affect the lives even of the relatively privileged. In print and on screen, hipsters and bogans are used as figures to mark hierarchies in social space. In person, hipsters and bogans operate as markers of class and to describe taste cultures too, but were also found to be used in a reflexive manner for irony and self-deprecation. In conversation, they allowed for the expression of a horizontal positionality with peers and family. The second case study of young people practising in a DIY scene presented an array of modalities of struggle. There were struggles over the very meaning of punk and DIY practice; struggles about the naming of a genre and its implications for authenticity; struggles over problematic gender and sexuality relations in the scene; and over the political work needed to change this. These everyday struggles are central to meaning making in the lives of these young people, where their creative practices are central to who they want to be and to the life they wish to lead. Questions about ‘selling out’, whether dolewave is meaningful, or if women are excluded from gig line-ups are

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emblematic of how punk and DIY operate as affective practice. The case study also illuminated aspects of those young people’s lives where they struggled with a combination of precarious labour market activities and their need to maintain a punk spirit to lead an ethical and creative existence. Illusio from cultural practices in the form of a punk and DIY ethos were seen to inform the strategies of struggle they practised in more legitimised fields such as the labour market. It seemed they were making a virtue out of precarity. Some were opting out of the normative transition to adulthood, scaling back their work careers to focus on their creative careers, to try to be the ethical person they wanted to be. In the broader view, the social location of the struggles empirically examined in this book are everyday struggles, that is, they are relatively mundane. This location has been referred to as the ‘missing middle’ (Roberts 2010b; Woodman 2013) in youth studies because there has been too much focus on ‘at-risk’ youth transitions and ‘spectacular’ youth cultures. Struggles examined in any field of representation colour the broader social horizon. The struggles of the young DIYers are over everyday meaning making and strategies to make do and get by. Despite being aligned with what some might consider a spectacular subculture, these young people do not really stand out from the crowd. They go about their day-to-day lives in a relatively ‘normal’ manner, even if they are making decisions that do not fit with mainstream doxic norms. Struggle and strategy then, are excellent conceptual tools to engage with these everyday practices. However, there are obviously much starker problems that might be dealt with using the notion of modality of struggle. Young people facing extreme marginality are pushed and pulled by the social gravity of many fields while making strategies to deal with their affects. Research of this kind on forms of youth struggle could range from disadvantaged youth tackling the education system, to a young person navigating a post-release programme in the criminal justice system, to young women dealing with online trolling. The concepts of struggle and strategy could be used to better understand young homeless people trying to secure everyday needs; young migrants confronting everyday racism; young refugees pushed out of their homeland; a young Muslim grappling with the rise of Islamism; young people in one of many war-torn countries trying to maintain an existence; or young Pacific Islanders facing rising seas from climate change.

Bourdieu, affect and reflexivity Reading some of Bourdieu’s concepts through an affective lens can add richness to his original concepts. If illusio constitutes the stakes, the level of investment one makes in the field, and the appeal of its rewards, then illusio is a mode of affect. It is a precursor of practice, a motivation to struggle, and the incentive to strategise. Moreover, forms of capitals are imbued with affectivity. The

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embodied forms such as language and bodily hexis affect the way people interact in any social setting. The objectified forms constitute distinctive social relations and therefore affect how people interact in any social setting. The institutionalised forms reflect the affective status from where they are acquired. Status is a form of socialised affect, conferring on its owner advantage in all manner of social settings. Furthermore, fields have their own affective atmosphere, with their own absent presences, immanence, intensities and orthodoxies, which hail and endorse some ways of being, and preclude and disparage others. Habitus can be thought of as a dispositional antenna attuned to the affective economy of a social setting, where reception is dependent upon one’s history, constituted by forms of capital. Actors struggle both within fields and with the competing demands between fields. These struggles occur in the field-specific affective space between the arbitrary and the hierarchical. Finally, social gravity implies how young people are affected by what is around them: things, people, ideas, norms, history. Thus an affective reading of Bourdieu can add dimensions to his conceptual tools that are only gestured towards at present. In the same manner, a Bourdieusian reading of the affective turn can incorporate – into any field of investigation – methods to help understand affective economies, that is, in specific settings, who is affected, in what ways, and why. The rise of the concept of reflexivity for understanding the contemporary subject also brings challenges to Bourdieu’s conceptual armoury. I have argued elsewhere that reflexivity can add dimensions to a Bourdieusian perspective (Threadgold and Nilan 2009; Woodman and Threadgold 2014). In this book, I have argued that reflexivity has implications for Bourdieu’s concept of illusio in particular. The promises of many fields are currently coming into question due to very rapid social change. While this change is too slow to be deemed hysteresis per se, there are similar consequences for how an actor feels relevant to illusio. There is at least a sense of permanent precarity, where the things learnt from an early age do not match the things experienced now. The middle classes express reflexivity about these changes in the representations they make and consume. The promise of happiness is an illusio embedded within a cruel optimism, in the form of the downward envy of the disgusted subject (Lawler 2005) and the ironic relationship with the hipster in the mirror. Furlong and Cartmel (2007) gesture towards the affectivity of permanent precarity with their ‘epistemological fallacy’, but this is not just a youth experience. It is spreading throughout the life course. When the promises of neoliberal happiness are not being kept, their normative illusio are therefore under threat of being deemed counterfeit, opening up the possibility for alternative movements and political change. Importantly, reflexivity does not imply an objective standing of one’s own place in the world, but is likely to be bound up in misrecognition. At the time of writing, this could well be expressed by the shifts to the hard-political right in UK’s Brexit, the US election of Trump, and in Australia, the return of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. For the

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majority of young people, this political move seems bound to foreclose even more future promises of the fields in which they practise. What comes next for youth in this regard is hard to predict, but the everyday struggles of all kinds of young people are likely to intensify.

Youth, modalities of struggle and the ‘future’ The notion of struggle implies the future. Struggle and strategies imply a forward-oriented subject that is making decisions to steer their trajectory ever-ahead. This is especially so when we consider the reflexive subject. The future is unpredictable, even intangible, but it is also affective (Coleman 2016; Lyon and Carabelli 2015). So, while the future is something that is coming, it is also ever-present as a reflexive trope, since anticipation of the future governs the present through the staging of risks (Beck 2009), through possibilities, crises and events (Anderson 2010), and through the affective contagion of fear (Massumi 2005). Bourdieu has argued that there is a protensive relationship between habitus and field (Bourdieu 2000), where practice does not happen in time, but actually makes time: so that practice is a form of temporalisation (see Adkins 2011). This understanding is important for youth studies because it speaks to the very heart of the specific research field. It implies that young people are creating their future on the trajectory from ‘child’ to ‘adult’ in a world where the very concept of the future is thrown into doubt by a range of issues, from endemic unemployment to climate change (Threadgold 2012; White 2011). Thus the very making of time is a modality of struggle, since strategies chosen to move forward and the way a young person is affected by hope, dread or an ambivalent in-between will be mediated by their position in social space and the very capitals on which that position relies. A young person’s ‘intensities of consciousness’ (Noble and Watkins 2003), that is, the way youth orient themselves towards, and invest in, a field, and the speed at which they need to do so, are also affected by this position. Rather than supporting claims of false consciousness on the part of youth, we need to open up the idea of ‘epistemological fallacy’. That is, we need to interrogate the disjuncture between the rhetoric of meritocracy and neo-liberal choice. In that way we will be tuned to the actual youth experience of everyday inequality, and the powerful forces that arrange the dynamic affective space where young people struggle and strategise every day.

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Index

Adkins, L. 44, 52, 53, 56–7, 59, 70, 185, 213 adult/adulthood 9, 10, 13–17, 19, 126, 181, 187, 211, 213 affect 5, 14, 21–3, 26, 28–9, 30, 33–5, 39–41, 45, 51, 52, 59, 61–2, 62–9, 70, 75, 86–7, 93, 104, 107, 118, 125–31, 155, 165, 169, 198, 207, 208, 211–13; affect and capitals 67–8, 171, 185, 196, 199, 211; affect and figures 76, 126; affect and illusio 68–9, 181, 194, 200, 211; affect and precarity 24, 25, 52, 68, 70, 98, 125–6, 129, 152, 160, 183, 186, 187, 189, 197, 199, 200, 211, 212; affect and symbolic violence 48–50 affective atmosphere 11, 65, 70, 77, 94, 96, 98, 113, 114, 115, 117, 131, 139, 170, 181, 183, 189, 201, 210; affective atmosphere and field 66–7, 212 affective economy 17, 39n vi, 52–3, 64, 69, 97, 96, 127, 128–30, 184, 212 affective labour 89, 183–5, 197 affective practice 66, 178, 211 affective space 5, 15, 58, 70, 75, 113, 212 affective structure 77, 87n v, 183, 197, 200 affective turn 25, 43, 52, 212 agency 28, 36, 37n v, 39, 53–4, 86, 87n v, 95, 160, 209 Ahmed, S. 17, 47, 61–2, 63–5, 66, 68, 87, 96, 104, 108n iv, 125–8, 130 ambivalence 52, 66, 68, 75, 76, 87, 89, 130, 158, 164, 172, 199, 208 amor fati 51, 63, Australian politics 49, 81–3, 85–7, 91, 93 authenticity 11, 25, 47, 88–90, 108, 111, 122, 129, 143, 145, 201; authenticity and DIY/punk 146–50

authenticity and dolewave 151–8; authenticity and hipsters/bogans 195–203, 205–07; authenticity and Noise in my head/LISTEN 161–77 beards 50, 78, 79, 92, 93, 107, 129, 203 Beck, U. 9, 20, 53–8, 143, 153, 182, 188, 213 Bennett, A. 12–13, 17, 95, 140, 163, 196n v Berlant, L. 63, 68, 76, 125–8, 198 Birmingham School (CCCS) 11, 20n ix, 140 Bourdieu, P 28–51, 30; Bourdieu and affect 52, 62–9, 69–70, 128–9, 185, 211–213; Bourdieu and autonomous pole 42; Bourdieu and capitals 43–5, 55, 67–8, 88, 185, 187; Bourdieu and class 20–1, 30–4, 51, 58, 125, 139, 178; Bourdieu and class on paper 24, 33–4, 43, 45, 51; Bourdieu and comedy 118–119; Bourdieu and cultural arbitrary 49–50; Bourdieu and cultural dupes 31, 38, 69, 116; Bourdieu and cultural intermediaries 31, 60, 111–113, 118, 183, 185; Bourdieu and determinism 29–30, 46; Bourdieu and distinction 50–1, 52, 59, 63, 90, 92, 93–4, 106–7, 112–115; Bourdieu and doxa 47–8, 118, 130; Bourdieu and emotion 62–69; Bourdieu and false consciousness 31; Bourdieu and field 31, 37, 38–43, 66–7, 139, 213; Bourdieu and habitus 38–43, 51, 54, 69, 213; Bourdieu and heteronomous pole 42; Bourdieu and illusio 34–6, 37, 68–9, 197, 200, 211, 212; Bourdieu

240 Index and misrecognition 47–8, 68–9, 97, 185; Bourdieu and morals 58–62; Bourdieu and naming 96–7, 104, 128–9, 151, 160–1, 173; Bourdieu and object/subject 28, 75, 112; Bourdieu and occupations 31–2, 185; Bourdieu and practice 13, 52; Bourdieu and reflexivity 53–8, 211–13; Bourdieu and reflexivity as method 34, 38, 54n ii; Bourdieu and relational/relations 28, 33, 58, 66; Bourdieu and skole 108; Bourdieu and social alchemy 39n vi; Bourdieu and social games 36–8; Bourdieu and social gravity 34–6; Bourdieu and strategy 36–8, 40, 51; Bourdieu and structure/agency 28, 37n v; Bourdieu and struggle 16, 22–4, 32, 34–7, 51, 76, 92, 127, 128–9, 139, 150, 177, 200; Bourdieu and symbolic violence 29–30, 48–9, 68–9, 97, 185; Bourdieu and thinking tools 5, 28–30, 34–5, 52, 65–6, 69, 98; Bourdieu and trajectory 46; Bourdieu and value 58–62; Bourdieu and youth 10, 21 Bourdieusian spirit/prospects 5, 53, 85, 86, 90, 197 bricolage 12, 89, 93 bridging the gap 17–19 capitalism 21n xi, 22, 88, 89, 97, 186 career 5, 8, 11, 15–16, 18, 19, 35, 126, 152, 178, 181–200, 209, 210, 211 Cashed-Up Bogan 61, 86, 105, 127, 205, 207 casual/casualised work 8, 18, 126, 182, 188, 191, 195 chav 25, 76, 85, 95, 123 choice 5, 9, 22, 24–6, 28, 35–6, 49, 50, 53–8, 70, 79, 82, 87, 126, 127, 143–4, 190, 193, 197–9, 208, 209, 213 class 5, 12, 19–22, 24, 28, 30–4, 39, 43, 46, 50, 58, 75–7, 91, 96, 97–8, 128, 130–1, 139–40, 142, 150, 151, 154, 157–9, 177–8, 181–6, 201–8, 209–10; class and affect 25, 33, 35, 52–3, 59, 61, 62–70, 77, 104, 125–131, 211–13; class and creativity 181–7; class and morals 58–62; class and reflexivity 53–8; class and scenes 13; class and vales 58–62; class and youth culture 8–9; class and youth studies 21, 26, 53, 61; class and youth transitions 9, 14;

class, blurry lines between 82, 94, 112, 115, 150; class, creative 185–87, 196; class, denial/death of class 9, 19–20, 53–7, 85; class, dominant 12, 31, 32, 37, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 113n vi, 128, 139–40, 169, 200; class, dominated 23, 31, 37, 48–50, 59, 68; class, making/ make 45, 57, 60, 62, 75, 104, 113, 117, 161, 210; class, middle 8, 18, 25, 31, 34, 50, 51, 53, 59–61, 68, 75–7, 79, 82, 86, 87, 94, 95, 104, 106, 107–9, 111–15, 117n viii, 118–20, 122–3, 125–9, 152, 159, 182, 192, 196, 201–8, 210; class, ruling 31, 45; class, working 8, 11, 31, 34, 50, 60, 61, 86, 94, 105–7, 114–5, 119–22, 126n xiii, 129, 152, 157, 186, 201–08, 212 class anxiety 9, 25, 75, 76, 87, 94, 97, 104, 106, 107, 112, 118, 125 class boundaries 25, 28, 31–3, 57, 58, 60, 64, 76, 82, 87, 98, 112, 115, 117–19, 128–9, 201, 210 class consciousness 31, 34, 40, 43, 54, 58 class on paper 33–4, 45, 113, 182 class relations 19, 33, 51, 52, 87n v, 94, 96, 104, 106, 113, 125, 127, 128–9, 178, 201–8 class struggle 22, 24, 32, 46, 51, 77, 82, 210 classification 57, 59, 75–7, 83, 94–7, 111–12, 114, 116, 145, 149, 150–61, 198 coffee 47, 50, 78, 80, 84, 92 collusio 40, 91, 152 comedy 76, 96, 115–128 Commentariat 76, 104, 105, 105n i consumer culture/lifestyles/practices 7, 9, 10, 16, 18, 20n xi, 45, 50, 57, 76, 82, 83, 88, 89, 91, 94, 96, 111, 125, 126, 129, 142, 183, 207 cool 8, 10, 37, 67, 78, 79, 83, 87–9, 91, 92, 108, 124–5, 129, 147, 157, 183, 184, 194, 195, 197, 203, 204 craft/craft economy 79, 201 creative industries 5, 8, 18, 60, 75, 80, 88, 91, 104, 126, 139, 181–7, 192, 196, 197, 201 creatives 8, 79, 95, 152, 185–7 creativity 8, 11, 26, 55, 92, 140, 142, 144, 177, 181–200 cruel optimism 68, 75, 76, 89, 116, 125–8, 198, 199, 210, 212

Index cultural arbitrary 47, 49–50, 51, 59, 212 cultural capital 20n x, 30, 31, 33, 43–6, 48, 49–51, 54n ii, 68, 80, 83, 87, 88, 93, 96, 104, 107, 112, 113, 118, 129, 140, 160, 161, 182, 196; cultural capital and affect 67–68, 211–12; cultural capital and anticipation 55; cultural capital and comedy 118–22; cultural capital and reflexivity 55, 107–9; cultural capital, embodied 44, 45, 55; cultural capital, institutionalised 44; cultural capital, objectified 44, 45 cultural intermediaries 31, 60, 97, 104, 105n i, 106n iii, 111–12, 113, 118, 128, 140, 150, 183, 185 culture industry 11, 18, 20n ix, 139, 142, 181, 183, 185–7, 196, 197 death of class 9, 19–20, 53–7, 85, 91, 104 determinism 23, 28, 30, 37 detraditionalisation 14, 56, 57 disgusted subject 60, 76, 111, 212 discourse 18, 47, 49, 85, 96, 121, 128, 154, 177, 186n iv, 198 disposition 24, 32, 33, 38–43, 44, 45, 46, 54, 55, 56, 59, 65, 114, 118, 165, 168, 169, 171, 181, 186, 212 distinction 23, 24, 25, 33, 34, 36, 38, 46, 50–1, 58, 59, 87, 131, 139, 143, 161, 169, 195; distinction and comedy 115–25; distinction and DIY 50; distinction and enclothed cognition 63; distinction and gastrophysics 63; distinction and hipsters/bogans 38, 83, 88, 90, 92, 205; distinction and irony 93–4 DIT (do-it-together) 144, 149 DIY (do-it-yourself) 5, 9, 25, 26, 140–5, 145–78, 210–211; DIY and career 19, 181–200; DIY and co-optation 144; DIY and distinction 50; DIY and dolewave 150–61; DIY and scenes 13, 45, 108, 139, 140–3, 145–50, 178, 181–3, 185, 190, 196, 201–8; DIY and sociology 144; DIY and struggle 58, 60, 186–7, 189, 192–5, 196, 197–9; DIY practice 13, 140–3, 178, 186–7, 188, 192–3, 195–7 DIY biography 14, 73–4, 188 dolewave 25, 109, 140, 146, 150–61, 184, 201, 210

241

dominant Class 12, 24, 31, 32, 37, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 113n vi, 128, 139–40, 169, 200 dominated Class 23, 24, 31, 37, 48–50, 59, 68 domination 20, 23, 31, 32, 36, 70, 114 double language of disinterest 156, 199 downsizing 18, 192–5 doxa 25, 26, 30, 36, 37, 38, 42, 42n xiii, 43, 45, 47–8, 51, 54n i, 58, 60, 75, 77, 116, 117n viii and ix, 118, 122, 126, 130, 139, 145, 146, 149, 150, 152, 156, 161, 169, 175–8, 183, 189, 192, 194, 195, 200, 209–11; doxa and affect 66–70 Durkheim, E. 21n xii, 23, 29, emotion 5, 22, 25, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36–7, 41, 48, 51, 52, 53, 58–9, 60, 61, 62–70, 77, 87, 97, 117, 125–8, 130, 142, 155, 159, 171, 174, 183, 197, 199, 209 emotional labour 183 enclothed cognition 63 ethics 5, 19, 24, 28, 68, 192, 194, 200 ethnicity 8, 9, 12, 14, 31, 32, 41, 52, 56, 63, 91, 92, 115, 117n ix, 126n xiii, 157 everyday illusions 68–9 everyday struggle 5, 8, 15, 24, 30–1, 45, 50, 51, 53, 54, 58, 60, 70, 76–7, 87, 94, 111, 139, 140, 142, 145–78, 181, 200, 209, 213 false consciousness 31, 37, 48, 54, 54n i, 57, 188, 209, 213 feel for the game 37, 39, 54, 58 field 18, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38–43, 45, 46, 48, 50–1, 55–6, 58, 60, 68, 69, 70, 76, 96, 97, 127, 139, 144, 146, 165, 177, 181, 183, 186, 187, 189, 192, 195–200, 209, 210, 211, 213; field and affective atmosphere 66–7, 189, 212; field and punk 13, 142–3, 160; field and social games 36–8 field of art 80; field of cultural consumption 75, 139, 144; field of cultural production 45, 139, 142, 143, 161, 178, 185n iii; field of economics 24, 31, 45, 75, 95, 196; field of education 35, 45, 67n vi, 75, 126, 139; field of occupations/labour market 31, 75, 126, 139; field of politics 49, 95; field of power 31, 45, 68, 96, 113n vi; field of representation

242 Index 9, 71–131, 161; field of science 45, 87; field of youth studies 5, 9, 10, 11n 1, 14, 18, 28, 29, 52, 53, 54n i, 209, 213; field, poles 43, 47–8 figures 5, 9, 18, 25, 26, 34, 5, 66, 75–7, 79, 82–5, 88, 91, 92, 95–6, 97, 98, 104, 105, 112, 116–19, 125, 126, 128–9, 130–1, 139, 160, 201, 203–7, 210 folk devil 86, 95, 105–7, 129, 207, 210 Foucault, M. 30, 53, 68, 77, 79, 95, 185, 186, 197 Frankfurt School 11, 12, 20n ix, 154, 205 free labour 89, 183, 184 gastrophysics 63 gender 8, 9, 12, 14, 24, 32, 41, 52, 56–7, 60, 63, 64, 67, 91, 92, 97, 109n iv, 111, 115, 117n ix, 140, 145, 161–78, 187, 210 generations 7, 8, 15–17, 30, 41, 43, 45, 54n i, 61, 88, 89, 90, 129, 155, 182, 192 governmentality 18, 35, 95, 120, 144, 152, 183, 195, 198 habitus 22, 24, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38–43, 45, 46, 51, 53, 54–7, 60, 62, 69, 90, 91, 95n xi, 97, 142, 198, 212, 213; habitus and affect 63–5, 69, 212 Hage, G. 23, 29, 30, 35, 46, 66, 70 happiness 17, 34, 48, 62, 68, 75, 98, 116, 125–8, 189, 197, 205, 206, 210, 212 Harris, A. 18, 19, 57, 144 haunt/haunting 52, 59, 76, 90, 97–8, 131 Hebdige, D. 11, 12, 158n vi hierarchy/hierarchical 26, 36, 47, 49–51, 56, 59, 66, 68, 97, 104–5, 116, 117, 160, 201, 203, 210, 212 high culture 47, 50, 59 hipster Marxism 109 hipster racism 57, 91, 109–10 hipster sexism 57, 91, 109, 110–12, 123 hobbyist 188, 195 homo economicus 16, 187, 209 homology/homologous 24, 31, 34, 39n vii, 40, 55, 57, 67, 68, 76, 93, 96, 104, 107, 112–15, 116, 117, 119–25, 129, 130, 172, 210, homophily 62, 62n iii humour 115–125 hysteresis 30, 39, 40n viii, 56, 58, 212

ideology 6, 11, 31, 48, 67, 69, 89, 109, 148, 184n ii illusio 22, 24, 29, 30, 33, 34–6, 37–8, 40, 41, 42n xiii, 48, 51, 53, 54n i, 70, 76, 91, 98, 125–7, 139, 142, 145, 146, 152, 156, 177, 181, 187, 188, 189, 192, 194, 195–8, 200, 209, 210, 211, 212 illusio and affect 68–9, 70, 125–7, 211–12 immanent/immanence 29, 55, 57, 58, 65, 67, 68, 117, 184,212 immaterial labour 8, 89, 183–4, 185, 187, 192, 196, 197, 200, 203 improvisation 29, 39, 141 individualisation 9, 14, 19, 20, 25, 53, 58, 70, 76, 90, 123, 129, 143, 145, 155, 182, 186, 198 inequality 14, 21, 25, 30, 37, 52, 53–8, 68, 76, 91, 111n v, 115, 128, 165, 210, 213 intern/internship 14, 126, 186, 187, 191, 192 irony 59, 76, 83, 89–90, 93, 94, 96, 109–111, 120, 123, 126, 129, 130, 151, 153, 187, 210 Journal of Youth Studies 21 journalism/journalist 7, 38, 60, 77, 79, 85, 93, 95–7, 111, 113, 122–3, 126, 145, 151, 151n x, 152, 156, 160, 161 Kelly, P. 10, 19, 28, 37n v, 53, 186, 198, labour market 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 25, 89, 96, 126, 129, 139, 181–3, 188, 192, 198, 199, 200, 210, 211 laugh/laughter 9, 60, 76, 85, 106, 115–25, 126, 152, 153, 154 Lawler, S. 23. 50, 60, 63, 76, 111, 114–15, 121, 212 lifestyle 7, 10, 12, 15, 18, 32–4, 50, 58–60, 78, 80, 92, 93, 105, 106, 110, 111, 113n vi, 124, 129, 139, 140, 145, 194, 197, 198, 199, 203, 211 Listen Listen Listen collective 12n vi, 161–78 mainstream 8, 9, 11, 25, 78, 87, 89, 117, 123, 140, 142, 144, 145, 147, 149, 152, 160–1, 195, 211 make do/making do 5, 26, 38, 153, 160, 181, 186, 189, 198, 199, 211 Marx, K. 19, 20, 20n ix, 21, 21n xii, 22–4, 29, 30, 31, 37, 43, 44, 53, 89, 109, 127–8, 144, 183

Index McRobbie, A. 12, 18, 38, 49, 60, 120, 120n xii, 164n xvii, 186 Melbourne 5–7, 12n iv, 25, 79, 109, 123, 148n vi, 151n viii, 157, 170, 203, 207 middle class 8, 18, 25, 31, 34, 50, 51, 53, 59–61, 68, 75–7, 79, 82, 86, 87, 94, 95, 104, 106, 107–9, 111–15, 117n viii, 118–20, 122–3, 125–9, 152, 159, 182, 192, 196, 201–8, 210 misrecognition 24, 30, 38, 47–8, 49, 51, 54, 68, 75, 112, 113, 115, 122, 177, 212 modality of struggle 5, 17, 19, 24, 28, 33n iii, 35, 36, 38, 43, 45, 50, 75, 92, 104, 115, 139, 181, 198, 209–11, 213 MONA Museum of Old and New Art 65, 68, 83–4 moral economy 25, 62, 76, 112–15, 115–25, 127, 207 moral panic 9, 10, 45, 49, 61, 89n ix, 123, 129, 140 morals 5, 11, 13, 14, 16, 22, 24, 25, 28, 34, 38, 51, 52, 53, 57, 58–62, 65, 67, 68, 75, 76, 77, 83, 86, 87, 89n ix, 96, 104, 106, 113n vi, 122, 123, 125–31, 139, 200, 210 music industry 13, 108, 141, 142, 149, 166 naming, politics of 96–7, 116, 140, 145–6, 150–61, 172, 178, 210 neoliberal/neoliberalism 10, 18, 38, 39n vii, 44n xiv, 47–8, 53, 57, 95, 144, 152, 181, 212, 213 Newcastle 25, 82–3, 85, 182 Nietzsche, F. 23, 35 Noble, G. 36, 40n ix, 43, 46, 48, 54, 55, 56, 62, 213 Noise in my Head 150, 161–178 not for the likes of us 51, 63, 129 ontological security 22, 195 opinion 7, 9, 25, 75–7, 86, 93–6, 104–7, 109, 110, 11, 112–15, 123, 143, 146, 161, 171, 178, 183 parody 25, 75, 95, 104, 111, 115–25, 130 Pini, B. 61, 86–7, 105, 121 pole, autonomous 31, 42 pole, heteronomous 31, 42, 47, 96 popular culture 7, 10–12, 47, 50, 59, 75, 76, 77n iii, 85, 90, 95, 104, 110, 111, 115, 116, 118, 127, 129, 140, 154

243

poverty 26, 82, 140, 152, 153, 182, 187, 188, 192, 198–99 precarity as affect 24, 25, 52, 68, 70, 98, 125–6, 129, 152, 160, 183, 186, 187, 189, 197, 199, 200, 211, 212 precarity/precarious 8, 9, 14, 15, 54, 76, 96, 139, 151, 152, 181, 182, 192, 198, 210, 211 precariat 21, 21n xii, 182–3, 191 privilege 8, 18, 48, 49–51, 60, 66, 75, 104, 107, 108, 110, 112, 115, 118, 122, 126, 127, 145, 197, 206, 210 promise of happiness 17, 68, 75, 116, 125–28, 210, 212 punk 5, 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 25, 38, 45, 50, 79, 108, 140–5, 139–178, 181–200, 204, 207, 210, 211 ‘race’ 41, 57, 63, 64, 91, 109n iv, 109–10, 114, 165, 177 racism 57, 76, 91, 93, 109–12, 109n iv, 114, 116, 117, 121, 143, 160, 211 rational/rationality 16, 55, 61, 62, 64, 67, 70, 188, 209 recognition 31, 37, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 59, 76, 77, 96, 109n iv, 112, 113, 17, 117n xi, 122, 123, 126, 139, 144, 145, 161–78, 192 reflexivity 5, 8, 9, 14, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 35, 36, 38, 40, 48, 49, 52, 53, 60, 68, 69, 70, 76, 89, 94, 107–9, 111, 112, 114, 117, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 128–31, 139, 143, 147149, 150, 153, 155, 165, 159n xiii, 176, 185, 187–8, 192, 193, 195–200, 207–8, 209, 210, 211–13; reflexivity and Bourdieu 38, 53–8, 211–13; reflexivity as Bourdieusian method 38, 54n ii; reflexivity and class 53–8; reflexivity and cultural capital 55, 107–9; reflexivity and inequality 53–58 relationality 19, 20n xi, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40n ix, 42, 45, 46, 50, 51, 52, 58–9, 66, 68, 75, 76, 87n v, 88, 93–7, 104, 106, 107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 116, 118–25, 126–31, 172, 177, 178, 183, 184, 186n iv, 198, 204, 205, 209, 212, 213 representation 5, 9, 16, 18, 19, 22–6, 28, 33, 43, 49, 59, 68, 75–131, 139, 151, 157, 161, 164, 169, 175, 176, 201, 202, 207, 210, 211, 212

244 Index resistance 8, 11, 13, 17n viii, 23, 69, 95, 105, 142, 144, 152, 153, 156, 168, 197 retro 12, 89, 90, 93, 94, 158, 210 risk 9, 18, 20, 22, 24, 38, 53, 55, 108, 143, 182, 187, 198, 211, 213 satire 9, 25, 75, 95, 109, 111, 115–25 scene 5, 9, 13, 17, 24, 25, 26, 45, 50, 91, 95, 108–9, 139–208, 210 sense of one’s place 51, 94, 129 setting 39, 40n xi, 41, 43, 54, 55, 56, 65, 67, 67n vi, 68, 69, 77, 212 sexism 57, 76, 91, 109–12, 114, 116, 120n xii, 123, 143, 161–78, 202 sexuality 15, 26, 52, 56, 63, 64, 92, 115, 140, 145, 203, 210 Skeggs, B. 20, 28, 52, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 75, 85, 114, 115, 116n vii, 121, 122, 130, 161 skole 108 social alchemy 34, 39, 39n vi, 58, 66 social capital 8, 44, 44n xiv, 108, 126, 193, 196 social distance 21, 40, 59, 64, 76, 88, 89, 93, 107, 112–15, 116, 119–25, 129, 130, 172, 206, 208, 210 social games 36–8, 39, 40, 47, 48, 54, 58, 171 social gravity 22, 24, 29, 30, 34–6, 40, 42, 46, 51, 53, 67, 69, 91, 98, 139, 153, 181, 188, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 200, 208, 209, 211, 212 social homology 24, 31, 34, 39n vii, 40, 55, 57, 67, 68, 76, 93, 96, 104, 107, 112–15, 116, 117, 119–25, 129, 130, 172, 210 social media 16, 77, 81, 91, 92, 97, 105n i, 106, 106n iii, 114, 152, 164 165, 170, 173, 174, 196 social order 10, 24, 33, 48, 51, 65–6, 68, 75–7, 96, 97, 112, 113, 115, 117, 126, 210 social space 10, 24, 30–1, 33–4, 37–8, 40, 40n ix, 42, 42n xiii, 46, 48, 49, 51, 54, 54n ii, 58, 64, 70, 75, 94, 96, 106, 112–17, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 139, 143, 150, 152, 183, 184, 209, 210, 213 sociological practice (Bourdieu) 28–51, 52 Standing, G. 21, 21n xii, 182–3, 191 sticky sign/subjects 87, 96

strategic or choosing poverty 187, 188, 192, 198–99 strategy 5, 16, 22, 24, 26, 33, 34, 36–8, 40, 41, 46, 51, 56, 70, 94, 96, 114, 127, 148, 181, 183, 186–9, 193, 197–9, 199–200, 209, 211, 213 structure 9, 15, 19, 22, 23, 28, 30 31, 36, 39, 45, 46, 47, 51, 53–4, 58, 61, 63, 66, 69, 70, 77, 87n v, 95, 143, 183, 197, 200, 209 struggle 5, 10, 13, 14, 17, 19, 22–4, 18–9, 34–6, 37, 38, 39n vii, 46, 51, 53, 56, 70, 111, 117, 130, 139, 143, 187, 188, 199, 209–11, 213; struggle, authenticity 143, 145, 146–50, 193; struggle, Bourdieu 13, 22–4, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34–6, 37, 48, 58, 70, 92, 106, 127, 129, 142, 178, 200, 211–12; struggle, class 18, 19, 22, 24, 28, 31, 77, 87n vi, 94, 96, 104, 107, 112, 115, 122; struggle, classification 33, 45, 75–103, 104, 31, 142, 150–61; struggle, creativity 9, 26, 139–200; struggle, cultural 9, 11, 12, 25, 26, 49, 50, 58, 60, 106, 118, 129, 131, 142; struggle, everyday 5, 8, 15, 24, 30–1, 45, 50, 51, 53, 54, 58, 60, 70, 76–7, 87, 94, 111, 139, 140, 142, 145–78, 181, 200, 209, 213; struggle, modality of 5, 17, 19, 24, 28, 33n iii, 35, 36, 38, 43, 45, 50, 75, 92, 104, 115, 139, 181, 198, 209–11, 213; struggle, recognition 161–78; struggle, representation 9, 16, 92, 93, 94, 105, 107, 111, 112, 115, 139; struggle, site of 11, 12, 20n ix; struggle, social 23, 24, 42, 45, 47, 48, 51, 66, 68 subcultural capital 67, 140, 148, 160, 161, 187, 192, 195–7 subculture 8–9, 11–13, 17, 19, 38, 85, 88, 89, 90, 95, 140–3, 150, 160, 164n xvii, 165, 168, 178, 195, 197, 203, 204, 204n v, 211 subjectivity 19n ix, 38, 39, 65, 115, 125, 169, 183, 185, 186, 197 suburban/suburbs 77, 78, 80, 83, 85, 86, 92, 105, 163, 166, 205 symbolic boundaries 5, 25, 28, 31, 32, 33, 57, 58, 60, 64, 76, 82, 87, 87n v, 98, 112, 115, 117, 118–19, 128, 130, 148, 149, 161, 178, 186, 188, 201, 210 symbolic capital 33, 44, 54n i symbolic economy 76, 112–15, 130

Index symbolic violence 10, 25, 29, 30, 31, 48–51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 66, 67, 68, 70, 76, 87, 97, 105, 106, 113, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 129, 131, 150n vii, 153, 156, 157, 177, 185, 198, 201, 207 sympraxy 52 taste 5, 25, 32, 36, 37, 38, 44, 45, 47, 50, 58–9, 60, 65–6, 67, 68, 75, 76, 77, 87, 88, 91–3, 94, 96, 104, 106, 107, 112, 115, 118–19, 121–22, 124, 127–8, 128–9, 130, 139, 149–50, 176, 183, 198, 208, 210, 212; taste and capitals 44, 87, 183; taste and class 25, 50, 60, 75, 76, 87, 88, 91–3, 96, 118–19, 121, 208, 210; taste and distinction 32, 36, 37, 38, 45, 47, 50, 58, 59, 60, 67, 68, 77, 94, 106, 107, 112, 115, 118–19, 124, 127–8, 129, 139, 198; taste and music 32; taste and Values 36, 58–9, 65, 75, 77, 104, 118–19, 128–9, 176, 198; taste boundaries 5, 65–6, 68, 87, 91–3, 112, 119–19, 121–2, 127, 130, 149–50 tattoos 50, 78, 81, 93, 109, 120–1, 202 television/TV 59, 60, 66, 80, 85, 86, 92, 105, 106, 110, 115, 121–5, 151n viii, 186 temporality 13, 24, 36, 46, 48, 67, 156, 181, 187, 189, 199, 213 Tinkler, N. 83 trajectory 8, 13, 14, 15, 22, 24, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 43, 45, 46, 48, 51, 58, 59, 67, 152, 181, 182, 188, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 209, 213 transition 9, 13–17, 17–19, 19, 126, 185, 191, 200, 211 Triple J 209, 123, 140, 145, 147 Tyler, I 85, 95–6, 104, 105, 121, 123, 130

245

underemployment 8, 9, 181, 182, 187 unemployment/unemployed 9, 91, 181, 182, 197, 190, 193, 200, 213 urban 13, 79, 86, 115, 140, 163, 203 values 5, 11–12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 24, 25, 28, 34, 47, 50, 58–62, 65, 66, 75, 77, 83, 95, 96, 104, 106, 112, 113, 115, 117, 119, 125, 127, 128, 129, 142, 143, 144, 145, 160, 176, 183, 184, 186, 188, 193, 194, 198, 200, 210 virtue out of necessity 37, 198, 199, 211 Wacquant, L. 23, 30–4, 36–43, 45, 48, 54n ii, 55, 66, 67, 70, 96, 112–13, 123, 178, 186, 199 Walsh, D. 83 Watkins, M. 36, 46, 48, 54, 55, 56, 64, 65, 169, 213 Weber, M 19, 20, 21n xii, 23, 24, 29, 31, 32 working class 8, 11, 31, 34, 50, 60, 61, 86, 94, 105–7, 114–5, 119–22, 126n xiii, 129, 152, 157, 186, 201–08, 212 youth culture 8, 11–13, 14, 17, 18, 89n ix, 140, 185, 211 youth studies 5, 8, 9–10, 13, 15, 18, 21, 24, 25, 26 28–30, 51, 52–8, 61, 95, 143, 154, 185, 188, 200, 209, 211, 213 youth transition 9, 13–19, 185, 191, 200, 211 zombie category 20, 200