Commencer un blog à dominante politique par un sujet en apparence aussi trivial que les discothèques pourra surprendre, un petit avant-propos s’impose donc. Le texte qui suit est une recension écrite en 2009 dans le contexte de cours du soir en sociologie pris un peu par hasard au Birkbeck College de Londres, où je résidais alors lorsque dans une vie antérieure je fus banquier d’affaires à la City. La recension a pour sujet un ouvrage universitaire traitant plus particulièrement du phénomène house-techno-rave dans les années 80 et 90 à Londres avec un angle résolument sociologique et bourdieusien, donc pas si apolitque que cela.

Je pris beaucoup de plaisir à écrire ce texte, qui me permit de méditer sur mes expériences de clubber assez acharné à cette même époque et me valut une excellente note d’un remarquable et inspirant professeur qui eu le mérite de pousser ses étudiants vers l’excellence. Souvenir ému d’une pinte au pub de la London School of Economics où il m’encouragea généreusement à continuer à rechercher et à écrire. Il fut le premier texte à peu près sérieux que j’ai écrit et je le présente ici dans sa langue anglaise originelle sans la moindre retouche. Cheers!

Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures invites its reader to a sociological exploration of London’s dance music scene in the late 80s and early 90s, specifically in the context of the house-techno-rave subculture.

Beyond the apparent frivolity of the matter this well-researched book closely examines these youth cultures and endeavours to uncover the underlying cultural hierarchies operating within that nocturnal, post-adolescent world. A world, according to Thornton, typically subject to distorting value judgments, and therefore generally neglected or misunderstood in the field of subcultural studies.

This multifaceted research can accordingly be approached from different critical perspectives, first as a documented contribution to media studies. Club cultures, Thornton points out, are intrinsically disc cultures. Through an archaeological inquiry into the discotheque phenomenon, the author traces the successive mutations by which after the 50s live performance progressively declined and virtually disappeared as a spontaneous expression of dance music, whereas recorded music rose to become the predominant practical source and vector of values of authenticity.

Furthermore, Thornton investigates, with convincing supporting evidence, the process of the creation and orchestration of tastes in music youth subcultures by the media, including micro-media (e.g. flyers, listings, fanzines) and niche media (e.g. music or style magazines). Contrary to widely held opinions among subcultural sociologists and clubbers alike, Thornton draws our attention to the fact that in reality:

Youth cultures are not organic, unmediated social formations, nor are they autonomous, grassroots cultures which only meet the media upon recuperative ‘selling out’ or ‘moral panic’. On the contrary, the media do not just represent but participate in the assembly, demarcation and development of music cultures.

Yet perhaps the most conceptually appealing idea contained in Club Cultures is the notion of subcultural capital, in direct reference to the cultural capital that Pierre Bourdieu develops in Distinction. Cultural capital occupies a pivotal position in contemporary sociological theory, and Bourdieu decisively demonstrates the distinction mechanism whereby ‘art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences’.

Interestingly, Bourdieu stresses the distinguishing value of music as precisely one of the most spiritual forms of art, and the relevance of social determinants to access to avant-garde culture.

Subcultural capital, then, constitutes a conceptual redeployment within club cultures, characterised as taste cultures. Thornton identifies ‘hipness’ as a form of subcultural capital by which ‘cool’, ‘in-the-know’ clubbers distinguish themselves from, and form their identities against, the ‘uncool’, commercial mainstream, best exemplified by BBC’s Top of the Pops or the stereotypical image of ‘Sharon and Tracy dancing around their handbags’.

The idea is eminently seductive, and there are undoubtedly profound analogies. Both cultural and subcultural capitals are extra-curricular, and consequently operate as second nature, a form of ‘existential elevation’ from which status can be derived. Their value is similarly dependent on their unequal, exclusive distribution; and this is important.

A parallel can be drawn here between the popularisation and resultant devaluation of both erudite classical music in Bourdieu’s analysis and underground house-techno music in Thornton’s. In addition, in both cases the assertion of a certain type of taste implies identification and inclusion within a certain affinity group, and simultaneously the stigmatisation of an inferior one. ‘Taste.’ as we know since Bourdieu, ‘classifies, and it classifies the classifier’.

If the dividends of cultural capital are measurable and convertible in the academic and ultimately social and economic markets, we might however struggle to pinpoint in this analysis exactly those generated from its subcultural version. While its direct economic value remains fundamentally marginal, and Thornton evokes certain status and symbolic benefits, the argument does not completely unfold in practical terms within this book.

Could we, with a note of sociological derision, intuit for instance from ‘the importance of clubs as a place for people to meet prospective sexual partners’ the convertibility of subcultural capital into a form of ‘sexual capital’ before the Internet Dating Age? While Thornton hints at this aspect, she does not, alas, completely explore the promising, yet slippery, symbolic avenues opened by her line of thinking.

In comparison with the wider social and political implications of Bourdieu’s ideas, we also might be tempted to question what ultimate sociological combat can be fought from the notion of subcultural capital. A recurrent theme in the book is subcultural capital’s relative classlessness, the media being the primary source from which it is derived. But if we consider house-techno music in its most intellectualised forms as a fully fledged avant- garde, are there not sufficient grounds to socially re-examine this notion in the light of Bourdieu’s argument?

In other words, to what extent is the acquisition of subcultural capital in actual fact facilitated by a pre- existing cultural capital? And to what extent are the hierarchies observed within club cultures, consciously or unconsciously, the continuation of broader cultural, social and economic divides? An opportunity might also have been missed here to endow subcultural capital with broader sociological ramifications.

Notwithstanding minor conceptual critiques, Club Cultures forms a fascinating account of a defining moment in British social history.

[…] the youth of my research were, to cite the cliché, ‘Thatcher’s children’. Well versed in the virtues of competition, their cultural heroes came in the form of radical young entrepreneurs, starting up clubs and record labels, rather than the politicians and poets of yesterday.

Thornton displays a unique talent for participant observation, and in a few remarkably perceptive pages narrating an ordinary clubbing night out (A Night of Research), acutely portrays a corporatised society in the making.

The accelerating in-built obsolescence of tastes and fashions, identities increasingly formed around leisure pursuits and, eventually, the absolute blurring of commercial, artistic and spiritual boundaries, are all admirably well observed. Seven Days in the Art World, Thornton’s second and excellent book, confirms this talent, and firmly positions its author as a remarkably insightful and stimulating observer of self-labelled avant-garde circles.