I remember telling my friend Charlotte back in 1981 that a college teacher of mine had once said that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants from eastern and southern Europe had recreated much of their peasant culture in the center of U.S. cities. My comment was that 50 years later, in some of the same neighborhoods of New York’s Lower East Side, bohemians from the suburbs had recreated the culture of suburban high schools, though with the twist that the cool kids and the freaks and the artsy fartsies actually got to run the student council and put on the dances.
Charlotte laughed but also thought that what I said was both justified and derogatory. But I actually didn’t mean the comment to be derogatory. What I had in mind wasn’t high-school-like posturing and immaturity and snottiness and sniping—though Manhattan’s East Village certainly had enough of that—but that by the late-’60s/early-’70s almost every suburban school would have had at least a rudimentary bohemia composed of some freaks and liberals and artsy-fartsies who thought of themselves as oppositional in some sense, if only to the extent of not signing on to the idea that the school in its curriculum or its sanctioned social activities was taking you where you want to go. Anyway, while I soundly reject the idea that the freaks and punks et al. were actually a counterculture (they were generated by the culture, a lot of their ideals came straight from the movies and TV shows they’d gorged on as tykes and from parents and teachers and from novels and history books), they were nonetheless playing a role that’s considered oppositional. This role is easier to play in high school than in adulthood because it’s harder to get kicked out of high school than it is to get fired from a job—and since there’s no production line that the high-school bohos are screwing up by their slacking, you get some teachers and perhaps an administrator or two who will be lenient or even supportive. Appreciative of the kids for not being boring.
So then, a little older, and in the East Village, the bohemians were trying to keep the roles going beyond the teenage bubble, even where the roles were not so easy. It is a difficult road, when you attempt to be an artist or musician or entertainer or writer or DJ or marginal intellectual or social critic. There’s no real apprenticeship for it: maybe some artistic training or musical training, but no degree that’ll get you anywhere, especially if the sounds you want to make don’t seem to be nurtured by the biz. No accredited path that takes you from training to employment. Maybe for some people I should be substituting “college” or “art school” for “high school” above. But my idea here is that bohemian roles already exist in someone’s everyday school life before he or she hits the bohemian neighborhoods of a major city. And the earlier high school attitudes and behavior can be a model for what comes next—not just oppositional posturing but sharing books that are not the assigned reading, having existential crises and discussing how to change the world, testing your self-expression and your stances against those of the people around you. It’s not necessarily immature to want to extend these activities into adulthood. And the model someone might bring with him or her, that there’s a rah-rah mainstream that doesn’t nurture us, and a creativity that can only blossom despite the mainstream—even when the model is obsolete or just plain wrong—may seem reasonable, given a person’s experience.
But the phrase I just used, “even when the model is obsolete or just plain wrong,” brings me to a whole bunch of questions. In the very first Rules Of The Game column back in June I asked where people’s musical tastes come from and why the tastes seems to cluster by social class. To answer this question I felt I needed to expand my concept of “social class” beyond the usual upper, middle, and working class, needed to include what I’m calling “cultural classes”—social categories such as “rednecks” and “skaters,” for instance. Last week I gave what I think are strong reasons for doing so: that such cultural classes are where people live emotionally and stylistically, are what people aspire to join or are uncomfortable leaving (which of course has consequences for a person’s career and income). And when those cultural classes are in play, they and not the supposedly “deeper” upper/middle/working classes are what structure the immediate social environment. I gave as my example the study that Penelope Eckert had conducted in the high schools in suburban Detroit in the early-’80s, where the social structure was jocks vs. burnouts, not middle class vs. working class. Although jocks vs. burnouts is obviously related to middle class vs. working class, it’s not the same thing.
But here’s my problem: I say “I gave as my example” the high-school cultural classes, which implies I could just as easily have given some other example. But in fact, it’s not so easy. Are there other examples ready at hand? I used high school because high school is pretty much the only thing I’ve got.
Now, I’m sure that my basic insight is right: that throughout the society, not just in school, not just among the youth, cultural classes are present and that they, rather than the “deeper” middle and working classes, are where we live emotionally. But high school is the only place where the cultural classes are consistently named and thrown into people’s faces. Not that there are no general names in adult society: “man,” “woman,” “black,” “white,” “gay,” “supervisor,” “doctor,” “shop steward,” “bitches,” “hos,” and “niggas” are all cultural categories. As are “suits” and “celebs.” And for better or worse so are “alternative” and “indie” and “gangsta” and “establishment” and “mainstream” and “corporate.” But I don’t know of any environment other than high school where there’s such attention paid to social groupings and where there’s an immediate vocabulary at hand to describe the social landscape.
Think of this as a thought experiment: You’re a sociologist and you go into a high school and hand out a questionnaire that contains a simple instruction: “List your friends.” (And if people ask, “How do you define ‘friend’?” you tell them to use their gut.) Then you compile the results, counting only the mutual friendships (that is, when each person lists the other). Basically, these friendship patterns will show you the social structure of the high school; if it’s a suburban school you’ll get a cluster of related cliques on the prep end and another cluster on the burnout end (or whatever equivalent names are in use depending on time and place). And where the freaks are numerous, or there are hot-button religious or racial divisions, those might also shape the social landscape. But my point is, it makes sense that in a high school this question—who is friends with whom— will get you your social map.
Whereas if you were to ask the question of the people in my apartment complex (“Who in these buildings are you friends with?”) your question wouldn’t get you a social structure, since the people here don’t have much to do with each other. There would be some social similarities among the friendship groups (if there are any friendship groups), but these wouldn’t mean anything as far as the complex’s social structure, because the complex doesn’t have a social structure. It’s where we live bodily, but it’s not where we live our social lives.
Think of various other settings, venues or institutions where we could ask the question: neighborhood, college dorm, college department, department store, corporation, office, profession, message board, army base. You’d get pretty interesting results, especially if you looked further to see if anyone outside of a particular friendship cluster noticed it as a cluster, whether people gave names to the clusters, what the people in a cluster had in common, etc. And you’d get more meaningful results than you’d get from my apartment complex, since most of those settings would be more important to people’s social lives than my apartment complex is to mine. But my guess is that rarely would you get results as structured or as significant as you will in a high school, because rarely is so much of one’s social life and social identity concentrated in a single institutional setting. And rarely are you confronted with such a social range of people as you are in high school—“confronted” being the key word here. Presumably as you go on into adulthood you deal with a greater social range of people, but not usually in a way that has as much consequence to your social identity.
A few paragraphs up I describe high school as something of a bubble, as if it were a protected space. But it’s also a fishbowl. It is protected in the sense that you’re allowed expressive, nonproductive malingering that would get you fired from a real job but won’t get you tossed out of high school if you can get by with C’s and D’s. But it’s very unprotected in that it allows other people the same expressive, nonproductive malingering, and you can’t really avoid those other people when they’re expressing themselves at your expense. You can be a target or an object of admiration of someone you don’t really have much to do with but whom you’re in parade in front of day in and day out in a way that as an adult you wouldn’t be in front of, say, your dentist or the guy you buy hot dogs from. For sure the dentist and the hot dog man can tell things about your class and culture pretty quickly, just by looking at you and talking briefly to you. But nevertheless your cultural attributes don’t really have any new consequences. In general, you’ve already made a lot of your social choices, chosen or at least reconciled yourself to your social identify. So if the hot dog guy thinks you’re a nerd or a misfit or an intellectual or a hoity-toity arts aficionado, well, so what?
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If you’re a student, you can ask yourself if your school is nurturing you or if it’s mangling and distorting you. And of course, student or nonstudent, you can ask the same about a job or a leisure activity or a family or a love affair or a friendship. You might answer ambivalently or not. What’s interesting about the school setting is that at least one of the major social groups in the school seems to be saying “No” to the school, but that the refusal—the “No”—is itself a crucial part of the school’s social structure. (Notice that the word “school” seems to have taken on two different meanings in the previous sentence.) So the question of whether or not the school is nurturing you would have to include whether or not people’s various ways of saying “No” are nurturing you (including your own way of saying “No,” if you’re among the nay sayers).
Since so much of the audience, especially the audience for music criticism, wants music to act out some kind of a “No,” my gut tells me that high-school analogies are plenty relevant. But I also feel that I’m stuck using high-school cultural classes for my names and my map simply because I have no other alternative, even where the names and map aren’t all that good. (For instance, one crucial disanalogy is that jocks-preps-socs in a school are the ones leading many of the school-sanctioned extracurricular social activities, while the burnouts vehemently shun such activities. But once you’re out of high school, what’s analogous to a school-sanctioned extracurricular social activity?) So, a question for you all: what other analogies might be useful? What other category names?