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‘Flexible Opposition’: Skateboarding Subcultures under the Rubric of Late Capitalism

2011; Routledge; Volume: 28; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09523367.2011.586790

1743-9035

Sean Dinces,

Spatial and Cultural Studies

Abstract In this article, I develop a critical dialogue with historians and sociologists who suggest that subcultural or 'alternative' sports such as skateboarding are best understood as fluid and fragmented sites of 'postmodern' identity formation. Depending largely on an archive of video footage from the 1960s to the present, I argue that while these scholars accurately depict the quotidian operation of skateboarders' identity formation, they have lost sight of the historical relationship between the development of skateboarding subcultures and the emergence of neoliberal regimes of accumulation. Drawing from the theoretical insights of scholars such as David Harvey, I call for a radical critique of 'alternative' sports that acknowledges, but does not necessarily celebrate, the ephemeral subjectivities of the athletes in question. Keywords: alternative sportcapitalismneoliberalismskateboardingsubculture Acknowledgement The author wishes to thank Mark Dyreson and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and encouraging comments. Also, many thanks to Elliott Gorn, Becky Beal, Gideon Goldin, Lucyna and Jerard Dinces, and all the members of Mary Gluck's Spring 2009 'History of Everyday Life' seminar at Brown University for providing feedback on earlier versions of this piece. Finally, a big thank you to Josh Guilford for help tracking down several now obsolete skateboarding videos. Notes 1. Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City, 137. 2. On Peralta's skateboarding career and role in the rise of the skate industry, see Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City; Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001); and Mortimer, 'Bombing Down Memory Lane', Transworld Business News, 25 Feb. 2008., available online at http://business.transworld.net/9/press-releases/bombing-memory-lane/. 3. My placement of the term 'oppositional' within quotation marks is meant to indicate that this is a characterisation made by skateboarders themselves, rather than to suggest that 'alternative' sports like skateboarding are genuinely oppositional subcultures in the sense that they confront prevailing modes of social reproduction (i.e. are anti-capitalist). As Robert Rinehart explains, 'the overriding "value" participants relish is that they see themselves as truly different, as truly oppositional or alternative in some ways'. Rinehart, 'Alternative Sports', 299. 4. Muggleton, Inside Subculture, 6. 5. The 'Birmingham School' refers to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, England, whose faculty and graduate students produced a wealth of scholarship on youth culture, media studies, and race and ethnicity from its founding in 1964 to its closure in 2002. Scholars associated with the centre broke new ground in incorporating the theoretical insights of Marxist scholars like Gramsci, Althusser, and various members of the Frankfurt School into empirical sociological research. For a seminal CCCS treatise on youth subcultures, see Hall and Jefferson, Resistance Through Rituals. For a helpful overview of the history of CCCS, see Webster, 'Cultural Studies and Sociology at, and After, the Closure of the Birmingham School'. On identity and 'lifestyle', see David Chaney, Lifestyles. On 'alternative' sports (also known as 'lifestyle' or 'extreme' sports), see Rinehart, 'Alternative Sports' and Wheaton, 'Introduction: Mapping the Lifestyle Sport-Scape'. 6. Muggleton, Inside Subculture, 6. 7. Chaney, 'Fragmented Cultures and Subcultures', 39. 8. Sproul, 'Post-Modern Cowboys', 156, 164. 9. Beal and Wilson, '"Chicks Dig Scars"', 40, 33. 10. Rinehart, 'Alternative Sports', 312, 308. Emphasis in original. 11. Willard, 'Séance, Tricknology, Skateboarding and the Space of Youth', 331–3. 12. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 187–8. I use the term 'late capitalism' to refer to the phase of capitalism under which flexible accumulation became hegemonic. See notes 15 and 16 for the intellectual genealogy of the term. 13. See Harvey, The Limits to Capital. 14. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 147. Harvey defines flexible accumulation against the 'Fordist' mode of production that underwrote the sustained growth of developed economies from the end of the Second World War to 1973. The Fordist model involved a Keynesian compromise (between corporate capital, the state, and organised labour) geared towards full employment and continued growth via high levels of consumption. In the US version, corporate capital ensured a continuous flow of investment and technological innovation, organised labour traded militant resistance and real wage gains for union bureaucracies and collective bargaining strategies that acceded to Fordist organisational practices, and the state implemented counter-cyclical fiscal policy and secured the stability of the dollar via the Bretton Woods system. However, growth began to slow in the second half of the 1960s due to factors like the decrease in demand for American exports from recovering economies like West Germany and Japan, as well as the inflationary pressures caused by the Vietnam War. By 1973, these developments came to a head in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Despite contracting growth, inflation persisted due to OPEC's decision to cut off oil supplies to the US (thus raising prices and ushering in 'stagflation', or recession concurrent with inflation). In response, American capital initiated the 'neoliberal offensive', restructuring the 'rigidities' of the Fordist system (i.e. the barriers of organised labour, the welfare state, and economic regulation) in order to revive profit margins amidst an economy growing at steadily shrinking rates. In the realm of industrial organisation, capital reduced traditional manufacturing in favour of the service sector, financialisation and small-scale 'niche' production and marketing. Central to this shift was increasing reliance on the production of rapidly obsolete fads and spectacles with quick 'turnover time' (i.e. the time required to complete the movement from production to profit). For two lucid critiques of American economic history that cover the specifics of this transformation, see Sweezy and Magdoff, The Dynamics of US Capitalism and Kemp, The Climax of Capitalism. 15. In linking the 'postmodern' condition to an intensified dependence on the production of spectacle and other cultural forms with increasingly rapid turnover rates, Harvey builds on the insights of Marxist political economist Ernest Mandel and Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson. Mandel argued in the early 1970s that, by the 1960s, the tendency of post-war monopoly capitalism towards the over-accumulation of surplus was already forcing capital in places such as the US to find new investment outlets. Sectors such as service, research and development, the culture industries and the financial sector expanded to fill this role. Jameson, in agreement with Mandel, asserted in 1984 that by the 1980s, cultural production had 'become integrated into commodity production generally'. He prefigured the cultural studies component of Harvey's project by linking the 'fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods' to the 'depthlessless' and 'weakening of historicity' characteristic of 'postmodernism'. See Mandel, Late Capitalism and Jameson, 'Postmodernism', 56, 58. 16. For a more state-centred critique of the 'postmodern' lens as applied to 'extreme' sports, see Booth and Thorpe, 'The Meaning of Extreme'. Booth and Thorpe suggest that extreme sports are a response to the demise of the welfare state in 'late modernity'. According to them, these activities embody a growing tendency towards the consumption and commercialisation of risk in societies where its prior regulation by the welfare state has been perceived as stifling the full expression of individuality. 17. On the history of skateboarding and other 'alternative' sports as representative of the 'postmodern' moment, see Sproul, 'Post-Modern Cowboys' and Rinehart, 'Alternative Sports'. 18. Jameson contends that the disappearance of the notion of 'alienation' is one of the defining aspects of 'postmodern' thought and practice. He comes to this conclusion logically, since the process of alienation presupposes the possibility of some basis for coherent identity in the first place. See Jameson, 'Postmodernism'. 19. Whannel, 'Between Culture and Economy', 84. 20. Chaney, 'Fragmented Cultures and Subcultures', 41. 21. Andrews, 'Sport, Culture, and Late Capitalism', 223. It is not my intent to recycle a form of structuralist Marxism that negates the possibility of unearthing examples of human agency and resistance, or that denies the potential for conditions to change in the future. Rather, I want to contribute to an empirical foundation for understanding why alternative sports appear to be saturated by the logic and practice of capitalism. For a discussion of the powerful but problematic role of structuralist Marxism in sport history, see Booth, The Field, 55–6. 22. For a recent collection of essays that addresses this problematic, see Best and Pasterson, Cultural Political Economy. 23. Harvey's writings on capitalism emphasise the period after 1973, but it is worth noting that Marxist political economists have shown how the crises of the 1970s that prompted the intensification of flexible accumulation were based on internal contradictions of capitalism that were apparent by the immediate post-war period (i.e. 'Fordism' was doomed well before the 1960s). Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy demonstrated in the late 1960s (years before Mandel made a similar argument in Late Capitalism) that US monopoly capitalism, which was characterised by both increasing productivity and the absence of competitive price deflation, was by the 1950s showing a tendency for the surplus to rise at a rate faster than that of real wages. Given that the economy was near full employment (and thus the level of consumption still high), this was not a classic case of the 'falling rate of profit' described by Marx (in which the crowding out of labour by technology leaves workers unable to consume capitalists' products). Rather, it was a situation in which capital did not have adequate markets to sustain its growth indefinitely. This is crucial to an understanding of Harvey, because this predicament led to the creation of massive investment in marketing, publicity and advertising, which would become even more central to processes of accumulation in the era of flexible accumulation. See Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, and Mandel, Late Capitalism. For a helpful synopsis of Baran and Sweezy's argument, see Ross and Trachte, Global Capitalism. For a discussion of the implications of the financial boom for Baran and Sweezy's claims, see Foster, 'The Financialization of Capitalism'. 24. Booth, The Field, 18. My emphasis in the notes on the theoretical and political foundations of my analytical framework also represents a very modest effort to respond to Booth's call for greater 'reflexivity' on the part of sport historians. Booth posits explicit reference to theoretical influence as one component of this reflexivity. Booth, The Field, 211–12. For those interested in a postmodernist/deconstructionist perspective on reflexivity and narrative in sport history, see Rinehart, 'Beyond Traditional Sports Historiography'. 25. For an especially rich reading of skateboarding magazines, see Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City. 26. Phillips et al., 'Broadening Horizons in Sports History', 287. For some notable exceptions to this trend, see Baker, Contesting Identities and Booth, 'Surfing Films and Videos'. Phillips et al. provide a more extensive list of 'exceptions' in their article. 27. Beal and Wilson, '"Chicks Dig Scars"', 35. My own experience as a skater in Southern California during the 1990s corroborates this, as my peers and I were much more interested in watching videos than in reading magazines. It is difficult to offer a quantitative comparison of the circulation of videos versus that of magazines. The fact that videos are more easily consumed by several skaters simultaneously (i.e. by a group of skaters sitting around a television) makes it nearly impossible to use sales figures to determine whether or not skaters consume videos with greater consistency than magazines. Furthermore, it is hard to know what percentage of video consumption takes place outside the realm of formal circulation (i.e. by watching on YouTube as opposed to buying the actual DVD). On the culture of skate video viewing, see Hawk, How Did I Get Here?, 87. Thank you to Becky Beal for bringing some of these issues to my attention. 28. Phillips et al., 'Broadening Horizons in Sports History', 278. 29. Sproul, 'Post-Modern Cowboys', 156, 164. 30. Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), quotation taken from narration. 31. Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City, 29. 'Vertical' skating refers to a style of skating practised in wooden half-pipes or concrete bowls, in which skaters attempt to perform aerial manoeuvres above the coping, or edge, of the pipe/bowl. 32. Hebdige, Subculture, 103. 33. Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001). For a collection of the series of articles in Skateboarder magazine, see Stecyk, DogTown: The Legend of the Z-Boys. 34. Whannel, Media Sports Stars, 129. 35. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 171. 36. On Tony Alva's as both subcultural innovator and entrepreneur, see Willard, 'Cutback'. 37. Skateboard Madness (1980), 43:40. 38. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 156. 39. Peralta's Bones Brigade series includes the videos The Bones Brigade Video Show (1984), Future Primitive (1985), The Search for Animal Chin (1987), Public Domain (1988), Axe Rated (1988), Ban This! (1989), Propaganda (1990) and Eight (1991), 12:53. 40. The Bones Brigade Video Show (1984), 12:53. 41. Whannel, Media Sport Stars, 130, 128. 42. On 'authenticity' as an indicator of a skater's legitimacy within a particular subculture, see Beal and Weidman, 'Authenticity in the Skateboarding World'. 43. Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City, 157. 44. The Bones Brigade Video Show (1984), 0:33. 45. The Search for Animal Chin (1987) and Public Domain (1988). 46. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 155. See note 14. 47. Beal and Weidman, 'Authenticity in the Skateboarding World', 338. 48. Thornton, Club Cultures, 161. 49. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 158. 50. Wheels of Fire (1988) and Streets of Fire (1989). Santa Cruz Skateboards and Vision Streetwear were Powell-Peralta's primary competitors during the 1980s. 51. Ban This! (1989), 49:45. 52. Cubitt, Timeshift, 56. 53. For an example of the earnings potential of a Bones Brigade skater who has remained relevant within the sport, see Iwata, 'Executive Suite'. While sponsored by Powell-Peralta, Tony Hawk was able to purchase his first home at the age of 17. Hawk, How Did I Get Here?, 17. 54. Future Primitive (1985), 12:54 and 13:39. 55. Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), 1:08:14. 56. Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator (2002), 40:21. 57. Ban This! (1989), 5:44. 58. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 286. 59. Eight (1991). 60. Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City, 183. 'Street skating', or 'streetstyle', refers to a form of skateboarding practised in urban and suburban spaces not constructed expressly for skateboarding (though some skate-parks offer areas geared towards streetstyle manoeuvres). 61. Beal and Weidman, 'Authenticity in the Skateboarding World', 344. 62. Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City, 242. Douglas Booth's informative history of surf videos reveals that other alternative sports embraced adaptable video production techniques aimed at deftly addressing and adapting to market demand. See Booth, 'Surfing Films and Videos'. 63. Questionable (1992), 13:31. 64. Thornton, Club Cultures, 134–5. 65. Welcome to Hell (1996), 11:35. 66. Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City, 158. Borden's analysis here is helpful in showing how the '"translocal" microeconomic communities of small-scale craft production and micromedia' described by Willard in his analysis of skateboarding and punk subcultures in the 1970s enjoyed a very limited shelf-life before corporate infiltration: Willard, 'Cutback', 184. Booth suggests a similar economic historical trend in the case of surf videos. See Booth, 'Surfing Films and Videos'. 67. Hawk, How Did I Get Here?, 14. For a helpful overview of the savings and loan crisis, see Isenberg and Valvano, 'No Expense to Great'. 68. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 80. 69. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 158. 70. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 285. 71. '2009 Rankings', World Cup of Skateboarding (13 Dec. 2009), available online at http://www.wcsk8.com/index.php?/Table/2009-Rankings/. 72. Video Days (1991) and Questionable (1992). 73. Ban This! (1989) and Propaganda (1990). 74. In addition to Video Days (1991) and Questionable (1992), see Welcome to Hell (1996), Las Nueve Vidas de Paco (1995), Yeah Right! (2003), and The DC Video (2004). 75. According to Tony Hawk, this had to do with the fact that after the streetstyle explosion skaters began to jump from one sponsor to another with unprecedented frequency. While Peralta regularly recruited new up-and-coming skaters, the Bones Brigade was relatively stable when compared with skate 'teams' that emerged in subsequent decades. Hawk, How Did I Get Here?, 13–14. 76. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 42. 77. McChesney, 'Media Made Sport', 267. For a candid discussion of the X-Games' very deliberate focus on the personal interest side of skateboarding, see Hawk, How Did I Get Here?, 17. 78. McChesney, 'Media Made Sport', 266. 79. Ibid., 273. 80. 411: Best of Volume 7 (2001), 17:15 and 19:25. A full listing of the 411 Video Magazine series can be found online at http://www.411vm.com/dvd/. 81. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 288. 82. Snow, 'Skateboarders, Streets and Style', 19. 83. Ewen, 'Marketing Dreams', 52. 84. Yeah Right! (2003). 85. On Jonze's multifaceted career, see Smith, 'Spike Jonze Unmasked'. 86. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 156. 87. Yeah Right! (2003), 22:24. 88. The DC Video (2004). 89. Whannel, Media Sport Stars, 49. 90. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 64. 91. Baker, Contesting Identities, 49. 92. Frank, 'Opening Salvo', 15. 93. Badenhausen, 'The Highest Paid Action Sports Stars'. 94. Hawk, How Did I Get Here?, 5, xi. 95. See http://www.mtv.com/shows/fantasy_factory/season_3/series.jhtml. 96. Andrews, 'Sport, Culture, and Late Capitalism', 213. For a convincing re-statement of this argument that draws upon the theoretical insights of Frankfurt School scholar Herbert Marcuse, see McDonald, 'One-Dimensional Sport'. 97. Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City, 223. 98. Williams's analysis of 'emergent' cultural formations is based on his observation that the ruling class uses 'selective tradition' (i.e. picks certain cultural and ideological projects) in its construction of hegemony, rather than attempting to incorporate every last form of culture. See Williams, 'Base and Superstructure'. 99. Cleaver, 'Sports?', xxix–xxx. 100. Harvey, 'Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition'.