Abstract
DIY and alternate cultures are important social spaces to study because they are where young people can find themselves when they feel like they do not fit in and where they can find like-minded peers with whom to work, make and play. DIY and alternative cultures are also key objects of co-optation and value creation, where resistive and creative practices are denuded of their artistry, politics and emotional authenticity, repurposed through immaterial labour, and resold as aesthetics and affects. Beginning by situating the analysis in wider conceptualisations about late capitalism's business ontology, this article contributes to unpacking these processes firstly by making a theoretical/methodological distinction between ‘youth’ and ‘young people’. I then develop the affects of ‘youthful culture’ not only to conceptually rethink how youth cultures still play a role in the lives of young people in terms of identity formation and everyday forms of escape and creativity, but also to highlight processes of co-optation, commercial culture and how figurative distortions of youth create value in late capitalism. As ‘youth’ is conceptually cut loose from age brackets, it becomes an affect operationalised for an array of vested interests. Importantly, what is often left out of considering co-optation are the actual physical bodies and everyday emotions of living, breathing young people from whom these affects are extracted. This article will discuss these aspects using empirical examples from research on punk and hospitality showing how the immaterial labour that ‘youth’ enacts in these spaces is exploited from backs of the physical and creative labour performed by young people themselves, aspects of which they are sometimes reflexively aware and are attempting to negotiate.
Introduction
The advent of DIY, Alternative Cultures and Society is a significant event in legitimising the importance of research on cultural activities and everyday creative practices that challenge dominant norms. These are spaces where people, especially young people, can find themselves when they feel like they do not fit in elsewhere and where they can find like-minded peers with which to work, make and play, create scenes and communities, and build political coalitions and interventions. At the same time, and while it is important not to rely on simplistic mainstream/alternative dichotomies (see for instance Baker et al., 2013), the creative production in alternative cultures on the margins, especially those with a DIY ethic, are central to capitalist value creation, to the point where DIY is just as associated with home renovations as punk (Threadgold, 2018: 140–145). There is a long history of resistive and creative practices being co-opted, with debates about just how resistive subcultural practices are, resulting in conceptual understandings of how aesthetic and symbolic aspects can be denuded of their resistance and sold back as fashion and trends. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) have argued more broadly that the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism has been so folded back into its very logic that it is part of the new spirit of capitalism (see also Lazzarato, 2005). ‘Creativity’ has become one of the weasel words of neo-liberalised management (Leary, 2018; Morgan and Nelligan, 2018; Mould, 2018) and a dispositif that aligns the creative economy with the market demands of precarious work and flexibility (McRobbie, 2016). In the following article I consider how aspects of DIY and alternate cultures can be enrolled in these processes through the symbolic and affective co-optation of youthfulness and through the exploitation of young people's bodies.
Beginning by situating the analysis in wider conceptualisations about late capitalism's business ontology, I will then make a theoretical/methodological distinction between ‘youth’ and ‘young people’. The very object of youth studies – ‘youth’ as a transition phase between being a child and an adult – has been problematised by the field's own findings as the traditional markers of adulthood happen later in life, if at all. Youth cultures are not just the domain of young people, as older people continue to participate in them, while, as always, youth cultures are commercialised for profit. As ‘youth’ is conceptually cut loose from its age bracket, it becomes an affect operationalised for an array of vested interests. The affective space between ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ is implicated in the immaterial and figurative notions of youthfulness (see Farrugia, 2018; Threadgold et al., 2021) that are central to capitalist value creation. Importantly, what is often left out of these considerations about the co-optation of youthful sexy, edgy and cool cultures are the actual bodies of living, breathing young people from which these affects are extracted. This article will discuss these aspects using empirical examples from research on punk and hospitality showing how the immaterial labour that ‘youth’ does in these spaces is exploited from the physical and creative labour done by the young people themselves. Sometimes they are reflexively aware of these relations.
This article is written to from a youth studies perspective in Australia to interrogate how ‘youth’ as a concept is implicated in these co-optation processes that are central to the culture industries and night-time economy. The location of the research in Australia is significant as there is a wide array of different situations and opportunities pertaining to young people around the world, between the rural/suburban/urban, between countries and continents, or between the Global North and South. In terms of youth culture and the arts, there are different opportunities in terms of funding, different levels of political engagement and differences in how processes such as gentrification affect practices. This article is firmly situated in the urban east coast of Australia in the underground music scene and hospitality industry, so while there will be some resonances with other places and scenes, there is a specificity here relating to the ongoing relevance of punk and bar-based rock performance. Nevertheless, while there is a location-specific subjectivity, similar patterns of the co-optation of immaterial labour would no doubt be occurring across different locales and scenes: they may look and feel different, but the processes will be similar.
A note on the way that new theories of labour are used in the following: In the research I have been doing with colleagues, we have been using affective labour to consider how young people's very presence working in the night-time economy creates value (Farrugia et al., 2018), engaging in the debates and conceptualisations of how these new forms of labour operate. To keep it simple, in this article I am using the term immaterial labour here as a wider umbrella term that incorporates affective, emotional, aesthetic and free labour. There is no room in this article to go into detail on the differences between these forms of labour and the debates that surrounds their usage. Youthful culture is put forward as a way of thinking about how these different forms of immaterial labours coalesce to create co-opted affects.
Youthful culture in late capitalism
Much has changed since the CCCS subculture studies were undertaken in the late 1960s and 1970s (Hall and Jefferson, 2006; Hebdige, 1979), and even since the post-subculture debates (Weinzierl and Muggleton, 2003) that brought to prominence concepts such as scenes (Straw, 1991), neo-tribes (Bennett, 1999) and lifestyles (Miles, 2000) in the 1990s and early 2000s. Capitalism has rapidly evolved to the point where some are asking whether we move onto something else (Wark, 2019). The very conception of resistance towards capitalism has changed forms under what Fisher (2009) has termed ‘capitalist realism’, where he reworks a now well-known paraphrased Fredric Jameson quote: it seems more possible to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than the end of capitalism. 1 Capitalist realism is a way to think about the dominance of business ontology across most facets of life, including education systems, work performance cultures and metrics, creative and artistic endeavours, the rise of the wellness industries and the individualisation and pathologising of alienation in the form of widespread mental health problems.
Moving beyond the nihilist ‘no future’ anthems of 70s punk, the ‘legislated nostalgia’ (Coupland, 1991) of GenX and the related descriptions of the so-called ‘conquest of cool’ (Frank, 1998), Fisher sees a melancholic relation to the absence of a future, any future that the above quote implies. To be clear, these previous eras were not exactly symptomatic of happy times, they are themselves promoted today through a nostalgic lens, often to denigrate the ‘here and now’ as being worse. Fisher draws on Jameson's ‘nostalgic mode’ of retrospection and pastiche (1991) and Berardi’s (2011) ‘slow cancellation of the future’, where it becomes doxic and self-fulfilling: ‘The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations … The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed’ (Fisher, 2014: 8). Fisher (2014) calls this ‘reflexive impotence’, which is an antecedent to what Sharp and I (2020) elsewhere have called ‘reflexive complicity’ regarding gender inequalities in punk scenes. Reflexive complicity is performed when one knows about unequal or exploitative social relations, can observe them, and claim to want things to change, but there are no significant changes in practice by the individual and little effort to engage in situational interventions that make a difference. Importantly, as described in the empirical examples below, one can be reflexive about one's own exploitation, but this should not be considered as ‘selling out’, but a reasonable strategy to deal with precarity (see Threadgold, 2017, 2018).
In terms of the field of cultural production, and particularly in terms of the DIY spaces that are the sites of the research projects discussed below, neo-liberal capitalism has slowly but systematically divested artists of the resources needed to create ‘the new’, where welfare and arts funding have been decimated leaving the relatively privileged to dominate creative spaces (Alkovska, 2022; Brook et al., 2019). For Fisher and others who write from this perspective, this leads to a process of diminishing expectations and acceptance towards popular culture. In previous work I have used the figure of the hipster and bogan 2 as a proxy for class anxieties and disgust (Threadgold, 2018), but the hipster, which is a term that is often aimed towards some of the suburbs and aesthetics of the research participants below, also illustrates co-opted aspects of the backward looking nostalgia in popular and consumer youth culture with a penchant for DIY: the lumberjack beards and woodwork; the return of records and cassette tapes; the rise of knitting, craft and colouring in books as hobbies; the emergence of ruin porn; the rise in practices such as home brewing of beer, whisky, gin and kombucha and the pickling of everything. If the future is slowly cancelled and one cannot imagine anything else other than the capitalism, then irony, cynicism, nostalgia and melancholy are symptoms of the struggle to maintain ontological security. The continuing pervasiveness of post-punk and pub rock genres for new bands in the scenes and spaces where the below projects take place are indicative of these social conditions: there is nothing new about these sounds and aesthetics, but they are also representative of previous eras of rising inequality and precarity of the late 1970s and early 1980s and seem to therefore make as much sense now. In artistic expressions of the present, the past solemnises the absent presence of a dubious and dystopic future.
Importantly, ‘youth cultures’ themselves are not just the domain of young people anymore, as individuals do not necessarily give them up as they get old. Participation and consumption continue, albeit in different ways (Bennett, 2006, 2013; Bennett and Hodkinson, 2012; Wheaton, 2017). Geeky products once aimed at children such as comic books, superheroes, Star Wars, etc. are now the multi-billion-dollar culture industries of endless prequels and sequels, where IP ownership rules supreme. ‘Computer games’ have developed from nerdy youth culture to arguably the biggest culture industry of them all, played by people of all ages (Monahan, 2021). In connection to the developments of capitalism and its ‘Tungsten-carbide stomach’ (Lyotard, 1973) that chews up and metabolises anything in its path, the multifaceted figure of ‘youth’ is central to immaterial labour and how value is created and mined in popular, consumer, artistic, creative and digital cultures. As always, youth cultures, especially anything edgy, DIY or underground, are key objects of co-optation, where resistive and creative practices are denuded of their politics and resold commercially as aesthetics and affects. These value extraction processes are exacerbated by platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, Spotify, TikTok, YouTube and the emergence of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) 3 , where youth cultures are co-opted to their logical capitalist conclusion: everyday pleasures, creativity and emotional sociality metamorphosises into clicks, data and pure financial speculation. The intense processes of co-optation and how the very figure of youth is something that creates value in late capitalism, especially across what has become known as platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017), is at a level of voraciousness that makes the ‘cool hunting’ phenomena of the 1990s No Logo (Klein 1999) era seem quaint by comparison. Algorithms and data mining based on our taste, consumption and social media practices categorise, distinguish and rank us in ways that we are mostly not even aware but, for instance, have severe implications for access to housing, health and insurance (Airoldi, 2022; Chun, 2021; Webber and Burrows, 2018).
This article brings a specifically youth studies approach to discuss these developments, some new, some more intense versions of social phenomenon that have been around for generations, through developing the concept of ‘youthful culture’. ‘Youthful culture’ is a specific affect to help rethink the idea of youth culture to show how it still plays a similar role in the lives of living and breathing young people in terms of identity formation and everyday forms of escape, creativity and resistance, but also highlights processes of co-optation via immaterial labour. The very figure of youth is something that creates value in late capitalism. The commercially platformed enclosure of aspects of DIY and alternative cultures is a form of immaterial labour where the work of creative DIY young people is repurposed and transformed. In the following I outline the place of youth in late capitalism and discuss some empirical examples of some young people involved in DIY practices and creative scenes where the everyday practices blur the lines between production and consumption, work and leisure, bodies and affects. The article draws together some of these strands to show how youthful culture has developed as an affective and aesthetic commercial force, but juxtaposes this with the experience of what the actual labour looks like in the making of these youthful affects for the young people themselves.
Between ‘youth’ and ‘young people’
Young people are now inheriting lower standards of living than previous generations and need to navigate increasingly precarious labour markets that demand ‘flexibility’, ‘lifelong learning’ and more and more free labour, volunteering and internships. There has been an upward credentialing of the labour market that still tends to lead to ‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber, 2018). Young people are putting off getting married and having kids (or not doing it at all) with a rise and increasing legitimation of non-nuclear families. At the same time, it is increasingly difficult in Australia that unless they are quite financially privileged, they will not be able to own their own home and be stuck with the precarity of renting into retirement (Konings et al., 2021; Arundel and Ronald, 2021). This is particularly important in Australia with its ‘quarter acre block’ central to its traditional cultural myths of what it means to be ‘Australian’. Young people face these individualised challenges all the while facing a future imbued with the risks of climate change, the rise of right-wing extremism, and in recent years, a pandemic. While these global forces are largely out of their control, young people are constantly scapegoated for many of the world's ills: they eat too much avocado on toast to be able to afford to buy a house, are not loyal enough to employers, are narcissistic with their selfies and social media use, alongside the traditional class-oriented denigration towards the ‘lazy’ young unemployed. Youth sociologists research from young people's perspectives to provide evidence against these lazy and damaging stereotypes.
With the very markers of adulthood happening later in life, if at all, our categories of thinking through the trajectory of life – born, child, youth, adolescent, adult, old, death – are all up for grabs. The very idea of ‘adulthood’ needs to be rethought if the traditional markers of it are increasingly meaningless, impossible or slippery. Blatterer analyses this contradiction: while living up to a selective image of youth has become imperative for the maximization of life chances, doing so attracts the discursive misrecognition of young adults’ personhoods. This cultural evaluation evinces a misapprehension of the meaning of adulthood whose increasing ambiguity is inseparable from changes in the semantics of ‘youth’. Labour and commodity markets have ‘liberated’ youthfulness from its biological, age determined delimitations and have recast select, desirable (i.e., profitable) characteristics of youth as necessary for the maximization of individuals’ life chances. 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)
In my work on ‘figures of youth’ (2020) I analysed how different figures are inter-related, and how this figuration has consequences for how young people are governed and exploited by experts, inaccurate scapegoating moral panics, and immaterial processes of co-optation. To do this I formulated four different spaces where there are two sometimes contradictory figures of youth being used. Political figures are on the one hand the grist of moral panics to scapegoat young people as individualised and even pathologised reasons for all of society's ills that are structural issues beyond their control. On the other hand, youth are revolutionary figures (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015) historically positioned at the vanguard of progressive politics, framed as ‘agents of change’. Temporal figures position youth as a proxy for the immanent future, standing in for anxiety about the future, especially as the present is increasingly precarious and insecure. At the same time youth is associated with a nostalgic past where everything new gets compared to and then criticised as not being like it was ‘back in my day’. One's own ‘youth’ is a permanent absent presence in our lives, where we romanticise the past, usually through rose-coloured glasses. There are risky figures where risk-taking youth are a danger to themselves and others, ‘a brain a jar’ (Kelly, 2012) needing to ‘develop’ towards adulthood. There are also at-risk figures, especially important in youth studies to make interventions into policy that have influence on the actual lives of young people, where young people are ‘artefacts of expertise’ in positions of ‘institutionalised mistrust’ (Kelly, 2000, 2003).
For our purposes here, I also described figures in/of capitalism and consumerism, with the Figures of Young Mindless Consumer Dupes who appear in moral panics about pop and consumer culture and recently culture, social media. This seems to go all the way back to Aristotle, where he was lamenting that the young generation of his age were no good. This is opposed to the Sexy Cool Edgy Figures of Co-optation that comes out advertising and PR. ‘Youth’ here is a commodity to sell stuff. The sexy-cool-edgy figure of co-optation is where DIY and alternate youth cultures are disembodied from young people themselves to become youthful culture, a multifaceted affect that is articulated across the culture industries.
These figurative distortions are well known and familiar to anyone critically engaged with the lives of young people, generally used to scapegoat in media distortions and moral panics. But importantly, I want to encourage a more reflexive understanding here for researchers too, one that brings together the living breathing young person with their conceptual doppelganger. To the reader I ask: be reflexive about these relations and about the feelings one experiences in these moments, to think about how young people are positioned in your own social spaces – the barista, the bar staff, the student, – and how your own interactions with young people and youth resonate and disconnect with the publicly disseminated stereotypes. I use these examples deliberately: I am still surprised in situations when I am with academics that are rude to baristas or bar staff, or in meetings where they are disparaging of their students, talking about them in a deficit model. Even the experts can maintain the distorted distance between youth and young people. It is in this space, the space between ‘youth’ and ‘young people’, where the immaterial and figurative notions of youthfulness are central to capitalist value creation and the scapegoating moral panics that blame individuals for structural problems. Importantly for what follows, young people are often cognisant of these kinds of relations. In the following sections, I will use some empirical examples to illustrate where IRL young people in punk scenes and venues struggle and strategise against co-optation and exploitation, and how the labour of young bodies is exploited to produce the youthful cultural affects to create value.
DIY and co-optation struggles: ‘It's hard to be consistent’
The first empirical example is from 12 interviews (6 male, 6 female identifying, aged between 18 and 30) conducted in 2015 to 2016 across the east coast of Australia in Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney and Melbourne with young self-identifying DIY and punk artists in a scene that has loosely been described as ‘the ugly Australian underground’ (Kritzler, 2014; see Threadgold, 2018 for methods details). The research looked at broad aspects of the scene, the interconnections between cities, the meanings and practices attributed to their artistic endeavours (Threadgold, 2018), how gender struggles colour interactions and relations (Sharp and Threadgold, 2020), and how being a punk influenced decisions in terms of their broader lifestyle and careers (Threadgold, 2017). In the following, I am talking with Stan, in his late 20 s at the time of the interview, about the meaning of DIY and the importance of this to his artistic practices and sense of authenticity. Stan is in many bands, seven at the time of being interviewed. Stan notes that one of the more popular bands he is in is no longer DIY if that label is applied rigorously: [DIY record label] may organise stuff for us sometimes. I guess that's like an indie label though. Or even the [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. 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.
Importantly though, how do the likes of Stan negotiate these boundaries between making a living, the co-optation of his labour, and ‘selling out’? Many people like Stan in the scene have made specific decisions to lead a relatively impoverished life. They have moved to a big city, got the Uni degree, entered the ‘rat race’, discovered how alienating it is and how it impedes on their artistic endeavours and ethics towards how they want to live. They then decide to work less to concentrate on being able to pursue their passions, making decisions about their careers and their financial situations based upon their punk attitudes, what I have referred to as the punk illusio (Threadgold, 2017). So, when Stan's bands get to the point where they are being offered this kind of opportunity, they put that band on hiatus or break it up. Being reflexive about the immaterial labour they are performing for wider commercial interests leads to debates and anxieties within the bands and in the scene more generally about whether to take these opportunities or to end that project and moving on to something else. This is not complicity. The subcultural capital that they have already acquired is useful in this situation because their new projects begin with more notoriety than those that have not already made a name for themselves in the scene, but allows them in a sense to level down do something else and avoid these kinds of intrusions at least for a while until they level up again.
This is a direct example of how the immaterial labour of youthful culture is intrinsic to co-optation processes: a band builds up a solid following, gets great reviews and gets the attention of cultural and fashion industry reps who are desperate to enrol the subcultural capital that bands like this possess, then strive to co-opt the cred of authentic punk practice as cool affects to be associated with their product. The brand manipulates the symbolic capital of the band, but the band is cognisant of what is happening and resistant to what it means and, importantly, how this feels. This is an important consideration because in the broader affective labour literature these instances are essentially considered under the lens of false consciousness where those being exploited and co-opted are cultural dupes. Stan and people like him in the scene are not ignorant of what is going on in these situations where their creative authenticity is being mined via immaterial labour. They are reflexive about these relations, possessing nothing like a false consciousness in this regard. Sometimes they are reflexively complicit and allow it to happen. Other times they debate and negotiate, which may lead to them rejecting these advances. Sometimes they will stop and start again to resist these commercial forces, which is itself a form of resistive artistic expression that attempts to negotiate a sense of authenticity in the affective atmosphere of capitalist realism. These are reflexive struggles where they make reasonable strategies based upon their values and their material conditions. In terms of the work their youthful culture affects are doing, these struggles are disembodied from the symbolism that brands so desire. The labour, authenticity and emotional investments of the artists are fractured from the practitioners and sold as affect. In the following example, I show how the bodies of young workers are also implicated in these processes. Stan and his peers may at times be ‘Sexy Cool Edgy Figures of Co-optation’, but they are hardly ‘Figures of Young Mindless Consumer Dupes’.
Ageing bodies, tired minds, but the party must go on: Youthful culture and ageing
As Hodkinson asks (2011: 262): ‘what happens to participants of “youth cultures” as they move beyond adolescence’? The work on ageing subculturalists focusses on the production and consumption aspects, that is, those making the music or attending gigs. To deal with ageing in punk, Bennett (2006: 219) argues that the ‘articulations of punk style transgress with age from the visual to the biographical and how older punks develop particular discursive practices as a means of legitimating their place within a scene dominated by younger punk fans’. Rather than trying to cling to one's own youth, subcultural practice is reconfigured to bring in aspects of a more respectable adulthood (Hodkinson, 2011: 281). But what happens to those working in and around the edges of DIY scenes and spaces, those doing the non-creative, physical labour such as pouring the drinks and mopping the floors that supports the presentation of the art and is an important element to the fun? The second empirical example is from an ongoing programme of interviews and ethnographic research in the hospitality industry in Newcastle and Melbourne, Australia, conducted between 2018 and 2022 with a diverse cohort across genders, sexualities, and ethnicities that at the time of writing has over 100 participants aged between 18 and 30 (see Farrugia et al., 2018 for methods details). The projects examined how the very presence of young people in the hospitality industry creates value for their venues. We analysed aspects of this value creation in terms of affective atmospheres, that is, the vibe that particular young employees create for a venue in their everyday work practices and how different taste and subcultural aspects are brought into the workplace that blur the lines between production and consumption, work and leisure (Farrugia et al., 2018). Gender and sexuality have been key points of analysis in the project, where we found queer subjectivities are enrolled for specific purposes at venues (Sharp et al., 2022), and that female identifying participants were consistently exposed to sexual harassment and other physical risks which were basically taken as a given across the industry (Coffey et al., 2018). Class is also an important for considering how particular venues use aesthetics, brands and associations with specific taste cultures, including DIY and underground music scenes, to attract the preferred clientele to their venue (Threadgold et al., 2021).
Young people enter the hospitality industry for a variety of reasons, but ‘hospo’ work is often not seen as a ‘real job’, often seen as a low skill job or a job that you do while you are studying for your actual career. Some hospitality workers end up staying in the industry for longer than they expected, and they refer to themselves as ‘lifers’ (the prison connotation is deliberate). In the following examples Greg and Jenny, both in their late 20 s at the time of their interviews, work in venues that are central to the underground music scenes in Melbourne. Both have worked in multiple venues some of which host the gigs in the scene or are attended by people in and around the scene, including some of Stan's bands, discussed above. At first the blurry nature between work and leisure is a positive aspect of the job, where one can see bands that they like while working, have their friends come in and have fun with them, all the while still having to do the more arduous aspects such as picking up glasses, dealing with drunks and cleaning toilets. Greg and Jenny were first employed in these venues at a time in their lives when they were themselves ‘punters’ in them, a term used to denote regular attendance of venues in a particular scene. They were already visiting them, knew people that worked at them, dressed like them and had the similar tastes. This is the main way that people get jobs in the venues that service the music scene. Their very presence as ‘Sexy Cool Edgy Figures of Co-optation’ is both pleasurable for them and valuable for their venue owners. But after working in the industry for nearly a decade the fun starts to wane, and their bodies begin to suffer.
Greg has been working in hospitality since his late teens and always felt a ‘sense of excitement and being out there and meeting people and chatting to people’ in the work that he enjoyed. But after a while he feels that he has ‘outgrown’ this: there's a point where that becomes sort of empty … You know and you get all kinds of fucked up and you have this great time and you go home … But eventually that's just … par for the course and it's not interesting, it's not anything and if you don’t really have the passion for it, which I never did, then why do you keep doing it? [Greg] I’ve been doing this for a very long time and I’m tired and I don’t want to work nights anymore and I want to be able to study and do all this sort of stuff and live like a normal person … I felt trapped in hospitality overall because I’d been doing it for so long and once you’ve been doing it for so long there isn’t really a way out. [Jenny]
The temporal trajectory of these interactions is important to consider: what begins as relatively enjoyable work to support study towards becoming something else becomes entrenched. The strong social homology with one's own lifestyle and their consumption practices in the underground music scene is an important facet of how youthful culture is extracted via immaterial labour and co-opted to produce value in the night-time economy. That is, if you own or manage a venue that has underground gigs playing, you need workers who fit in, look right, are knowledgeable about what is going on and can relate with the punters. This creates the right convivial vibe, regardless off the taste distinctions that are being curated. But as one ages, this contribution to youthful culture becomes a relation of affective violence, enjoying the party less while still being surrounded by it, but nevertheless still obligated to create the good vibes.
The theorising of ageing participation in youth culture into later life has been written from the perspective of punks or surfers (Wheaton, 2017) continuing in their subculture regardless of age. But for workers in the business of youthful culture, this can feel very different as they move beyond the enjoyable affordances of employment in the spaces they also consume, or at least once consumed. The ageing process makes the lines between production and consumption, work and leisure, labour and pleasure that is blurred in processes of immaterial labour re-emerge. These workers are the ‘youth transitions’ counterparts of Hodkinson and Bennett's ageing youth cultural participants. For ageing workers, the good part of the job – their own tastes and leisure practices resonating with the job that creates the relation of immaterial labour as their youthful culture affects are extracted to create value – becomes more difficult or disappears, at the same time as the actual physical labour becomes more difficult on their bodies. Ageing hospo workers need to deal not just with feeling like they have been left behind by their peers, but also with dealing with the desynchronised lifestyle and sleep patterns, sore backs and knees, and the likelihood of elevated drinking over a long period of time.
Conclusion
The field of research that I am immersed in, youth studies, or more specifically in terms of the research I do, youth sociology, has always had an inherent interest in the future (Cook & Cuervo, 2019; Threadgold, 2012). Furlong and Cartmel’s (2007) concept of ‘epistemological fallacy’ has been particularly influential for considering the affective atmosphere of the 1990s to 2000s. This concept aligned with reflexive modernity theories that still have vitality, but social changes, especially the rise of digital culture and a media life, see new spaces open where young people interact and practice. So, while the concept still has legs to consider the false promises sold to young people from birth, as Côté (2016) points out it also has ‘false consciousness’ overtones to which I am opposed (see France and Threadgold, 2016). Essentially, aspects of the epistemological fallacy concept still works for considering aspects of youth transitions, that is, feelings of disjunction and cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) when faced with the meritocratic rhetoric of classless neo-liberal ‘choice’ and their actual opportunities, but when it comes to youth cultures and popular culture in general, cultural nostalgia becomes a way of understanding the expression of those feelings of affective violence and a lack of affinity with the future. In the above I contribute to ‘bridging the gap’ (Woodman and Bennett, 2015), so to speak, between youth transitions and youth cultures to outline how the immaterial labour of the very concept of ‘youth’ is central to value creation in these cultural and economic circumstances. Further, the empirical sections contain data that challenges the comprehensiveness of capitalist realism as a dominant ontology, using examples of young people who struggle with and against these forces.
Therefore, in this article I have made two claims: firstly, there needs to be a clear delineation between ‘youth’ and ‘young person’ to help conceptualise how figuratively produced affects of youthfulness are disembodied from IRL young people. Secondly, I have introduced the concept of youthful culture as a way of following processes of co-optation that are crucial to how youth culture is mined for value in the culture industries and night-time economies via immaterial labour. Youthful images, conviviality and creativity are extracted while youthful bodies are exploited. I have used the two empirical examples of struggles over authenticity and creativity, and struggles over how ageing hospo workers experience exhaustion, but I do not want to inadvertently support the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy where the creative practices are seen as ‘mind’ and the labour in the scene as ‘body’, as they are inseparably intertwined. The theoretical intervention I want to make here aligns with work that wants to destroy that misleading separation (see Coffey, 2021). ‘Cultures’ and ‘transitions’ perspectives can be brought together by shedding light on these negotiations. Most of the work on ageing subculturalists are with those who are doing the creative or leisure practices, not on those doing physical labour in the spaces that support these practices.
Concerns about these aspects of youth culture are not new. In 1963, Bennett M. Berger was questioning the seeming moral panic aspects in Talcott Parsons’ take on youth culture and propositioned that youth cultures should be defined as those participated in by youthful persons, not necessarily young ones. He argued that what was defined as youth culture is not usually characteristics of all young people, therefore characteristics of youth culture are relevant to other age groups as well. This leads him to suggest that those who align with his rather conservative definition of youthfulness – hedonistic and irresponsible – will be able to then make ‘youthful careers’ in areas such as ‘bohemian business’, ‘show business’ or ‘working class occupations’, hopefully so that they do not disrupt society at large. We have come a long way since then. Youthfulness is now a vital affect in late capitalism. From the wellness industries’ promises of eternal youth and health (Ehrenreich, 2018; Cederstrom and Spicer, 2015), to the culture industries co-optation of punk and DIY cultures, and the night-time economies’ reliance on young bodies to create the right aesthetics and vibes, youthfulness drives profit making. Digital information and communication technology now mine the data from how these practices transpire online. This is where research on DIY and alternative cultures needs to be focussed as it is also here that the cutting edge of resisting these processes will be taking place.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the ARC DP Young Hospitality Workers and Value Creation in the Service Economy (grant number G1800136).
