Revisiting <i>resistance through rituals</i> : Beyond essentialism – Then and now?

Revisiting Resistance through Rituals in a very different conjuncture has made me think about some of the less dramatic threads of its analyses for their capacity to connect then and now. The first involves the idea of a repertoire of negotiations and responses (Hall and Jefferson, 2006: 36) which sketches a non-essentialist approach to thinking about the forms and practices of working-class political culture. What might the idea of ‘repertoire’ allow us to think better? The second centres of the conception of subcultures as expressing magical solutions to the problems, contradictions and conflicts that confronted particular sections of the working class. How useful is the idea of magical solutions – and the associated displacement of problems, contradictions and conflicts – for thinking about contemporary forms and practices? Finally, I have been struck by echoes of the collection’s concern with, and critique of, concepts of generation and generational consciousness. Resistance Through Rituals emerged from a critique of generational consciousness. How might we rethink generation in terms of the complex relational constitution of political subjects? None of these are about a return to subcultural studies for me, but I find them suggestive ways of thinking about contemporary formations and questions about how to study them.