Abstract
He would start with five or six bullet points on the whiteboard. Like a shopping list; my heart would sink, this’ll never work as a public lecture! Then Stan would almost magically conjure the points together – their relationships, their contradictions – the ‘voracious gods’ that we, as sociologists, must suffer who demand the one thing of us and at the same time insist on the contrary. His abiding interest was in policy, in intervention that was deeply embedded in theory. But it was never a simple solution whether total or tinkering. There was no trace of the liberal quick fix in him nor the desire to wait around for some utopian transformation. Life was too ironic, the stakes were too high; the gentle anarchism which buzzed through him had a sense both of urgency and of projects that would always be unfinished. So the list became alive, the bullet points rearranged themselves and challenged each other. We did not have our liberal reflexes reassured or our pessimism substantiated but one thing is for certain – we came out of the theatre having learnt something.
Stan Cohen moved from South Africa to England in 1963, working as a psychiatric social worker, and signed up at the London School of Economics to do a PhD. The place and timing were propitious. The LSE had a strong sociology department and the early sixties were marked by the tumultuous questioning of social institutions (not least the police and the mass media), a path which led up to 1968 when the tectonic plates seemed to move from under us and the whole world seemed to turn on its head. It was a time in criminology when, as Bill Chambliss nicely put it, the criminologists stopped looking out of the police cars and started looking into the police cars. LSE sociology department was particularly relevant, for several of the faculty (enough to constitute a core group) had over the years imported American sociology of deviance which was, as yet, little known in this country. Like blues music enthusiasts, they were fascinated by it, proselytized the word and in many cases attempted to transpose the American work into an English context. The core group at that time centred around Terry Morris – although the process had been foreshadowed in the 1940s by the work of Hermann Mannheim. It consisted of Morris, Paul Rock, David Downes, Alan Little and Frances Heidensohn. And onto this were tagged three of Terry Morris’s PhD students: Mike Brake, myself and Stan Cohen. LSE was the major transatlantic conduit of work from that dazzling period of American sociology of deviance stretching from say 1955 to 1965, and a little beyond: think of Goffman, Becker, Al Cohen, Matza, Cicourel, Erikson, Garfinkel, Kitsuse and Scheff. The world was rendered upside down: social control created deviance, not deviance created social control, to paraphrase Edwin Lemert: deviance was not the nature of an act but a quality bestowed upon it. In a flash the whole apparatus of social control became the subject of scrutiny: the police, the courts, the mass media, the psychiatrists, the prison and its guards. The academic contrast here was the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge which was under the directorship of the prominent legal scholar, Leon Radzinovicz . The Institute was located in the law department, in a university which did not at that time teach sociology, and which had a close relationship with the Home Office and government; in short, all of the agencies which we found increasingly suspect. What was important was that Stan and his two PhD compatriots found themselves in a sociology department rather than one circumscribed by law, which was immensely receptive to the new sociology of deviance coming out of the States and, very importantly, at a period of time that was awash with transformative culture and politics. Stan’s role in these early days was absolutely central. He was the greatest enthusiast for the new deviancy theory. It made sense of the psychobabble of his psychiatric social work, it fitted well with his sense of irony and dark humour, and it carried with it the shared libertarian anarchism of his heroes such as David Matza.
The subcultural explosion
The 1960s in Britain presented the most dramatic formation of youth cultures in the First World. Britain emerged from the destruction of the war and the years of austerity and discipline which followed it in a culturally uneven way, split by generation and resentment at the new freedoms of the young. This generated an explosion of spectacular subcultures: rockers, mods, skinheads, punks and Britain’s own version of hippies. They systematically rediscovered and revitalized the rich tradition of American popular music, both white and black, which had settled into conformity and blandness. The British (musical) invasion of the US by so many groups from the Beatles and the Stones through to the Kinks, Pink Floyd, the Who, the Cream, Led Zeppelin and the Animals, backed up by the émigré status of Hendrix in west London, clearly demonstrated this.
The impact of these social transformations upon us cannot be overrestimated. Those who say ‘if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there’ were definitely not there. Most probably they were sitting in their Oxbridge rooms worried about what their tutor was about to say about their essay on Wordsworth. But from Eel Pie Island to the Ricky-Tick, Guildford, an extraordinary cultural transformation was occurring: hedonistic, expressive, spearheaded by the new music which was largely working class, both in terms of the musicians and the audience, with a strong Art School backbone. I can only remember the blank looks in the LSE bar when members of the Stones backup tried to persuade people to come down and support the lads who were playing a gig at the Marquee, a mere fifteen minutes down the road in Soho (even though Jagger was one of their own ). Middle-class students were not into rock and roll – that was for the working class. They were into jazz, first traditional and then bebop. A year later the whole applecart was overturned. And the rest is history: the culture of youth spread to all classes and, most extraordinary of all, to all ages. That is why we find ourselves today with stadium rock, exorbitant ticket prices and delightfully aging rock stars.
For a young person at that time the feeling was of extraordinary power and vitality. So it was not strange that Stan, Mike and I, all in our mid-twenties, focused our research on youth culture – we were part of it, and excited by it. Thus it was not a question of what subject to study for our PhDs, which we would choose objectively as ‘social scientists’ – maybe something which promised to illuminate some sociological problem ‘out there’ with a useful and accessible database – but, rather, that which turned us on. Indeed, it was youth cultures for which we would, perhaps inevitably, come to act as advocates. Hence Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Cohen, 1972), The Drugtakers (Young, 1971) and The Sociology of Youth Culture (Brake, 1980). The excitement was not just in the streets. It had begun to penetrate the stalwart dullness of the academy itself.
It was in such a setting that Stan set off with notebook and backpack on weekend returns to coastal resorts such as Brighton, Clacton and Margate to watch skirmishes between mods, rockers and the police and to interview participants, irate shopkeepers and outraged holidaymakers, following this up by detailed analysis of the escalating media commentary. For all three of us the seeming irrationality of the public response to the new generation of youth, whether it was against the use of cannabis, the anger about premarital sex, or the responses to what were extremely low-keyed and limited fights at the seaside, set up a major question mark. Stan’s breakthrough was to realize the symbolic quality of such conflicts. Thus he wrote, in a tone resonant of Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans (1966), ‘Whatever “the devil” was in the seaside towns it was not in the vandalism’ (Cohen, 1972: 114) and later:
The mods and rockers symbolized something far more important than what they actually did. They reached the delicate and ambivalent nerves through which post-war social change in Britain was experienced. (Cohen, 1972: 161)
From this perspective, something important and exciting was going on. Nor were sociologists alone in spotting the symbolism and intergenerational significance of these happenings. In particular the up and coming rock group, The Who, closely identified with the mods, this subculture having evolved around and given zest to their music. One glance at their discography underscores this: My Generation, 1965, The Kids Are Alright, 1966, and Quadrophrenia, 1973, the rock opera inspired by the happenings in Brighton and followed, of course, by Quadrophrenia, the film in 1979, based on the battles and actually filmed in Brighton. The antennae both of Stan Cohen and Pete Townshend had picked up on the centrality of such intergenerational conflict, that it was not just a mistake in representation in the media or the over-eagerness of a misinformed police force. So for one writer such a fascination gave rise to an elegant sociological analysis which placed the notion of moral panic in the public arena and influenced research in a host of disciplines. For another, it inspired a rock opera, a movie and much incidental music emblematic of the period. Both sides probably would not immediately recognize each other. But both sprang from observing the same scenario, having the same sensitivities and, as a result, contributing manifestly to our culture.
The naughty schoolboys and the NDC
I do not wish to end this account without a rather amusing episode. Right in the middle of the Third National [ Criminology] Conference taking place in Cambridge in July 1968, a group of young social scientists and criminologists, participants at the conference, met secretly to establish an independent ‘National Deviancy Conference’ and soon afterwards duly met in York. At the time it reminded me a little of naughty schoolboys, playing a nasty game on their stern headmaster. (Sir Leon Radzinowicz, 1999: 229)
Criminology at this time was characterized by clinical psychiatric and medico-legal approaches. It was constituted by a slurry of unsophisticated positivism and unreconstructed neoclassicism. It was largely atheoretical and evoked a multifactorial notion of causality. It was written as if sociology did not exist. It was therefore no accident that it was at Cambridge that an alternative conference was planned: more sociological, much more radical, and more resonant with the spirit of the times. Stan was the leading light in this subversion. The NDC was inspirational and antinomian. It worked across disciplines and it managed to create a bridge between phenomenology and Marxism. It was also amazingly successful. David Downes depicted it as a veritable ‘explosion of work’, the ‘fall out’ of which was to change the terrain of criminology and the sociology of deviancy for many years to come. One gauge of this explosion would be that in the first five-year period from the inception of the NDC in 1968 to 1973 there were 63 speakers who between them produced just under 100 books on crime, deviance and social control. The impact, moreover, was scarcely limited to crime and deviance. Early work in gender studies was presented (including Mary McIntosh and Ken Plummer), and the first flourishes of what was to become cultural studies (including Dick Hebdige, Mike Featherstone, Stuart Hall and Paul Willis). The basis of such work and the widespread interest it generated (there were ten national conferences in the four years 1969 to 1972) undoubtedly constitute the first airing of what were to become known as ‘postmodern’ themes. As Stan famously put it:
After the middle of the nineteen sixties – well before Foucault had made these subjects intellectually respectable and a long way from the Left Bank – our little corner of the human sciences was seized by a deconstructionist impulse. (Cohen, 1988: 101)
NDC was deconstructionist to a person, anti-essentialist in its stance, and it evoked a myriad voices and viewpoints right to the edge of relativism. It dwelt on the social construction of gender, sexual proclivity, crime, suicide, drugs and mental state. It inverted hierarchies; it read total cultures from the demimonde of mods, rockers, teddy boys, hippies, skinheads; it traced the bricolage of the old culture by which the new ‘spectacular’ youth cultures constituted themselves. It focused on their media representation and the fashion in which media stereotypes shaped and at times became reality. And beneath all this was an underlying critique of both strands of state intervention: positivism and classicism. All of this project Stan Cohen was central to, from the first book to emerge, Images of Deviance, which he edited in 1971, to The Manufacture of News in 1973, to the hard-hitting Psychological Survival, written with Laurie Taylor in1976, and the review of this early period in Against Criminology, 1988.
None of this really captures, as does the wonderful LSE Alumni tributes, the level to which Stan regularly helped and inspired people. As Ken Plummer, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and a student of Stan’s at Enfield College at that time, put it well: ‘every generation gets excited by the “hot news” of their day. Mine was the National Deviancy Conference. And Mary [McIntosh], Stan and a few others were my inspirations’ (Plummer, 2013). In retrospect Leon Radzinowicz’s moral indignation at such upstarts, his patronizing attitude and his thinly concealed anger at the temerity of their criticism reflects his dawning awareness that he represented the past. For the future quite clearly split into two trends: a revanchist scientific positivism which would show little interest in neoclassicism and legalistic approaches to crime, and that of the critical criminologists, ‘the young Turks’, his ‘naughty boys’ (and girls) who would, as it happened, gain the majority of the jobs in criminology and the sociology of deviance which were to proliferate in Britain in the next fifteen years.
Beyond the word limit
Here we are and I am way beyond my word limit. I would like to have described our working in my study in East London in an area which Stuart Hall called ‘the Dalston triangle’ (John Clarke and I shared a house, Dick Hebdidge lived across the road), where left-wing intellectuals were rumoured to mysteriously disappear. It has since been renamed London Fields, with multi-ethnic Dalston remaining like a doughnut around it. Or, for that matter, our attempt while writing Manufacture of News to institute our own moral panic which, I have to say, was an abysmal failure.
Stan was a sound friend and a stern critic. He was the person who got me my first job at Enfield (against all my inclinations), and who persuaded Mike and I to go to the first NDC in York where I gave my first academic paper (which was definitely the end of my project to write the greatest British novel by the turn of the century). I still have a rather worn manuscript of the original paper on realism, which I sent to Stan. He was critical, as usual. The margins were crammed with advice, but not as substantively critical of realism as you might think. His most telling comment was: ‘Jock, we have been comrades for a long time so I feel I can tell you what I think: why the hell can’t you do something about your writing, you are beginning to sound like a text book.’ Spot on. A great comrade and friend. I only wish I had taken his advice.