Confessional Goth, Poetry, and the Study of Subculture
*Max Weber (1864-1920) was a German social theorist who, among contemporaries like Karl Marx, sculpted the modern field of sociology into its current disposition.*
Preface
This writing is partially inspired by the book Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style by David Muggleton (1) as it specifically applies to the study of subcultures, and its relevance to what I am referring to in simple terms as “confessional goth”, an essential component to the historiographical integrity of such a study’s stature and breadth. I appreciate Muggleton’s fluid approach to the inquiry of modern subcultures, which historically was more heavily structured and statistically mobilized in scholarship (though he still somewhat caters to and works from within some of those structures himself).
Neo-Weberian Model for Researching Subcultures
In his book, Muggleton’s objective is to delineate what he calls a neo-Weberian approach to studying subcultures into a three-pronged spearhead: 1. We must value anecdotal data rather than succumbing to a totalitarian definition or model of goth in and of itself. 2. We must accept what Muggleton calls “a ‘nominalist’ rather than a ‘realist’ position on social reality” in that we give credence to the phenomenal affairs of the subculture as independent entities rather than assuming that they are the direct progeny of “underlying structures.” 3. “Recognize the independent explanatory role of cultural values rather than theorizing these as necessarily related to socioeconomic and social factors.”
Weber’s original methodology was founded on the literal concept of “human understanding,” aka verstehen (the study of subjective interpretations of phenomena in addition to empirical investigation), so as not to reduce “meaning” to mere “statistical probability.” Later, researchers such as Phil Cohen and J. Clarke also proposed similar models which would provide a digestible analysis of subcultures by including not just the historical or empirical, but the subjective and phenomenological as well, though even they rarely employed the subjective component of their suggested modalities.
Many academic discourses are undertaken regarding whether an objective reality exists outside of subjective perception or not, or whether “nominalism” contributes to an empirical succession of cause and effect, but I will leave such debates to the erudition of the sociologically astute. I have earned a sociology degree, but I make no claims to the realm of proficiency past a baccalaureate understanding of the general subject. Here, I am lightly concerned with the role of the “I” in identity, community, and research methodologies.
Our Relationship with Confessional Work and Community
The most prominent mental connection I make with confessional work is that of confessional poetry. Poetry is not a subculture, but in examining the relationship academics and public critics have with the realms of confessional work (that which posits itself upon the “I” and often relays personal experiences) is, I think, essential to begin to understand the hesitancy to everyone’s relationship with phenomenological research. There are a few reasons why I personally think that academics and researchers take issue with the autobiographical “I,” but these are only abstractions of personal reality based on my investigations into criticisms of poetry and subcultural studies. The medium I have chosen to use as my lens while examining the response to confessional work is Anne Sexton’s poetry, since she unabashedly delved into the discomfort of the everyday… more specifically, her everyday experiences in a female body.
James Dickey, who wrote a scathing review of Sexton’s work, leads me to my first hypothesis: “It would be hard to find a writer who dwells more insistently on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience…” Our collective discomfort with “the body” stands in direct opposition to the anecdotal and personal relationship each participant has with their subculture, as it is first experienced from the standpoint of a singular body. I argued with myself for a while about whether the phenomenological first arises in the mind or if that is the dominating sphere as a separate entity, and perhaps for some, that represents the experience, but many goths seem to remember goth as that which made them feel more physically at home on the planet. Of course, this can arise from mental congruence, but the way the music “feels” and makes us want to move, or the way we (many of us being queer) suddenly feel less “alien” when first engaging with elements of the goth subculture have helped me build a tenuous, but worthwhile connection to a body-based relationship to our subculture. Either way, the brain, which enables perception and “mind work,” is part of the body. Autopoietic enactive embodiment, or autopoietic enactivism (AE), which is a framework “in which the body can be understood both as an autonomous system and sense-making agent,” comments on the body as a holistic and central liaison in the interpretation of phenomena… Though hopefully, I am not insinuating that sensory interpretation is merely functional. (2)
Even the public abstraction of “goth” from gothic pillars is hyper-focused on the body, whether through the capitalist seizure of the fashion (the “look”) or the socially attenuated concept of beauty. As Sexton’s work in the 50s and 60s worked within the subversive realms of menstruation, aging (through very visibly descriptive language), abxxxion, and female servitude, goth subculture expressed on a confessional plane often confronts the public with fluid concepts within gender (not just assertive detailing of one gender’s experiences), unconventional approaches to beauty, and a willingness to peer into social philosophies surrounding death, grief, and interests in the macabre.
Secondly, as I often relate goth to gender because both are “othered” as discomforting topics to the mainstream, I am fascinated by Sexton’s confessional work as a groundbreaking method to express what it looks like and feels like to live in a female body. Gender, inside and outside of goth, extends well beyond the accepted binary, but considering the rocky relationship between the collective and the binary itself, it is not shocking to me that collecting biographical data in subcultural research on these topics can feel like grasping at mists. This is not to imply that certain genders or experiences are disembodied. I am using the analogy to describe the orthorexic relationship the collective has with gender and the many (unpredictable?) ways the “other” can manifest. Sexton’s poem, “In Celebration of My Uterus,” centralized Sexton’s experience with womanhood in a bold, emblematic way that made many of her contemporaries extremely uncomfortable. However, in goth, we are usually not communicating a subversive nature (as perceived by the collective non-goth public, which rarely listens to our music) through words, but through appearances and non-conformity, further relating the collective ideas such as “gender equals body” or “goth equals body” to those physical manifestations. I speculate that this is one of the reasons fashion becomes a hyper fixation in commodified realms. The confessional “I” is not always a verbal statement, though biographical information retrieved from within the subculture may quote or conceptualize it in written work. With this view, the “I” can somewhat be controlled, hidden, or displayed in terms of fashion or symbolic identities in or out of alignment with public projections and internalized beliefs.
Thirdly, and in terms of white-driven research, we have come to regard the “I” as having less value, just as we unconsciously devalue community (and I am only speaking to white people in this statement, realizing that there will also be exceptions within it). Community, to many of us, is totalitarian, not exploratory or explanatory of evolving social conditions, or accepting of both individual development and one’s responsibility to their community. This is not to say that subculture researchers, sociology majors, or any other researcher is, by default, white, but I am using the conscious and subconscious collective beliefs surrounding bodies that look like mine as the “social scalpel” to carve back the public skins we adopt. I also use it to look more deeply into how we (specifically white people) approach research. Black and indigenous people have been doing this for centuries, long before words such as mine were introduced to a page. Personally, I think that in researching and attempting to “acquire” community (an interesting approach), many of us feel content erasing the “I” as we place community on, once again, an absolutist plane. With an “it,” there is little responsibility or claiming of the “self” in community happenings unless they benefit our ideals. Like the Cloud, it stores our collective creations and inspirations but is still separate from our personhood when we want distance. We desire a third-party structure to act as a neutral representative of our interests, while ironically, hyper-individualizing our spaces and aesthetics…. and using “other” bodies acting independently as holographic scapegoats of entire races and ethnicities. We, as white people, in my opinion, have disembodied the “I” from our research and the phenomenological from our community considerations as an unconscious commentary on the self-protective mobility we lend to our identities. (For further information on colonialism and how research has been ethnocentric, check out Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith.)
Lastly, the sheer volume of work produced by Sexton’s poetry alone is enough to raise an eyebrow in terms of collecting data and sorting personal phenomena from that which is relevant to one’s scholarship. In subculture studies, there can be hundreds of participants sharing their subjective relationships and personal interpretations of social theories. Instead of just amassing and organizing a collection of work as a biography, as with Sexton, sociologists must amass and then categorize information into that which is relevant to the subculture and what is purely personal. Many doing this work are not part of the subculture(s) they are studying and may miss nuances and connections because they are not regularly privy to them.
The way that I approach my understanding of subculture is by relating it to social, economic, spiritual, and physical frameworks to determine goth’s (or any subculture’s) relationship to those things on a personal and “community-based” level. Based on the information I have received from elder goths, the subculture originally focused on a high degree of individuation and has gradually developed a stronger sense of community over time (which I am grateful for). Sadly, I was not in the goth community in the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s, so I only have third-person opinions on which to substantiate my understanding of goth community development. Interestingly positioned nearby, we see the punk interpretation of subculture as incredibly anti-structuralist, both in their musical lyrics and in their identities (If you say you are punk, you probably aren’t, according to interviewees commenting on group consciousness and labels).
The Confessional is Often Subversive
The confessional is confrontational… and subversive in and of itself, regardless of which empires the “confession” is speaking into or upon. It is often personal, embarrassing, cringey, blunt, and viscerally real. It does not always play the social game (often white-driven or rooted in privilege) of distancing the self from difficult issues or unattractive or undesirable occurrences, but rather examines whether they really are inescapable institutions that act upon the self. Even though confessional poetry is more widely accepted now than it was in earlier decades, it is still regarded with a bit of a sneer in many domains. Often it explains how the subjective has become reduced to an objectified entity, which perhaps would be better tasted if presented as objective and universal phenomena, unfixable and unquestionable. It is certainly easier to accept phenomena at “face value” than to delve into experiences shaped and sculpted by institutionalized systems, whose” effects are unevenly distributed across gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, and “difference” or “otherness” in general. Global phenomena are eschewed when they become personal or detail their oppressive roots from a first-person perspective, or demand to be felt by the author and readers. Though again, according to our third prong of a neo-Weberian model, the confessional and the expressed can simply be explanatory as well, and not all phenomena arise (most likely) out of a response to a social condition.
Simultaneously, the “I” is not always so self-aware and can be heavily ridden or programmed by unconscious adaptations to cultural or social expectations. When many use the “I”, they are still pulling on that cultural clothing and becoming further disconnected from independent thought (a foggy concept, I know), and instead, catering to collective entertainment or popular interests. Still, it is a threatening and unpredictable entity when it is unafraid to be raw and explicit and brazenly put its bleeding guts on display rather than be well-behaved or “traditionally” academic. The organic “I” (or less commodified and socially influenced) is less easy to control, which is why I emphasized that the “I” is often coopted and confined by plutocratic corporations to impose some degree of aphasia or limitation upon it.
The Evolution of Meaning
Due to its cultural constitution, the “confessional”, which can be reduced to “confession”, is associated with an admission of wrongdoing, or an admission of one’s adherence to their religious beliefs, even in the face of adversity or hardship. In modern terms, confession has taken on a humorous turn with Confessions of a Shopaholic and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen rescripting the definition into a chagrined “hindsight is 20/20” perspective on one’s silly or dubious choices. Symbolic interactionists appreciate differences between past and present meanings of language, as I do, since they provide insights into cultural growth, regression, conflicts, and values.
The Role of the Individual in Research per Muggleton
Rather than distilling nebulous subcultural phenomena to rigid definitions, modern researchers have embraced a “show”, not just “tell” approach to underground examinations. As Muggleton states: “My own position, however, is not one of assuming, but one of demonstrating. The purpose of the interview extracts presented in this book is to show how members of youth subcultures interpret and make sense of the postmodern characteristics imputed to them by social theorists.” In other words, subjective interpretations of subculture are placed on par with empirical assertions about the implications (or definitions) of subculture.
The “I,” The Community, and The Subversive
It is common knowledge that goth, for the most part, arose from left-oriented substrata in response to capitalism and other socio-economic structures. Currently, the “I,” though still hyper-individuated, is still associated with community in subculture (e.g., Fit in with the subculture but make your mark as an individual simultaneously). The rejection of heteronormative expectations and partial rejection of social games (relatable to neurodivergent people), such as refusing to hide from difficult subjects and examining culturally embedded structures to undermine the agency of those structures, is step one. Furthermore, transforming supposedly deterministic concepts (like gender) into isomorphic or flexible re-interpretations that question the status quo (this last concept is known as bricolage) all continue to ensure the subversive nature of goth and subculture.
Afterword
Thank you for bearing with my somewhat erratic, fever-dream of a blog post, which was really a hopscotch game of the role of the “I,” community, gender, whiteness, and subversiveness all rolled into a very brief layout… one that does not necessarily answer any questions. My understanding of goth, subculture, and self borrows from the concept of collages (like the Riot Grrrls used in the 90s) in that I create “word collages” to compare seemingly unrelated concepts within spaces infused with my own interests, beliefs, observations, and personal reading materials. This “cut and paste” approach is not a comprehensive analysis or presentation of any of these topics, but abstractions loosely adhered together to allow interesting juxtapositions to (potentially) reveal interconnections otherwise left unaddressed. Most of my blogs are oriented around a specific question or definition, but occasionally, something less tame will emerge from the comings and goings of my goth-interpolated fascinations. In these cases, I like to swallow my ego and post the roughly hewn messes I have made to inspire unexpected conversations, insights, and self-led reviews of my experiences within the goth subculture.
Sources:
(1) Muggleton, D. (2000). Inside subculture: The postmodern meaning of style. Oxford: Berg.
(2) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312039423_Making_Sense_of_Autopoietic_Enactive_Embodiment_A_Gentle_Appraisal