Subculture: The Meaning of Styles

by Dick Hebdige

Provider: Kate Liu / 劉紀雯

Starting Questions

The Work as a Whole

Criticism

Starting Questions 

1. Where do we draw the line between culture as both provider of pleasures and an instrument of hegemony on the one hand, and subculture as resistance and commercial on the other?  

2. What are the examples of contemporary subcultures?  Do we see "resistance" to dominant or commercial cultures in them?  Which of the following are subcultures?  同人誌, underground music band, teenage music fans, fans of high culture?

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The Work as a Whole

A. methodology: 

1. structure + social interactions; Semiology + Volosinov; studies of ideology & hegemony; 

2. His work focuses on marginal groups -- punks, mods, Rastafarians -- whose style he sees as 
   a statement of "refusal," of resistance and opposition to the dominant order.

3. Studies of ordinary objects -- safety pins, a tube of vaseline, motor scooters --as signs, and how they are appropriated by a subculture to resist the dominant group.

B. Subculture: Some Case Studies: 

1. punk: "excesses"; "contradictions"

   •  combine multiple musical styles and two radically dissimilar languages of reggae and rock 26-27

   •  transgression of taken-for-granted codes of dress, behaviour, musical and dance forms --> semantic disorder.  

2. unseen connections (deep structural links) between black subcultures and white subcultures  

   • the punk aesthetic: read in part as "a white translation of black 'ethnicity'"  (64)

   • "The succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep-structural adaptations which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community.   It is on the plane of aesthetics: in dress, dance, music; in the whole rhetoric of style, that we find the dialogue between black and white most subtly and comprehensively recorded. . .  a phantom history of race relations since the War" (44-45)

3. Reggae, Rastafarianism and style: 

   • "Africa finds an echo inside reggae in its distinctive percussion." (31)

   • Rastafarianism: Black revision of Christianity; signifying a going "back to Africa" by identifying Ethiopian emperor Haille Selassie's enthronement as the second coming and the fall of Babylon. (34)

   • "Somewhere between Trenchtown and Ladbroke Grove, the cult of Rastafari had become a 'style': an expressive combination of locks, of khaki camouflage and 'weed' which proclaimed unequivocally the alienation felt by many young black Britons."(36)  "By questioning the neat articulations of common sense (in appearance, in language, etc.) the Rasta was able to carry the crusade to the level of the 'obvious' itself" (37).

4. Punks' imitation: 

   • e.g. The Clash --" a musical hybrid of punk dub, punk and reggae forms generally remained separate, even 'audibly opposed.'  --> a willful segregation that concealed a more profound identity.  

   • "Punk includes reggae as a 'present absence' -- a black hole around which punk composes itself' (68).

C. Subculture: A Reading 

1. general definitions: 

   • a cultural group or class within a larger culture, esp. one having beliefs, interests, customs etc., at variance with those of the larger culture (New Shorter Oxford, "subculture" definition 2, page 3115)

   • "a system of shared meanings" (Greentz source)

   • a integrated collection of styles" (Hebdige)

2. language (langue) of dominant culture vs. speech(parole) of subculture

3. The strategy employed by subcultures in this struggle is one of appropriation, displacement, 
   and assemblage (bricolage)

4. sources of style: ". . . experience encoded in subcultures is shaped in a variety of locales (work, home, school etc.).  Each of these locales imposes its own unique structure, its own rules and meanings, its own hierarchy of values. Though these structures articulate together, they do so syntactically. They are bound together as much through difference (home versus school, school versus work, home versus work, private versus public etc.) as through similarity. To use Althusser's admittedly cumbersome terms, they constitute different levels of the same social formation. "

5. The history of subcultures -- a cyclical one of subversion and incorporation (ideological incorporation and commodification).  

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"From Culture to Hegemony" 

Main Ideas: 

1. Ideology and hegemony shape a culture's values through signification.

2. The unnaturally `naturalized', cultural values can be re- appropriated because signification is contingent. 

I. Culture:

1. a process and a product at the same time

2. discussions of culture (6; Norton 2449)

   • contemporary culture as a `wasteland', past culture were seen as "harmonious perfection" ()

   • a socialist Utopia (labour=leisure) which itself was split into two directions: 

     • The first was "essentially classical and conservative. It represented culture as a standard of aesthetic excellence: 'the best that has been thought and said in the world'" (6). 

     • The second one was rooted in anthropology in which a particular way of life expressed certain values and meanings held in a particular culture. 

3. (R Williams) the theory of culture involved "the study of relations between elements in a whole way of life."  

   •  emaphasis shifted from immutable to historical criteria 

   • studying "an altogether broader formulation of the relationships between culture and society (...) [one which analysed] the 'general causes' and broad social `trends' which lie beneath the manifest appearances of an `everyday life" (7; Norton 2450)

4. Problems: biases "towards literature and literacy and equally strong moral tone" in Hoggart and Williams 

II. Barthes: Myths and Sings

1. concerned with "how all the apparently spontaneous forms and rituals of contemporary bourgeois societies are subject to systematic distortion, liable at any moment to be dehistoricized, 'naturalized', converted into myth. (9; Norton 2451)  

2. Barthes' application of a method rooted in linguistics to other systems of discourse outside language (fashion, film, food, etc.) opened up completely new possibilities for contemporary cultural studies.  

   • reconcile the two conflicting definitions of culture: "a marriage of moral conviction and popular themes: the study of a society's total way of life"

   • More analytic framework; 

   • "Barthes found an `anonymous ideology' penetrating every possible level of social life, inscribed in the most mundane of rituals, framing the most casual social" (11; Norton 2452)  
     encounters" (9; Norton 2451)  

III. Ideology: A Lived Relation

1. Marx--ideology; thrives in our subconsciousness. 

2. ideology: spontaneous, transparent, natural; most effect (and most effectively concealed) on the level of `normal common sense' (11; Norton 2452)  

3. a system of representation: (Althusser)"they are usually images and  occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structure that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their consciousness."  (e.g. "the physical structure of academia")

4. Ideological content of Signs: It is not only the forms of social relations and processes that escape our consciousness, but also signs: 

   • "There is an ideological dimension to every signification" (13; Norton 2453)  

   • Volosinov: "[Sign] reflects and refracts another reality.  . .  .Te domain of ideology coincide with the domain of signs"   (13; Norton 2454)

5. 'ideology has no history' -- [the sets of social relations] "appear as if they were universal and timeless" 

6. The specific ideologies --   in the favour of specific groups to create power relations:

   •  `It should be obvious that access to the means by which ideas are disseminated in our society (...) is not the same for all classes. Some groups have more say, more opportunity to make the rules"

   • "Maps of meaning [in society] are charged with a potentially explosive significance because they are traced and retraced along the lines laid down by the dominant discourses about reality, the dominant ideologies. Thus they tend to represent, in however obscure and contradictory a fashion, the interests of the dominant groups in society...(14; Norton 2454). 

IV. Hegemony: The Moving Equilibrium

1. Two Gramscian terms useful in analyzing subcultures: conjuncture and specificity.

2. The dominant groups in society create a dominant discourse by using dominant ideologies. --> hegemony

3. hegemony: a spontaneous consent in society without the use of force. According to Gramsci, hegemony is not given to the dominant group, but "has to be won, reproduced, sustained."  Hegemony can only be maintained so long as the dominant classes succeed in framing all competing definitions within their range... so that the subordinate groups are either controlled or contained within an ideological space. .  .  (13; Norton 2455)

4. Because hegemony is not just given, there is a possibility for de-construction, de-mystification and repossession of signs.  "The symbiosis in which ideology and the social order, production and reproduction, are linked is neither fixed nor guaranteed. It can be prised open. The consensus can be fractured, challenged, over-ruled, and resistance to the groups in dominance cannot always be lightly dismissed or automatically incorporated..." (16; Norton 2456).  

5. Sign -- a site of struggle: Volosinov: "the `sign becomes the arena of the class struggle' so that there is a struggle within signification. 

Subculture:

1. Style is the way in which youth cultures express their resistance to dominant culture and in which `punks' question the sanctity of culture.

2. "Style in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance. Its transformations go 'against nature', interrupting the process of `normalization. (...) As a symbolic violation of the social order, such a movement attracts and will continue to attract attention, to provoke censure and to act (...) as the fundamental bearer of significance in subculture"  (18-19; Norton 2456-57). 

3. His task: "to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace them out as 'maps of meaning'"(18; Norton 2456)

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Criticism (Ref. Beezer in Barker 107 - )

1. Angela McRobbie--> girls:  ignores the role of girls in subcultures, or the ways girls are marginalized from many subcultural interests and pursuits 

2. Simon Jones--> politics:  a structural reading of subcultural formation . . . slides over the question of the political impact of those groups which it has identified.  e.g. Punks' uses of black cultures "contained ambiguities which were susceptible to fascist manipulation. .  . .For the same powerlessness, desire to shock and sense of anger at official smugness expressed by punk's more working-class constituency, were precisely the same motives and feelings which steered jobless and powerless young whites towards organized racism" (Jones qtd in Beezer 108). 

3. Simon Frith--> formation rather than form: 

   • a distinction should be made between those committed to subcultural identity and those associated with it; 

   • music as a leisure commodity used in multiple ways by the listeners. 

Dick Hebdige's work:

• Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, 1979)

• Cut 'n Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (Routledge, 1987)

• Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (Routledge, 1988)

References 

Subculture: The Meaning of Style . London: Routledge, 1991. 
Volosinov, Valentin N. "Studies of Ideologies and Philosophy of Language."  Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1986. Chapter 1, pp.9-16.  
Barker, Martin, et al, eds.  Reading into Cultural Studies.  NY: Routledge, 1992.

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