Subculture- The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebdige

Used books Subculture: The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebdige

The sixteen years since Subculture* was published have seen the remarkable rise of 'cultural studies' as a university teaching subject and the global spread of the term (sometimes with a prefix: 'Birmingham cultural studies') as descriptive of a distinctive approach to both cultural sociology and literary and media analysis. Throughout Dick Hebdige's small (140 pp.) but rich essay on 'the meaning of style' (originally published in Methuen's New Accents series, itself an influential venture in the redefinition of disciplines) has been the key cultural studies text. John Fiske may have eventually cornered the market in the popularising (and simplifying) cultural studies text book; Policing the Crisis may be the definitive study to come from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies itself (if only for the wealth and sophistication of its empirical, historical, political and textual detail); but Subculture is still the book that despite its flaws (most obviously a complete lack of interest in girls) is likeliest to persuade both students and staff that this subject is fun. If there were a cultural studies citation index, in other words, Subculture would surely have the most entries. It provides the clearest accessible account of how one tradition of cultural studies (British socio-literary moralism from Arnold to Williams and Hoggart) was overlaid by another (continental ideological theory from Marx to Althusser) and then pivoted smartly round both Gramsci's theory of hegemony and Barthes's concept of myth. There is still no better brief account of the Birmingham project: from understanding culture as hegemony to celebrating subculture as the challenge to hegemony. There's an irony here nonetheless. Subculture was if nothing else a study of contemporary culture. The theoretical material takes off from and circles all around 'the British summer of 1976', the moment of punk and all that. It is, therefore, important to remember that the same amount of time has now gone past since then as there was between punk and the rock'n'roll, Elvis Presley, teenage moment of the mid 1950s. At the time of its first publication Subculture (like punk) announced itself as something new. It did refer to the fifties (to teds and delinquency theory and The Uses of * Mcthuen, 1979,

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Literacy) but only as a time of lost innocence: we knew too much, we’d heard too much, to have such simpZe ideas about youth and youth music ever again (Hebdige thus provided, among other things, a capsule postwar social history). Nowadays, though, people read and teach Subculture as if the Britain it described were still contemporary. It’s like post-punk never happened. It is now generally accepted, at least among pop scholars outside the academy (following Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces and Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming) that punk itself was always a double narrative: on the one hand, about art; on the other hand, about class. I don’t just mean this sociologically - though punk clearly did involve a creative interplay of art schools and dole queues - but also ideologically: as an expressive form, punk was crucially about class and art. So was Subculture, if somewhat obliquely. Hebdige’s explicit interest was youth and race. He suggested that the close study of youth subcultures was a means by which ‘we can watch played out on the loaded surfaces of British working class youth cultures a phantom history of race relations since the War‘ (p. 45), and not the least of his ambitions was to put race at the centre of post-war British experience (one reason why his account of working-class culture is so different from Richard Hoggart’s). Paradoxically, though, Hebdige’s arguments about race have probably been his least influential - ’subcultural theory’ is still firmly centred on art and class, and it is in this latter respect that the debt to Hebdige’s work is most obvious. Methodologically speaking, that is to say, Subculture is a double text: the issues of class and art are approached rather differently. First, then, we have an analysis of punk as issuing ’out of nameless housing estates, anonymous dole queues, slums in the abstract’ (p. 65), and as reproducing ’the entire sartorial history of post-war working-class youth cultures in ”cut-up” form’ (p. 26). Hebdige thus follows the traces of previous styles in class-specific terms - teds, mods and above all skinheads may all have been reactions to Caribbean British culture, but such reactions were distinctively proletarian: Its rituals, language and style provided models for those white youths alienated from the parent culture by the imagined compromises of the post-war years. The skinheads, then, resolved or at least reduced the tension between an experienced present (the mixed ghetto) and an imaginary past (the classic white slum) by initiating a dialogue which reconstituted each in terms of the other. (P. 57)

In offering such an analysis Hebdige refers to social institutions and activities, makes claims about post-war society, criticises conventional

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youth theory, and cites the social effects of the mass media, but by his own admission his arguments are based not on empirical data as such but on cultural ’readings’. ’Paki-bashing’, for example, ’can be read as a displaced manoeuvre whereby the fear and anxiety produced by limited identification with one black group was transformed into aggression and directed against another black community’ (p. 58). This is sociological theory without sociological method, as Hebdige readily admits: Much of this book has been based on the assumption that the two positions ‘Negro‘ and ‘white working-class youth’ can be equated. This equation is no doubt open to dispute; it cannot be tested by the standard sociological procedures. Though it is undeniably there in the social structure, it is there as an immanence, as submerged possibility, as an existential option; and one cannot verify an existential option scientifically - you either see it or you (P.131) don’t.

The question this raises is why his readers should see the world the way Hebdige sees it. After all, as he wryly notes, ‘It is highly unlikely that the members of any of the subcultures described in this book would recognise themselves reflected here’ (p. 139), and I doubt if many pop historians are convinced by his account of punk either (Dave Laing’s One-Chord Wonders is a rather more complex historical and semiotic study). What’s most interesting about Subculture‘s success, to put this another way, is that such empirical reservations don’t matter. As he writes, ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the idea of style as a coded response to changes affecting the entire community has literally transformed the study of spectacular youth culture’ (p. 80, my emphasis), and his achievement (drawing on arguments first worked through in Birmingham and presented in Resistance Through Rituals, but with little real evidence) was to make a new story about youth and race and class utterly convincing. And this is, I think, where the second text comes into play, the text about art. Subculture begins and ends with Jean Genet, a move which seemed odder then that it does now. Genet was not an obvious referent for either British social history or marxist ideological analysis, and Hebdige’s interest in him (followingSartre) is existential rather than sociological. His concern, to put this another way (and in this Hebdige clearly anticipated the most interesting cultural studies analysis to come) was performance of style: I shall be returning again and again to Genet’s major themes: the status and meaning of revolt, the idea of style as a form of Refusal, the elevation of crime into art . . . like Genet we must seek to recreate the dialectic between action and reaction which renders [the most mundane] objects meaningful. (p. 2, my emphasis)

Used books 123 From a sociologist’s perspective it is odd, given this concern, that Subculfure makes so little reference to ’symbolic interactionism’, whether in its European or American forms (Alfred Schutz is not mentioned; Erving Goffman’s work is relegated to a rather dismissive footnote). This in part reflects the study‘s origin in a literature rather than sociology department, but more important, I think, is the sense that for all Hebdige’s rhetorical gestures at anthropological and semiological accounts of meaning-making (L6vi-Strauss,Eco) he is primarily interested in the individual experience of creativity, in the process by which people transform themselves. He describes the ’recuperation’ of subculture, a central Birmingham concept, in these terms: 1. the conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music, etc.) into mass-produced objects (i.e. the commodity form); 2. the ’labelling’ and re-definition of deviant behaviour by dominant groups the police, the media, the judiciary (i.e. the ideological form). (P. 94)

Recuperation, in other words, means the translation of individual style into social convention and, in the end, Hebdige wants to celebrate subcultural style as a form of personal communication. In fashion terms, that is to say, ‘intentional communication’ can be opposed to ‘normal’ dress conventions: it ’is of a different order. It stands apart - a visible construction, a loaded choice. It directs attention to itself; it gives itself to be read’ (p. 101). It is a way of being ’different’. It is not surprising, in short, that despite his continuing deployment of class terms, Hebdige is attracted by subcultural stylists more as artists than as social activists. This is the reason why he finds punks much more interesting than previous youth stylists like teds. Punks, he suggests, weren’t limited by subcultural sociology: We can express the difference between the two practices in the following formula: one (i.e. the punks’) is kinetic, transitive and concentrates attention on the act of transformation performed upon the object; the other (i.e. the teds’) is static, expressive, and concentrates attention on the objects-in-themselves. (P.124)

Hebdige, in other words, is more interested in the act or moment of creativity (or ’refusal‘) itself than in its social consequences. He may spend some time (and ingenuity) tracing the ‘homologies’ between symbols and social situation, between class and art, but his real fascination is with signs before they become codified, and he is as dismissive as any mass-cultural critic (or reader of New Musical Express) of the process in which ‘street’ creativity becomes media commodity.

124 Critical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2 And here lies the continuing appeal of Subculture. It is really a book about stylists for stylists, which is one reason why the book has had such a strong and unusual appeal outside the academy too. Whether in design studios or advertising agencies, whether among journalists or musicians, whether in cultural studies classrooms or staff rooms, there are lots of people out there who are happy to be told that playing with signs is, well, groovy. THE ARTFUL DODGER