Dick Hebdige’s work Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Dick Hebdiges toy Sub purification The Meaning of stylus has had a great impact deep down the argona of cultural studies as it manages to take the preceding theories of subculture one step further, and to pinpoint the differences between culture and subculture as well as to decipher the the hidden messages inscribed on the glossy surfaces of ardor (Hebdige, 18). Hebdige follows on the tracks of semiology as theorized before him by de Saussure and Roland Barthes and tries to read and discover the signs and the style of the subcultures that emerged in Great Britain after public War II, such as the flashs, the mods or the skinheads.Also, he is inspired to a great extent by Levi-Strausss structuralist anthropology. What is re all toldy significant active Hebdiges works though is that he applies the purely theoretical fig that had been constructed by the preceding authors directly to the varied styles which appeared as forms of subculture. Thus, he tries to interpret the outer signs which were displayed by each of the groups, from the punks to the skinheads, and reveal their genial and cultural meaning.He uses wearing and hair styles, types of music or dancing and so on, as small-arm of the language of the subcultures, in which the actual social meanings are inscribed. Thus, according to Hebdige although the social split upes were said to have disappeared after the atomic number 16 World War, they were actually plain transformed into ideological divisions from the of importstream. The classes thusly formed were subcultures, that is, marginal discourses which opposed the oecumenical tendency of the nameless culture existing at that point in timeIt has become nearthing of a clich to talk of the level after the Second World War as one of enormous upheaval in which the conventional patterns of living in Britain were swept aside to be replaced by a new, and superficially less class-ridden system Nonetheless class refused to disappear. The ways in which class was lived, however the forms in which the experience of class prepare prospect in culture did change dramatically.The advent of the troop media, changes in the geological formation of the family, in the organization of school and work, shifts in the relative status of work and leisure, all served to fragment and polarize the working-class community, producing a series of marginal discourses within the broad confines of class experience. (Hebdige, 54) As Hebdige emphasizes, the subcultural styles formed their consume rhetoric by means of a certain way of living(a) and of an ostentatious appearance, as a response to the particular cultural, social, political circle of the time.In brief, it can be said that these subcultural styles were a form of protest to the anonymous culture. Although sometimes their rhetoric, as in the deterrent example of the punks, was intentionally baffling and consciously aiming at meaninglessness, to the point that it take careed to w ork against the reader and to resist every unequivocal interpretation,(Hebdige, 89) it formed nevertheless a coherent symbolic enact in itself.The subcultural groups represent, in Hebdiges view, responses to the contrary mythology of class, that is, to the way in which class was alternatively proclaimed as gone and then reaffirmed by the media earlier the different styles and the ideologies which structure and determine them represent negotiated responses to a contradictory mythology of class. In this mythology, the withering away of class is paradoxically countered by an undiluted classfulness, a wild-eyed conception of the traditional undivided way of (working-class) life revived in two ways weekly on television programs like Coronation Street.The mods and skinheads, then, in their different ways, were handling this mythology as much as the exigencies of their material condition. They were learning to live within or without that amorphous body of images and typifications mad e available in the mass media in which class is alternately overlooked and overstated, denied and reduced to caricature. (Hebdige, 55) Thus, Hebdige sees subcultures as alike and coherent forms of rhetoric, which go beyond the merely desire to shock the public opinion.In fact, as he theorizes, all the parts of the systems of symbols that make up a particular style are homologous, and they can be said to be as coherent as a whole way of life In Profane Culture, Willis shows how, contrary to the popular myth which presents subcultures as wide-open forms, the internal structure of any particular subculture is characterized by an extreme edict each part is organically related to other parts and it is through with(predicate) the fit between them that the subcultural member makes sense of the institution.For instance, it was the homology between an alternative measure out system (Tune in, turn on, drop out), hallucinogenic drugs and pungent rock which made the hippy culture cohere as a whole way of life for individual hippies. (Hebdige, 123) As Hebdige remarks the subcultures were actually concentrated constructs, which were usually meant as a response to a crisis situation, as is the case of the punks at the end of the 1970s, whose rhetoric mimicked the chaos of the English social and stinting life.The violent and obscene style was in fact a language in itself, in perfect accordance with the way in which swore or spoke There was a homological relation between the gilded cut-up clothes and spiky hair, the pogo and amphetamines, the spitting, the vomiting, the format of the fanzines, the insurrectionary poses and the soulless, frantically compulsive music. The punks wore clothes which were the sartorial equivalent of swear words, and they swore as they get holded with calculated effect, lacing obscenities into record notes and publicity releases, interviews and love songs.Clothed in chaos, they produced Noise in the calmly orchestrated Crisis of e actual lyday life in the late 1970 s(Hebdige, 125) Hebdige thus highlights the identity of language and style within the subcultural rhetoric. The punks for instance functioned as a current in which the meanings were not point fixed as such, although the worldwide meaning behind the style was that the forbidden is permitted, as Hebdige comments If we were to write an epitaph for the punk subculture, we could do no better than repeat Poly Styrenes famous dictum Oh Bondage, Up Yours or somewhat more concisely the forbidden is permitted, but by the same token, nothing, not even these forbidden signifiers (bondage, safety pins, chains, hair-dye, etc. ) is sacrosanct and fixed. (Hebdige, 125)The subcultures were thus a way of subverting the anonymous, mainstream currents trough a form of rhetorical rhetoric. The main discontents with the contemporary world were thus displayed by means of dress or discordant music for example, aiming at a deconstruction of traditional concepts or cultural fa cts.The subcultural styles didnt target necessarily the values of a certain edict, as it is usually believed, but rather those notions and cultural patterns that they found as incoherent and contradictory. They were actually an abstract embodiment of the outside chaos, and not a chaotic response to order, or a protest against order. Also, the subcultural streams aimed at emphasizing severalty and difference and their adherents were intentionally posing as aliens to society and wearing masks so as to avoid any categorization or prescribed identityThey the punks played up their Otherness, happening on the world as aliens, inscrutables. Though punk rituals, accents and objects were deliberately used to signify working-classness, the comminuted origins of individual punks were disguised or symbolically disfigured by the make-up, masks and aliases which seem to have been used, like Bretons art, as ploys to escape the principle of identity. (Hebdige,126) Another very important charact eristic of the subcultural movements is, as Hebdige notes, the fact that they strived to confuse the usual divisions of race, sexuality and chronology by combining them in their style.The boundaries between the white and black cultures are progressively erased through the borrowings that the white cultures made from the black ones in their style 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 well-nigh subtly and comprehensively recorded (Hebdige, 96) The subcultures proceeded to mix up the separate elements of the mainstream culture, attack thus the idea of identity and opening the way to difference and othernessBehind punks favored cut ups lay hints of disorder, of breakdown and category confusedness a desire not only to erode racial and grammatical gender boundaries but also to confuse chronological sequence by merge up details from different periods. (Hebdige, 128) The important thing t o note therefrom is that in Hebdiges theory the subcultures were deviations from the anonymous culture, aiming at decentralizing some of the most rooted concepts and ideas of society, and at establishing a new different order outside the stereotypes of society. All this was done through style, ranging from music to dressing and all the other means of expression.Style works therefore as a system of signs, as a text that must be read to quail at the meaning behind it. Obviously, Hebdiges work deals with the subcultures in the moderne epoch, after the Second World War. Therefore, there have been attempts to take his study further, so as it may capture the way in which subculture is manifested in postmodernism. Although the main subcultures that Hebdige discusses- the punks, the teddy boys, the mods, the skinheads, the Rasta men and so on, lost their force or even disappeared, some subcultural groups still exist today, although their structure seems to be different from that of the m odern subcultures.The styles in the contemporary world are, to a great extent, the products of postmodernism and therefore heed its main tenants, its fragmentation and hybridization. There are no longer whole compact, coherent or well delimited subcultures like those identified by Hebdige, therefore the concepts he proposed remain mostly valid for the historical period he analyzed in his work. His approach is very enlightening for any cultural studies inquiry but it should be modified or move so as to comprise the contemporary phenomena.