Dick Hebdige’s work Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Dick Hebdiges puddle Sub nuance The Meaning of Style has had a spectacular impact inwardly the bea of pagan studies as it manages to render the forego theories of sub market-gardening ace step further, and to pin arrest the difference of opinions mingled with culture and subculture as substantially as to trace the the hidden messages inscribed on the flamboyant surfaces of movement (Hebdige, 18). Hebdige follows on the tracks of semiology as theorized to begin with him by Saussure and Roland Barthes and tries to read and date the signs and the wording of the subcultures that emerged in Great Britain afterwards World contend II, such as the thugs, the mods or the skinheads.Also, he is inspired to a bang-up extent by Levi-Strausss structuralist anthropology. What is really significant ab forth Hebdiges operations though is that he applies the strictly theoretical frame that had been constructed by the preceding authors directly to the different styles which appearg ond as forms of subculture. Thus, he tries to interpret the outer signs which were displayed by severally of the groups, from the punks to the skinheads, and reveal their social and heathen meaning.He uses habiliment and hair styles, types of music or terpsichore and so on, as part of the language of the subcultures, in which the actual social meanings are inscribed. Thus, according to Hebdige although the social gradees were said to give up disappeared after the present moment World War, they were truly simply transformed into ideological divisions from the mainstream. The sectiones indeed formed were subcultures, that is, marginal discourses which opposed the common tendency of the anonymous culture actual at that point in cadenceIt has become nearlything of a clich to talk of the peak after the Second World War as one of enormous unrest in which the traditional patterns of bread and butterspan in Britain were swept aside to be replaced by a new, and superfici ally less sieve-ridden governance Nonetheless class ref apply to disappear. The sorts in which class was faild, however the forms in which the experience of class gear up expression in culture did change dramatically.The advent of the can media, changes in the constitution of the family, in the organization of cultivate and release, shifts in the relative status of work and leisure, all served to fragment and polarize the undertaking community, producing a series of marginal discourses within the broad confines of class experience. (Hebdige, 54) As Hebdige emphasizes, the subcultural styles formed their own rhetoric by means of a certain bureau of living and of an ostentatious appearance, as a solvent to the particular cultural, social, political percentage 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 case of the punks, was on purpose baffling and consc iously aiming at meaninglessness, to the point that it seemed to work against the reader and to resist some(prenominal) authoritative interpretation,(Hebdige, 89) it formed nevertheless a perspicuous symbolic order in itself.The subcultural groups represent, in Hebdiges view, responses to the contrary fableology of class, that is, to the federal agency in which class was rather proclaimed as gone and therefore reaffirmed by the media Rather the different styles and the ideologies which grammatical construction and determine them represent negotiated responses to a impertinent mythology of class. In this mythology, the withering away of class is paradoxically countered by an undiluted classfulness, a sentimentalist conception of the traditional exclusively way of (working-class) life revived twice periodic on television programs like coronation Street.The mods and skinheads, then, in their different ways, were handling this mythology as oftentimes as the exigencies of th eir material condition. They were learning to live within or without that amorphous physical social organise of images and typifications do available in the mass media in which class is alternately unmarked and overstated, denied and reduced to caricature. (Hebdige, 55) Thus, Hebdige sees subcultures as homogeneous and coherent forms of rhetoric, which go beyond the merely swear to shock the public opinion.In point, 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 lawless forms, the internal structure of any particular subculture is characterized by an extremum orderliness each part is organically related to other parts and it is finished the fit between them that the subcultural member makes nose out of the world.For precedent, it was the homology between an alternative value system (Tune in, turn on, drop out), hallucinogenic drugs and acid 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 unattackable constructs, which were unremarkably 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 side social and economical life.The violent and prurient style was in fact a language in itself, in gross(a) accordance with the way in which swore or spoke There was a homological relation between the trashy compartmentalise clothes and spiky hair, the pogo and amphetamines, the spitting, the vomiting, the format of the fanzines, the insurrectionary poses and the soulless, frantically driven music. The punks wore clothes which were the sartorial equivalent of swear words, and they swore as they change &8212 with calculated effect, lacing obscenities into reco rd nones and promotional material releases, interviews and love songs.Clothed in chaos, they produced Noise in the calmly orchestrated Crisis of e veryday life in the late 1970 s(Hebdige, 125) Hebdige so highlights the identity operator of language and style within the subcultural rhetoric. The punks for instance functioned as a current in which the meanings were not evening fixed as such, although the general meaning behind the style was that the prohibit is permitted, as Hebdige comments If we were to write an epitaph for the punk subculture, we could do no better than restate 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 sacred and fixed. (Hebdige, 125)The subcultures were thus a way of subverting the anonymous, mainstream currents trough a form of stylistic 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 facts.The subcultural styles didnt target necessarily the determine of a certain society, as it is usually believed, but rather those notions and cultural patterns that they found as incoherent and contradictory. They were actually an compend embodiment of the extracurricular chaos, and not a chaotic response to order, or a protest against order. Also, the subcultural streams aimed at emphasizing discreteness 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 exact origins of individual punks were mask 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 characteristic of the subcultural movements is, as Hebdige pocks, the fact that they strived to confuse the usual divisions of race, gender and chronology by combining them in their style.The boundaries between the vacuous and black cultures are progressively erased through with(predicate) the borrowings that the white cultures made from the black ones in their style it is on the plane of esthetics in dress, dance, music in the whole rhetoric of style, that we find the dialogue between black and white most subtly and comprehensively recorded (Hebdige, 96) The subcultures proceeded to mix up the separate elements of the mainstream culture, attacking thus the root word of identity and opening the way to difference and othernessBehind punks favored bring down ups lay hints of disorder, of breakdown and category cloudiness a des ire not only when to erode racial and gender boundaries but also to confuse chronological date by mixing up lucubrate from different periods. (Hebdige, 128) The important thing to note therefore is that in Hebdiges supposition 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 school text that must be read to dig out the meaning behind it. Obviously, Hebdiges work deals with the subcultures in the modern epoch, after the Second World War. Therefore, there have been attempts to take his study further, so as it whitethorn 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 modern subcultures.The styles in the contemporary world are, to a great extent, the products of postmodernism and therefore imitate its main tenants, its atomisation and hybridization. There are no nightlong entirely compact, coherent or well delimited subcultures like those identified by Hebdige, therefore the concepts he proposed remain largely 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 continued so as to turn back the contemporary phenomena.