Tthe Style of the Subgroups - Case Study Example

Hebdige’s Work on Sub-cultural Groups Subculture is a group of people with a culture that has something in common and that differentiates them from a larger culture to which they belong. Dick Hebdige was a renowned theorist, most commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and its resistance against the mainstream society. According to Brake (1980), Hebdige’s work is basically a study of the working class youth in the 1970s England juxtaposed to their parent’s generation as well as immigrants from former or soon-to-be independent colonies, in particular Jamaicans. Hebdige research on subculture was based on the relationship of the black and white youth after the period of Second World War. His approach considered youth subculture as “authentic bastions of counter hegemony and resistance to the social injustices of the working class world.” Hebdige’s work focused on marginal groups such as Punks, Teds, Rastafarains, Mods, Hippies, bowie-ites all focusing on style as form of subversion. According to him, the style of such subgroups was a statement of ‘refusal’ to resistance and opposition to the dominant order (art and culture).He condemned the inequality and class system that existed in the British society and held it responsible for the birth of Punks, who were a separatists form of the Black Youth exhibiting outstanding styles linked with dresses, hairstyle, music and drugs. Hebdige defines subculture as hybridized styles that are a resultant of the available material culture in an effort to construct identities in order to gain autonomy within a social order that is dominated by class, work and generation. He suggested ‘Style’ was an unspoken language of identity and taught the generation to read personal fashion. As per Hebdige, the entire battle over cultural meaning and subculture formation is can be credited to the people’s bodies and appearance. McRobbie and Gerber (1993) provided a deep rooted analysis of the sub-cultural styles based on the gender differentiation and suggested that girls, though not dominant parts of the sub-cultures, did existed as a pivotal element of the subordinate groups. Looks are the various manifestations of the images that people of minor groups project to state their disapproval to the dominant culture. Hebdige theory suggests that the subculture is born when a minority group appropriates their style using objects or signs of the mainstream and depicting it in a distinct manner as symbols of deviation. Such deviation can take the form of danger, deliberate outrageousness and wastefulness creating a new distorted form of the main culture. Most of Hebdige early work was aimed at the sizeable black community of Negros living in proximity to the white working class in Britain. This openly resisted and repressed community continued to exercise a major determining influence in formation of sub-cultural styles which were apparently distinct from the mainstream. Hebdige’s work was a result of the need to understand the growing number of visible subcultures in Britain. The recession in the British economy during the 1960s further contributed to the class and race based conflicts fuelled by the rising unemployment. Hebdige discovered that specific historical and cultural conjunctures were giving birth to new styles. Pitre examines Hebdige’s ideas and arguments using the academic, vocational and the ideological currents that constitute cultural studies. Cultural studies also known as Birmingham School, can be dated back to the Industrial revolution and drew it’s early from Chicago and Frankfurt schools of Sociology. The Chicago school was based on urban social behavior, deviance and subcultures. The Frankfurt school was against positive scientific approaches and offered refuge to the Marxist thoughts, Psychoanalysis and Social research. The post war England laws allowed the citizens of the former colonies to immigrate to Britain as they served as cheap labor for the growing industrial needs of the country. This rush of a culturally distinct class of citizens created ripples in the urban English society. The existing English working class was going through a mixed emotion of notional supremacy combined with a hidden fascination for the migrants. The importance of Hebdige’s study is highlighted by the way it expressed the vulnerability of the ‘west’ to the ideological currents. As quoted by Pitre, When Black Jamaicans displayed their distinctive music, clothing, gestures, etc on the street and thereby took possession of a social space, white working-class youth were implicitly challenged to forge an equally "dense" style of their own. The mediations of this style were complex, because it embodied a fourfold signification: similarities and differences between white youth and blacks, similarities and differences between youth and their parents (Delaney, 182). Most of Hebdige early work was aimed at the sizeable black community of Negros living in proximity to the white working class in Britain. This openly resisted and repressed community continued to exercise a major determining influence in formation of sub-cultural styles which were apparently distinct from the mainstream. Hebdige explained the development of youth cultures as polarization process that was a result of the gradual changes occurring media, family constitution, work status organization of schools. This era was marked with a relative increase in spending power merged with changing education system and triggered the generation conscious youth, some of whom chose to express it in adversative ways. Hebdige According to Hebdige, the Birmingham school was ambivalent about sub-cultural resistance. Gelder points out the Hebdige explained the symbolic potency of distinct style as a gesture of defiance, refusal and contempt and as a power to disfigure. Muncie points out that Hebdige provided the most elaborate analysis of sub-cultural styles as symbolic violations of the social order, expressed in a coded form as resistance (2005). Hebdige used ‘style’ as the main variable to measure the magnitude of resistence and linked them to leisure. He stated that “it is young people’s use of leisure and style which offers possibilities of sub-cultural resistance “According to the Birmingham school, the thesis of the sub-cultural style is evidence of the so called resistance. This resistance was developed to give a separate identity to the sub-cultural groups. This identity was meant to showcase their response to the economic inequality prevalent in the society. The resistance manifested itself into various forms such as Punks, Mods, Rude Boys, Rastafarians, and Skinheads etc. These sub-cultural groups were routinely demonized in the society and thus they became symbols of youthful rebellion. With passage of time, adoption of such sub-cultural style became a way of youthful assertion by the young people. Since the larger section of the youth adopted such styles for merely making a statement and taking it up as a fashionable style, the sub-cultural styles found acceptance in the society. According to Thomas (2003), Hebdige definition of sub-cultural styles is a show of dispute with the mainstream. He stated that it is of the sub-cultural styles rather than being a kind of response to the mainstream culture. The sub-cultures often tend to take their styles to a forbidden level so that their effect is more pronounced. It has been a largely accepted fact that the youth brigade members who subscribes to such sub-culture are not those who also indulge in any kind of forbidden behavior. The resistance and forbidden styles is primarily a superficial thing and meant for showing off resentment. Hebdige used the concept of ‘Bricolage’ to describe the act of wearing something that was made with whatever materials happened to be available. Deriving and wearing meaning loaded objects and signs from the parent cultural system in ways that breach the consumerism norms. Such an opposition in the society was expressed through a category of style, which gained attention of the marketers and advertisers who restyled the ‘bricolaged look’ to gain from yet another commodity style. The innocence of the everyday items appearances is stolen and transformed to expose the invisible contradictions hidden under the ideology of its appearance. The marginal subcultures that were not accepted into the mainstream used Bricolage as a mode of expression vital to their existence and resistance. Hebdige discovered that bricolage exercised by the sub-cultural groups was not random thing, rather the styles came together to create a meaningful sub-cultural entity. He analyzed the internal structure of the sub-cultural styles to be characterized with certain orderliness and claimed that the different elements of style cohered into a meaningful whole. Contrary to the popular depictions of the sub-cultures as lawless, he borrowed the term homology to explain the generic anarchy. Hebdige used the terms ‘bricolage’ and ‘homology’ to explore how the sub-cultures could alter the normal expectations within a framework of meanings and use style as a signifier of unified practice (Muncie, 2004). Bricolage has often been used by the youth to communicate their disaffiliation to the opposition. According to Hebdige, bricolage includes stealing symbols that are representative of the parent culture and then interpreted to re-signify their meaning. Hebdige’s studies show that the sub-cultural groups such as the Punks converted common household artifacts such as the safety pins, toilet chains, plastic bags, unused badges and transformed them into elements of personal dress to register their opposition to traditional, mainstream culture. On an anecdotal level, there is ample evidence to suggest that Bricolage converted the meaning of certain specific consumer goods and altered them to represent confrontational usage and messages. At times, the styles adopted by sub-cultural groups were done to make a statement against the notions of modernity and style of the mainstream culture. The sub-cultural styles were not limited to clothing only. It was also evident in the way some of these sub-culture practitioners led their social life. An example was the way Punks danced, turning aesthetic movement of body parts into blank robotics. Pitre summarizes that Hebdige considered style to be ‘the most semiotically impregnated domain of subcultures and the arena for negotiation of identity and power relations’. He provides a summary of the Hebdige theory by scrutinizing one of his books that covers a chronological series of varied styles, followed by an examination of the different facets of style as resistance, confrontation and media commodification. Hebdige’s beliefs reflect that communal engagements are largely determined by age and class. The terms like ‘Conjuncture’ and ‘Specificity’ were used to analyze the subcultures. However the later work of Hebdige in 1980s reflected a new approach that accounted for commercial culture as a big factor in producing counter-hegemonic styles. The commercial culture was identified as a powerful factor that had captured youth markets and the working class transgression by a unique strategy which served as an instrument of hegemony as well as pleasure. Evaluating the causes of the subcultures and associated styles, Hebdige insisted that these subcultures be read as more than mere magical resolutions to social tensions. Each of these styles was formed by unique fusion of many other factors like fan-ship and niche marketing. It was believed that the oppositional styles could be defused by transforming them into fashionable commodities, thus making them safer objects. It is imperative to provide a critical analysis of the contemporary sub-cultures to evaluate if the Hebdige’s theory is still valid. Over the years, the existing sub-cultures in the American society have been continuously transforming with ever erupting newer groups of people using different styles and appearances differently to convey their own intentions to the society. However, the circumstances that laid the foundation for the sub-cultural groups and the different attributes attached have merged with the passing years; the faded influence of the influential styles can still be felt in the society. The sub-cultures have been associated with specific type of clothing and music being used by the straightedge youth sub-cultures for self identification. According to Williams (2006), the changing face of the sub-cultural societies can now be blamed on the advancements in the information and communication technologies like the Internet. He identifies a new type of sub-culture emerging, the one whose participation is limited to the internet. Analyzing modern day sub-cultural groups describes them as the kind of facile ‘flat-earth’ postmodernism’ that causes larger tendency within cultural studies to read sub-cultural practices as models as traditional forms of political organization. He explains how Hebdige’s theory has been successfully been used by the companies and marketers for brand commercialization to their own benefits. Hebdige’s views on the sub-cultural styles interpreted the styles as mere appropriation where the line between the ad and the article is blurred. Hebdige’s comparison of the sub-cultural terrain with the three dimensional avant-garde world with emergent dominance of the flat depthless post modern world brings out the stark comparison. The popular culture and mass media still serve Hebdige’s theory by promoting the self-praising, self-congratulatory Riot Grrrl revolution, which deploys the parade of youth cultures as fashion. The riot Grrrl model suggests a variation in the Hebdige’s model of ideological incorporation that ignored the media’s role of being the perpetuator and merely explained it as playing the role of controlling and containing this phenomenon. Even in conclusion of Hiding in the light, Hebdige grudgingly accepted that post-modernism was here to stay and that the society needed to stop complaining and equip ways to getting used to it. However, there is a marked difference in characteristic that can be associated with the sub-cultural groups that existed in the post second world war Britain and between the sub-cultural groups that exist in today’s society. Unlike the fixed sub-cultural groups, the fluidity that revolves around the modern lifestyles is a characteristic of the modern youth groups that are built around music and stylistic preferences. This fluidity lends a casual appeal to the modern day sub-cultural societies that constructed identity unlike the fixed sub-cultural groups that were got their identity by the parent culture’s thoughts. The contemporary society offers the choice of roles to the individuals, defining the modern day man as social self-creator. The boundaries of class, fixed sub-cultures have been discolored by the promotion of personal affiliation and choice. The changing faces of the sub-cultural groups in the society ever since the forties till date are worth observance in order to be able to understand the topic. The concept of ‘subculture’ that began as a term to explain the heterogeneous American society and then turned to being used for the deviant underprivileged youth groups dominated by class in the society, has been seeing a major shift in character. The nineties conceived the re-conceptualization of the sub-culture being defined as affinity based voluntary groups that are neither class nor space specific, but constitute some individuals sharing some common interests. The sub-cultural groups lend a sense of belongingness to certain individuals, enabling them to pursue their interests with others in the same sphere. These interests are usually typical ones that arte not widely popular with the broader society. The causes of the sub-cultural groups in modern day groups are not deep rooted in the sphere of leisure or resistance, and therefore function as legitimate alternatives of identity. This explains that the rules that define the sub-culture in today’s world are far more relaxed and flexible as compared to the ones in Hebdige’s era. Also, since the values of the sub-culture are not necessarily subordinated to the dominant culture, they have lost ‘resistance’ as the factor or the driving force. The formation of sub-cultures and their associated styles have developed the evangelical Christians against the American mainstream society. They have been taking possession of a cultural form, redefining it and using it to influence the dominant secular society, but in a milder way. Hebdige’s views can still be found valid in the contemporary society; however their presence is much more subtle and appears with mutated authentic elements that exist within blurred boundaries that used to segregate the sub-cultural groups from the mainstream. Works Cited Brake, Mike. The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures: Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll. Routledge, 1980. Gelder, Ken. The Subcultures Reader. Routlege, 2005. January 16, 2009. . Hall, Stuart and Tony. Jefferson. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain. Routledge, 1993. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture:The Meaning of Style. Routledge, 2002. Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. Routledge, 1988. The Function of Subculture. The Cutural Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1999. Thomas, Douglas. Hacker Culture. U of Minnesota Press, 2003. January 16, 2009. . McRobbie, Angela and Jenny Garber. Girls and Subcultures. Resistance Through Rituals. Routledge, 1993. January 16, 2009. < http://books.google.co.in/books?id=Okw4OoEV670C&pg=PA209&dq=Girls+and+Subcultures+by+McRobbie#PPA209,M1 > Pitre, Shawn. Cultural Studies and Hebdige’s Sub-culture: The meaning of Style. 2003. . Williams, J.Patrick. Authentic Identities: Straightedge sub-culture, music and the internet. Sage Journals Online. Journal of contemporary Ethnography, University of Georgia. Georgia, Athens: 2006. . Read More