Hebdige’s article on subculture and style is a brilliant – near inarguable – articulation of our world and the processes that establish its position. I couldn’t help being reminded of the film, The Matrix, in that Hebdige pulls back the curtain on the secrets of how dominant forces construct and maintain our culture and how the deviance the challenges orthodoxy is inevitably managed and domesticated by the reigning system. It all makes so much sense that it reads more as description than theory.
Before getting to a discussion of subculture, Hebdige rightly feels the need to define popular culture and the ideology that underpins everything from discourse to the objects described by Genet. He writes,
“All human societies reproduce themselves in this way through a process of ‘naturalization’. It is through this process – a kind of inevitable reflex of all social life – that particular sets of social relations, particular ways of organizing the world appear to us as if they were universal and timeless.” P.14
Of course, this is not a conspiracy of a secret cabal of industrialists or politicians; it is a self-driven process that churns away at the service of a particular way of life. Genet describes it as an edifice aligned against him. And, of course, any orderly system of traditionalism would likely find itself aligned against a radical like Genet. An intelligent man in Genet’s position could not help but see the edifice and attempt to decipher. It is a revelation at the very least, regardless of your position in or outside the system, that a time-tested structure is in place to keep things in their place.
I loved the discussion of taboos and how activities – such as the Punk movement – that are outside the norm “represent symbolic challenges to the symbolic order.” Hebdige goes on to analyze at length the processes that the dominant culture uses to either eliminate or colonize “subculture” practices that gain strength.
It seems that a subculture’s successful differentiation from the dominant culture is the necessary precondition for its destruction. After all, when the traditional fashion world starts using the safety pins and razor blades of punk then those stylistic messengers will no longer maintain their distinctiveness and power. As Hebdige writes, “The cycle leading from opposition to defusion, from resistance to incorporation encloses each successive subculture.”
There’s way too much to talk about here in one blog entry, but the discussion on page 105 of the “juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities,” caught my eye for its relevance to my American Runescapes series. I use collage to juxtapose old photographic and advertising images with modern publication text to create something that challenges traditional order and placement in order to reveal something both fresh and universal.
I want to explore Max Ernst further for his insight into the ‘explosive junction’ that results from the reorganization of meaning that is collage. To my mind, they are touching on the curious truth that the combination of seemingly disconnected imagery can result in the revelatory glimpse of the perpetual or universal. The image, especially the photograph -- removed and re-contextualized from its original positioning – can create an explosive junction of meaning and emotion.
Relative to our class, Hebdige’s exploration of subculture provides a way in to explore the imagery of childhood from a more thoughtful and grounded place. Where do our images fall in this dialogue between and around culture and subculture? What do the images of children mean and what are they trying to accomplish? From my explorations of images in advertising, it is obvious that there are common threads that are attempting to show what it is to be a boy and to be a girl. *
The current identification of young people with the video-computer technology does not make them different from the straight world, it denies their ‘youthfulness’; they are better more adult – than adults. They too are implicated in a complex and contradictory historical process by which the existence of youth is being reshaped and relocated in social, cultural and material space.
Lawrence Grossberg
Grossberg’s article, The Deconstruction of Youth, though somewhat dated also reveals some rich veins for cultural mining. I think his analysis of music, movies, video games and popular culture is most relevant for consideration of modern adolescence rather than childhood. That is certainly his intent, and he effectively bridges the distance between the hierarchical teens of the pre-James Dean and Bob Dylan 1950’s to the more loose variety of 21st century teenage lifestyles. This dissolution of order is truer today than it was when Grossberg wrote his article on deconstruction.
I am reminded of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, which tapped into an unfocused but very real adolescent angst of the time. Dean’s character felt crushed by his parent’s oddity and expectations. He couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand him and that mattered deeply to him. It seems to me that the world today is much more of an atomized take it or leave it attitude for teenagers. Speaking from experience, if adults don’t get them or they don’t get adults then… so what.
The existence of youth is, indeed, being reshaped and relocated in social, cultural and material place. It is not as simple as kids getting more like adults, as Grossberg understands. It is that the era of exploration of self-definition that constitutes this period between childhood and adulthood is in flux and unsettled. There is no longer one way to be, one path to take, single role models to follow. The atomization of American popular music is a symptom of that reality. We have infinite choices, and no clear path to the cool or the right.
There is potential conflict here with Hebdige’s analysis of a self-sustaining popular culture machine. But we do still have an educational and vocational structure that pushes the atomized youth of today in the direction of the more traditional adult establishment track. The movie Social Network might be a good contemporary account of the deconstructive struggle so presciently described by Grossberg. Adolescents have indeed created their own world, and they by no means consider it inferior to the more static world of older generations. Neither good nor bad, this modern world of adolescence is undoubtedly new.
Our spaces are changing.
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