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“Critically assess the project of Hebdige in Subculture (1979)”

The world of subculture was more visible in Britain than anywhere else in 1970s. It is in this context that Dick Hebdige wrote Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979. This book, associated with Cultural Studies, builds on earlier work carried out by the Birmingham School on youth subculture and has been widely read. The term “subculture” had been in use for decades before Hebdige propelled it into the limelight. His work mainly focused on marginal groups. Yesterday the punks, today hip hop and tecktonik: so many examples of urban culture, sometimes wild and often anti-authority with their artistic forms of expression, their dress codes and their history. Rather than ignoring them or worse stigmatizing them, it is necessary to try to understand them. This short and concise text is really a pioneering plan: a way to read personal fashion. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige reads style as a form of subversion through four defining concepts: intentional communication, bricolage, homology and signifying practice. For purpose of clarify, this assignment will give an overview of Hebdige’s work in Subculture looking at different examples of former and new subcultures through some of his concepts.

In order to understand the work of Hebdige in Subculture it is important to know the reason for such a project. Hebdige’s work was a solution to comprehending and describing the multiple subcultures in Britain in the 1970s. In postwar Britain several researches were carried out into ethnic groups and the question of race in Cultural Studies but also others which were based on youth subcultures. The first definition of the concept of subculture is 'To refer to a subdivision of a national culture, composed of a combination of a factorable social situations such as class status, ethnics background, regional and rural or urban residence, and religious affiliation, but forming in their combination a functioning unity which has an integrated impact on the participating individual’ (Gordon,1947, p.46).

This definition emphasizes the fact that a subculture is a part of the common culture which is bigger. Thus a subculture is a subordinate and beneath the dominant culture but it is still inside a society. On the other hand, a subculture is a group of people from the same social background who want to challenge the hegemony of the civil society where they do not think they belong. Sarah Thornton argues that a subculture is more likely to be a collective that has the same interests, values, attitudes and lifestyles in common. They are different and want to be different from the mass. That is to say that they are considered socially deviant because they are in a way non-conformist (Thornton, 1996, pp.1-4). Hebdige uses this definition in order to analyze a number of English subcultures. He does not define a subculture only by the relationship between the youth culture and the parent culture or by the link with social class. He mentions in Subculture that to respond to the discrimination in Britain, Black youth began protesting in their own way by creating a new subculture Rastafarism in the 1970s.In the same way the Punk movement appeared as an answer to the presence of this community, which was more represented and separatist than it used to be. �We can watch, played out on the loaded surfaces of British working-class youth cultures, a phantom history of race relations since the war’ (Hebdige,1979, p.43). In other words, Punk’s subculture was created not against the mainstream society or the parent culture but against another subculture. They defined themselves as others counter to others, the black community. Similarly to Punks, several social groups labeled as subcultures, such as hipsters, teddy boys and mods emerged for the same reasons.

This way of reading subculture can be applied to decipher other social groups in contemporary society. For instance, in France the ghetto subculture appeared because of a problem of racism from the majority in a postcolonial context. Unlike Britain subculture is a new phenomenon in France. French subcultures became much more visible after the troubles during the winter of 2005. That was the first time in this country that many cars, shops, schools and police stations were burnt as a sign of protestation. People from the ghetto (usually Blacks and Arabics) were on the streets and well organized to destroy the symbols of the society’s structure (Rotella, 2005, A1). A state of emergency was declared on November 8, 2005. At this stage, �the concept of subculture is mostly applied to deviant or youth cultures that posses a culture opposed to the dominant culture’ (Jary,2005,p.118).Obviously, the acts of violence committed three years ago in France by that group constitute another element which intensifies this subculture as socially and morally deviant. Thus, discrimination might be a condition for the formation of subcultures in the postmodern world.

вЂ?The succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep-structural adaptations which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community’ (Hebdige, 1979, p.44). Hebdige argues that the relationship between a postcolonial country and its immigrants creates tensions which become visible through subcultures. It was the case for Britain in the 1970s and it is still the case in France where a counter example can also be given. Race is no longer the key to describe a subculture such as Tecktonik. Apparently, this subculture borrows in terms of dance and style from other subcultures such as hip-hop, techno, electro house even cyberpunk. This is a proper subculture with its own codes, rules, values and style. Moreover, this subculture is not based on racism because all of its members are from everywhere without any dominant religion, color of skin or social status. In addition, Moore argues that punk as a subculture was a response to “the condition of postmodernity” provoked by the commodification of everyday life. In short, race cannot be the only factor for the emergence of punk as a group (Moore, 2004, pp.305-327)

Secondly, Hebdige declares that

subcultures represent “noise” (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media. We should therefore not underestimate the signifying power of the spectacular subculture not only as a metaphor for potential anarchy вЂ?out there’ but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a