13 (i) From Culture to Hegemony; (ii) Subculture: The Unnatural Break Dick Hebdige (i) From Culture to Hegemony Culture Culture: cultivation, tending, in Christian audiors, worship; the action or practice of cultivating the soil; tillage, husbandry; the cultivation or rearing of certain animals (e.g. fish); the artificial development of microscopic organisms, organisms so produced; die cultivating or development (of the mind, faculties, manners), improvement or refinement by education and training; die condition of being trained or refined; die intellectual side of civilization; the prosecution or special attention or study of any subject or pursuit. (Oxford English Dictionary) Culture is a notoriously ambiguous concept as the above definition demonstrates. Refracted through centuries of usage, the word has acquired a number of quite different, often contradictory, meanings. Even as a scientific term, it refers both to a process (artificial development of microscopic organisms) and a product (organisms so produced). More specifically, since the end of the eighteenth century, it has been used by English intellectuals and literary figures to focus critical attention on a whole range of controversial issues. The 'quality of life', the effects in human terms o mechanization, the division of labour and the creation of a mass society have all been discussed within the larger confines of what Raymond Williams has called the 'Culture and Society' debate (Williams, 1961). It was through this tradition ol * From Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Roudedge, 1979) pp. 5-19. From Culture to Hegemony 199 l dissent and criticism that the dream of the 'organic society' - of society as an integrated, meaningful whole - was largely kept alive. The dream had two ; basic trajectories. One led back to the past and to the feudal ideal of a hierarchically f ordered community. Here, culture assumed an almost sacred function. Its 'harmo-, nious perfection' (Arnold, 1868) was posited against die Wasteland of contemporary í life. The other trajectory, less heavily supported, led towards the future, to a socialist Utopia where the distinction between labour and leisure was to be annulled. Two r basic definitions of culture emerged from this tradition, though these were by '.' no means necessarily congruent with the two trajectories outlined above. The first -the one which is probably most familiar to the reader - was essentially classical and conservative. It represented culture as a standard of aesthetic excellence: 'the best that has been thought and said in the world' (Arnold, 1868), and it derived from an appreciation of 'classic' aesthetic form (opera, ballet, drama, literature, art). The second, traced back by Williams to Herder and the eighteenth century (Williams, 1976), was rooted in anthropology. Here the term 'culture' referred to a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning, but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour. The analysis of culture, from such a definition, is die clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture. (Williams, 1965) This definition obviously had a much broader range. It encompassed, in T. S. Eliot's words, all the characteristic activities and interests of a people. Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart-board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th Century Gothic churches, the music of Elgar.... (Eliot, 1948) As Williams noted, such a definition could only be supported if a new theoretical initiative was talcen. The dieory of culture now involved the 'study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life' (Williams, 1965). The emphasis shifted from immutable to historical criteria, from fixity to transformation: an emphasis [which] from studying particular meanings and values seeks not so much to compare these, as a way of establishing a scale, but by studying their modes of change to discover certain general causes or 'trends' by which social and cultural developments as a whole can be better understood. (Williams, 1965) Williams was, then, proposing an altogether broader formulation of the relationships between culture and society, one which through the analysis of 'particular meanings and values' sought to uncover the concealed fundamentals of history; the 'general causes' and broad social 'trends' which he behind the manifest appearances of an 'everyday life'. 200 Dick Hebdige In the early years, when it was being established in the universities, Cultural Studies sat rather uncomfortably on the fence between these two conflicting definitions -culture as a standard of excellence, culture as a 'whole way of life' - unable to determine which represented the most fruitful line of enquiry. Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams portrayed working-class culture sympathetically in wistful accounts of pre-scholarship boyhoods - Leeds for Hoggart (1958), a Welsh mining village for Williams (1960) - but their work displayed a strong bias towards literature and literacy1 and an equally strong moral tone. Hoggart deplored the way in which the traditional working-class community - a community of tried and tested values despite the dour landscape in which it had been set - was being undermined and replaced by a 'Candy Floss World' of thrills and cheap fiction which was somehow bland and sleazy. Williams tentatively endorsed the new mass communications but was concerned to establish aesthetic and moral criteria for distinguisliing the worthwhile products from the 'trash'; the jazz - 'a real musical form' - and the football - 'a wonderful game' - from the 'rape novel, die Sunday strip paper and the latest Tin Pan drool' (Williams, 1965). In 1966 Hoggart laid down the basic premises upon which Cultural Studies were based: First, widiout appreciating good literature, no one will really understand die nature of society, second, literary critical analysis can be applied to certain social phenomena other dian 'academically respectable' literature (for example, the popular arts, mass communications) so as to illuminate their meanings for individuals and their societies. (Hoggart, 1966) The implicit assumption that it still required a literary sensibility to 'read' society with the requisite subtiety, and that the two ideas of culture could be ultimately reconciled was also, paradoxically, to inform the early work of the French writer, Roland Barthes, though here it found validation in a method - semiotics - a way of reading signs (Hawkes, 1977). Barthes: Myths and Signs Using models derived from the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure2 Bardies sought to expose the arbitrary nature of cultural phenomena, to uncover the latent meanings of an everyday life which, to all intents and purposes, was 'perfectiy natural'. Unlilce Hoggart, Bartlies was not concerned with distinguishing the good from the bad in modern mass culture, but rather with showing how all the apparentiy spontaneous forms and rituals of contemporary bourgeois societies are subject to a systematic distortion, liable at any moment to be dehistoricized, 'naturalized', converted hi to myth: The whole of France is steeped in this anonymous ideology: our press, our films, our theatre, our pulp literature, our rituals, our Justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a touching wedding, die cooking we From Culture to Hegemony 201 dream of, die garments we wear, everything in everyday life is dependent on die representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of die relations between men and the world. (Bardies, 1972) Like Eliot, Barthes' notion of culture extends beyond the library, the opera-house and the theatre to encompass the whole of everyday life. But this everyday life is for Barthes overlaid with a significance which is at once more insidious and more systematically organized. Starting from the premise that 'myth is a type of speech', Barthes set out in Mythologies to examine the normally hidden set of rules, codes and conventions through which meanings particular to specific social groups (i.e. those in power) are rendered universal and 'given' for the whole of society. He found in phenomena as disparate as a wrestling match, a writer on holiday, a tourist-guide book, the same artificial nature, the same ideological core. Each had been exposed to the same prevailing rhetoric (the rhetoric of common sense) and turned into myth, into a mere element in a 'second-order semiological system' (Barthes, 1972). (Barthes uses the example of a photograph in Paris-Match of a Negro soldier saluting the French flag, which has a first and second order connotation: (1) a gesture of loyalty, but also (2) 'France is a great empire, and all her sons, without colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag'.) Barthes' application of a method rooted in linguistics to other systems of discourse outside language (fashion, film, food, etc.) opened up completely new possibilities for contemporary cultural studies. It was hoped that the invisible seam between language, experience and reality could be located and prised open through a semiotic analysis of this kind: that the gulf between the alienated intellectual and the 'real' world could be rendered meaningful and, miraculously, at the same time, be made to disappear. Moreover, under Barthes' direction, semiotics promised nothing less than the reconciliation of the two conflicting definitions of culture upon which Cultural Studies was so ambiguously posited - a marriage of moral conviction (in this case, Barthes' Marxist beliefs) and popular themes: the study of a society's total way of life. This is not to say that semiotics was easily assimilable within the Cultural Studies project. Though Barthes shared the literary preoccupations of Hoggart and Williams, his work introduced a new Marxist 'problematic'3 which was alien to the British tradition of concerned and largely untheorized 'social commentary'. As a result, the old debate seemed suddenly limited. In E. P. Thompson's words it appeared to reflect the parochial concerns of a group of 'gentlemen amateurs'. Thompson sought to replace Williams' definition of the theory of culture as 'a theory of relations between elements in a whole way of life' with his own more rigorously Marxist formulation: 'the study of relationships in a whole way of conflict \ A more analytical framework was required; a new vocabulary had to be learned. As part of this process of theoriza-tion, the word 'ideology' came to acquire a much wider range of meanings than had previously been the case. We have seen how Barthes found an 'anonymous ideology' penetrating every possible level of social life, inscribed in the most mundane of rituals, framing the most casual social encounters. But how can ideology be 'anonymous', and how can it assume such a broad significance? Before we attempt any reading of subcultural style, we must first define the term 'ideology' more precisely. 202 Dick Hebdige Ideology: A Lived Relation In The German Ideology, Marx shows how the basis of the capitalist economic structure (surplus value, neady defined by Godelier as 'Profit... is unpaid work' (Godelier, 1970)) is hidden from the consciousness of the agents of production. The failure to see through appearances to the real relations which underlie them does not occur as the direct result of some kind of masking operation consciously carried out by individuals, social groups or institutions. On the contrary, ideolog)' by definition thrives beneath consciousness. It is here, at the level of'normal common sense1, that ideological frames of reference are most firmly sedimented and most effective, because it is here that their ideological nature is most effectively concealed. As Stuart Hall puts it: It is precisely its 'spontaneous' quality, its transparency, its 'naturalness', its refusal to be made to examine tlie premises on which it is founded, its resistance to change or to correction, its effect of instant recognition, and the closed circle in which it moves which makes common sense, at one and the same time, 'spontaneous', ideological and unconscious. You cannot learn, through common sense, how things are: you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things. In this way, its very taken-for-granted-ness is what establishes it as a medium in which its own premises and presuppositions arc being rendered invisible by its apparent transparency. (Hall, 1977) Since ideology saturates everyday discourse in tlie form of common sense, it cannot be bracketed off from everyday life as a self-contained set of 'political opinions' or 'biased views'. Neither can it be reduced to the abstract dimensions of a 'world view' or used in the crude Marxist sense to designate 'false consciousness'. Instead, as Louis Althusser has pointed out: ...ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness'.... It is profoundly unconscious. ... Ideology is indeed a system of representation, but in the majority of cases these representations have notiiing to do with 'consciousness': diey are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures that they impose on tlie vast majority of men, not via their 'consciousness'. They are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them. (Aldiusser, 1969) Although Althusser is here referring to structures like tlie family, cultural and political institutions, etc., we can illustrate the point quite simply by talcing as our example a physical structure. Most modern institutes of education, despite the apparent neutrality of the materials from which they are constructed (red brick, white tile, etc.) carry within themselves implicit ideological assumptions which are literally structured into the architecture itself. The categorization of Icnowledge into arts and sciences is reproduced in the faculty system which houses different disciplines in different buildings, and most colleges maintain the traditional divisions by devoting a separate From Culture to Hegemony 203 floor to each subject. Moreover, the hierarchical relationship between teacher and taught is inscribed in the very lay-out of the lecture theatre where the seating arrangements - benches rising in tiers before a raised lectern - dictate the flow of information and serve to 'naturalize' professorial authority. Thus, a whole range of decisions about what is and what is not possible within education have been made, however unconsciously, before the content of individual courses is even decided. These decisions help to set the limits not only on what is taught but on how it is taught. Here the buildings literally reproduce in concrete terms prevailing (ideological) notions about what education is and it is through this process that the educational structure, which can, of course, be altered, is placed beyond question and appears to us as a 'given' (i.e. as immutable). In this case, the frames of our tliinking have been translated into actual bricks and mortar. Social relations and processes are then appropriated by individuals only through the forms in which they are represented to those individuals. These forms are, as we have seen, by no means transparent. They are shrouded in a 'common sense' which simultaneously validates and mystifies them. It is precisely these 'perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects' which semiotics sets out to 'interrogate' and decipher. All aspects of culture possess a semiotic value, and the most taken-for-granted phenomena can function as signs: as elements in communication systems governed by semantic rules and codes which are not themselves directiy apprehended in experience. These signs are, then, as opaque as the social relations which produce them and which they re-present. In other words, there is an ideological dimension to every signification: A sign does not simply exist as part of reality - it reflects and refracts another reality. Therefore it may distort that reality or be true to it, or may perceive it from a special point of view, and so forth. Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation .... The domain of ideology coincides with die domain of signs. They equate widi one anotiier. Whenever a sign is present, ideology is present too. Everything ideological possesses a semiotic value. (Vblosinov, 1973) To uncover the ideological dimension of signs we must first try to disentangle die codes through which meaning is organized. 'Connotative' codes are particularly important. As Stuart Hall has argued, they '... cover die face of social life and render it classifiable, intelligible, meaningful' (Hall, 1977). He goes on to describe these codes as 'maps of meaning' which are of necessity the product of selection. They cut across a range of potential meanings, making certain meanings available and ruling others out of court. We tend to live inside tliese maps as surely as we live in the 'real' world: they 'think' us as much as we 'think' them, and this in itself is quite 'natural'. 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. This is what Altliusser (1971a) means when he says that 'ideology has no history' and that ideology in this general sense will always be an 'essential element of every social formation' (Althusser and Balibar, 1968). 204 Dick Hebdige However, in highly complex societies like ours, which function through a finely graded system of divided (i.e. specialized) labour, the crucial question has to do with which specific ideologies, representing the interests of which specific groups and classes will prevail at any given moment, in any given situation. To deal with this question, we must first consider how power is distributed in our society. That is, we must ask which groups and classes have how much say in defining, ordering and classifying out the social world. For instance, if we pause to reflect for a moment, it should be obvious that access to die means by which ideas are disseminated in our society (i.e. principally the mass media) is not the same for all classes. Some groups have more say, more opportunity to make the rules, to organize meaning, while others are less favourably placed, have less power to produce and impose their definitions of the world on the world. Thus, when we come to look beneath the level of 'ideology-in-general' at die way in which specific ideologies work, how some gain dominance and others remain marginal, we can see that in advanced Western democracies the ideological field is by no means neutral. To return to the 'connotative' codes to which Stuart Hall refers we can see that these 'maps of meaning' are charged widi a potentially explosive significance because they are traced and re-traced along the lines laid down by the dominant discourses about reality, the dominant ideologies. They thus tend to represent, in however obscure and contradictory a fashion, the interests of the dominant groups in society. To understand this point we should refer to Marx: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class wliich is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class wliich has die means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of die relationships which make the one class die ruling class, dierefore the ideas of its dominance. (Marx and Engels, 1970) This is the basis of Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony which provides the most adequate account of how dominance is sustained in advanced capitalist societies. Hegemony: The Moving Equilibrium Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring classes. (Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre) The term hegemony refers to a situation in which a provisional alliance of certain social groups can exert 'total social authority' over otiier subordinate groups, not simply by coercion or by the direct imposition of ruling ideas, but by 'winning and From Culture to Hegemony 205 shaping consent so that the power of the dominant classes appears both legitimate and natural' (Hall, 1977). Hegemony can only be maintained so long as die dominant classes 'succeed in framing all competing definitions within their range' (Hall, 1977), so that subordinate groups are, if not controlled; then at least contained witiiin an ideological space which does not seem at all 'ideological': which appears instead to be permanent and 'natural', to lie outside history, to be beyond particular interests (see Social Trends^ no. 6, 1975). This is how, according to Barthes, 'mythology' performs its vital function of naturalization and normalization and it is in his book Mythologies tiiat Barthes demonstrates most forcefully the full extension of these normalized forms and meanings. However, Gramsci adds the important proviso that hegemonic power, precisely because it requires the consent of the dominated majority, can never be permanendy exercised by the same alliance of 'class fractions'. As has been pointed out, 'Hegemony. .. is not universal and 'given' to the continuing rule of a particular class. It has to be won, reproduced, sustained. Hegemony is, as Gramsci said, a 'moving equilibrium' containing relations of forces favourable or unfavourable to this or that tendency' (Hall et al., 1976a). In the same way, forms cannot be permanendy normalized. They can always be deconstructed, demystified, by a 'mythologisť like Barthes. Moreover commodities can be symbolically 'repossessed' in everyday life, and endowed with implicitly oppositional meanings, by the very groups who originally produced them. The symbiosis in which ideology and social order, production and reproduction, are linked is then neither fixed nor guaranteed. It can be prised open. The consensus can be fractured, challenged, overruled, and resistance to the groups in dominance cannot always be lightly dismissed or automatically incorporated. Although, as Lefebvre has written, we live in a society where '... objects in practice become signs and signs objects and a second nature takes the place of the first - the initial layer of perceptible reality' (Lefebvre, 1971), there are, as he goes on to affirm, always 'objections and contradictions which hinder the closing of the circuit' between sign and object, production and reproduction. We can now return to the meaning of youth subcultures, for the emergence of such groups has signalled in a spectacular fashion the breakdown of consensus in the postwar period. In the following chapters we shall see that it is precisely objections and contradictions of the kind which Lefebvre has described that find expression in subculture. However, the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style. The objections are lodged, the contradictions displayed (and, as we shall see, 'magically resolved') at the profoundly superficial level of appearances: that is, at the level of signs. For the sign-community, the community of myth-consumers, is not a uniform body. As Volosinov has written, it is cut through by class: Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e. with the totality of users of the same set of signs of ideological communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differentiy oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes the arena of the class struggle. (Volosinov, 1973) 206 Dick Hebdige The struggle between different discourses, different definitions and meanings within ideology is therefore always, at the same time, a struggle within signification: a struggle for possession of the sign which extends to even the most mundane areas of everyday life. To turn once more to the examples used in the Introduction, to the safety pins and tubes of vaseline, we can see that such commodities are indeed open to a double inflection: to 'illegitimate' as well as 'legitimate' uses. These 'humble objects' can be magically appropriated; 'stolen' by subordinate groups and made to carry 'secret' meanings: meanings which express, in code, a form of resistance to the order which guarantees their continued subordination. Style in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance. Its transformations go 'against nature', interrupting the process of 'normalization'. As such, they are gestures, movements towards a speech which offends the 'silent majority', which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus. Our task becomes, like Barthes', to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surfaces of style, to trace them out as 'maps of meaning' which obscurely re-present the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or conceal. Academics who adopt a semiotic approach are not alone in reading significance into the loaded surfaces of life. The existence of spectacular subcultures continually opens up those surfaces to other potentially subversive readings. Jean Genet, the archetype of the 'unnatural' deviant, again exemplifies the practice of resistance through style. He is as convinced in his own way as is Roland Barthes of the ideological character of cultural signs. He is equally oppressed by the seamless web of forms and meanings which encloses and yet excludes him. His reading is equally partial. He makes his own list and draws his own conclusions: I was astounded by so rigorous an edifice whose details were united against me. Nothing in the world is irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, the flower-beds,... Nothing. This order... had a meaning - my exile. (Genet, 1967) It is this alienation from the deceptive 'innocence' of appearances which gives the teds, the mods, the punks and no doubt future groups of as yet unimaginable 'deviants' the impetus to move from man's second 'false nature' (Barthes, 1972) to a genuinely expressive artifice; a truly subterranean style. As a symbolic violation of the social order, such a movement attracts and will continue to attract attention, to provoke censure and to act, as we shall see, as the fundamental bearer of significance in subculture. No subculture has sought with more grim determination than the punks to detach itself from the taken-for-granted landscape of normalized forms, nor to bring down upon itself such vehement disapproval. We shall begin therefore with the moment of punk and we shall return to that moment throughout the course of this book. It is perhaps appropriate that the punks, who have made such large claims for illiteracy, who have pushed profanity to such startling extremes, should be used to test some of Subculture: The Unnatural Break 207 the methods for 'reading' signs evolved in the centuries-old debate on die sanctity of culture. (ii) Subculture: The Unnatural Break* I felt unclean for about 48 hours. (G.L.C. councillor after seeing a concert by the Sex Pistols, reported New Musical Express, 18 July 1977) [Language is] of all social institutions, the least amenable to initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force. (Saussure, 1974) • 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 'out there' but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a ldnd of temporary blockage in the system of representation. As John Mepham (1972) has written: Distinctions and identities may be so deeply embedded in our discourse and diought about tire world whetirer diis be because of their role in our practical lives, or because they are cognitively powerful and are an important aspect of the way in which we appear to make sense of our experience, that die dieoretical challenge to them can be quite startíing. Any elision, truncation or convergence of prevailing linguistic and ideological categories can have profoundly disorienting effects. These deviations briefly expose the arbitrary nature of the codes which underlie and shape all forms of discourse. As Stuart Hall (1974) has written (here in the context of explicitly political deviance): New... developments which are botíi dramatic and 'meaningless' witiiin the consen-sually validated norms, pose a challenge to the normative world. They render problematic not only how die.. .world is defined, but how it ought to be. They 'breach our expectancies'.... Notions concerning the sanctity of language are intimately bound up with ideas of social order. The limits of acceptable linguistic expression are prescribed by a number of apparently universal taboos. These taboos guarantee the continuing 'transparency' (the taken-for-grantedness) of meaning. * From Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York and London: Roudedge, 1979), pp. 90-9. 208 Dick Hebdige Predictably then, violations of the authorized codes through which the social world is organized and experienced have considerable power to provoke and disturb. They are generally condemned, in Mary Douglas' words (1967), as 'contrary to holiness' and Levi-Strauss has noted how, in certain primitive myths, the mispronunciation of words and the misuse of language are classified along with incest as horrendous aberrations capable of'unleashing storm and tempest' (Levi-Strauss, 1969). Similarly, spectacular subcultures express forbidden contents (consciousness of class, consciousness of difference) in forbidden forms (transgressions of sartorial and behavioural codes, law breaking, etc.). They are profane articulations, and they are often and significantly defined as 'unnatural'. The terms used in the tabloid press to describe those youngsters who, in their conduct or clothing, proclaim subcultural membership ('freaks', 'animals... who find courage, like rats, in hunting in packs'4) would seem to suggest that the most primitive anxieties concerning the sacred distinction between nature and culture can be summoned up by the emergence of such a group. No doubt, the breaking of rules is confused with the 'absence of rules' which, according to Levi-Strauss (1969), 'seems to provide die surest criteria for distinguishing a natural from a cultural process'. Certainly, the official reaction to the punk subculture, particularly to the Sex Pistols' use of'foul language' on television and record , and to the vomiting and spitting incidents at Heathrow Airport7 would seem to indicate that these basic taboos are no less deeply sedimented in contemporary British society. Two Forms of Incorporation Has not this society, glutted widi aestheticism, already integrated former romanticisms, surrealism, existentialism and even Marxism to a point? It has, indeed, through trade, in die form of commodities. That which yesterday was reviled today becomes cultural consumer-goods, consumption thus engulfs what was intended to give meaning and direction. (Lefebvre, 1971) We have seen how subcultures 'breach our expectancies', how they represent symbolic challenges to a symbolic order. But can subcultures always be effectively incorporated and if so, how? The emergence of a spectacular subculture is invariably accompanied by a wave of hysteria in the press. This hysteria is typically ambivalent: it fluctuates between dread and fascination, outrage and amusement. Shock and horror headlines dominate die front page (e.g. 'Rotten Razored', Daily Mirror, 28 June 1977) while, inside die editorials positively bristie with 'serious' commentary8 and the centrespreads or supplements contain delirious accounts of die latest fads and rituals (see, for example, Observer colour supplements 30 January, 10 July 1977, 12 February 1978). Style in particular provokes a double response: it is alternately celebrated (in the fashion page) and ridiculed or reviled (in those articles which define subcultures as social problems). Subculture: The Unnatural Break 209 In most cases, it is the subculture's stylistic innovations which first attract the media's attention. Subsequently deviant or 'anti-social' acts - vandalism, swearing, fighting, 'animal behaviour' - are 'discovered' by the police, die judiciary, the press; and diese acts are used to 'explain' the subculture's original transgression of sartorial codes. In fact, either deviant behaviour or the identification of a distinctive uniform (or more typically a combination of the two) can provide the catalyst for a moral panic. In the case of the punks, die media's sighting of punk style virtually coincided widi the discovery or invention of punk deviance. The Daily Mirror ran its first series of alarmist centrespreads on die subculture, concentrating on die bizarre clothing and jewellery during die week (29 Nov-3 Dec 1977) in which the Sex Pistols exploded into die public eye on the Thames Today programme. On die other hand, die mods, perhaps because of die muted character of tiieir style, were not identified as a group until die Bank Holiday clashes of 1964, aldiough die subculture was, by dien, fully developed, at least in London. Whichever item opens die amplifying sequence, it invariably ends witii die simultaneous diffusion and defusion of the subcultural style. As die subculture begins to strike its own eminentiy marketable pose, as its vocabulary (botii visual and verbal) becomes more and more familiar, so die referential context to which it can be most conveniendy assigned is made increasingly apparent. Eventually, the mods, the punks, die glitter rockers can be incorporated, brought back into line, located on the preferred 'map of problematic social reality' (Geertz, 1964) at die point where boys in lipstick are 'just kids dressing up', where girls in rubber dresses are 'daughters just like yours' (see pp. 98-9; 158-9, n. 8). The media, as Stuart Hall (1977) has argued, not only record resistance, tiiey 'situate it within the dominant framework of meanings' and those young people who choose to inhabit a spectacular youth culture are simultaneously returned, as they are represented on T.V. and in die newspapers, to the place where common sense would have them fit (as 'animals' certainly, but also 'in the family', 'out of work', 'up to date', etc.). It is through tiiis continual process of recuperation that die fractured order is repaired and the subculture incorporated as a diverting spectacle witiiin the dominant mythology from which it in part emanates: as 'folk devil', as Other, as Enemy. The process of recuperation takes two characteristic forms: 1. die conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music, etc.) into mass-produced objects (i.e. die commodity form); 2. the 'labelling' and re-definition of deviant behaviour by dominant groups — die police, the media, the judiciary (i.e. the ideological form). The Commodity Form The first has been comprehensively handled by botii journalists and academics. The relationship between the spectacular subculture and the various industries which service and exploit it is notoriously ambiguous. After all, such a subculture is concerned first and foremost with consumption. It operates exclusively in the leisure 210 DickHebdige sphere ('I wouldn't wear my punk outfit for work - there's a time and a place for everything' (see note 11)). It communicates through commodities even if the meanings attached to those commodities are purposefully distorted or overthrown. It is therefore difficult in this case to maintain any absolute distinction between commercial exploitation on the one hand and creativity/originality on the other, even though these categories are emphatically opposed in the value systems of most subcultures. Indeed, the creation and diffusion of new styles is inextricably bound up with the process of production, publicity and packaging which must inevitably lead to the defusion of the subculture's subversive power - both mod and punk innovations fed back directly into high fashion and mainstream fashion. Each new subculture establishes new trends, generates new looks and sounds which feed back into the appropriate industries. As John Clarke (1976b) has observed: The diffusion of youdi styles from the subcultures to tlie fashion market is not simply a 'cultural process', but a real network or infrasttucture of new kinds of commercial and economic institutions. The small-scale record shops, recording companies, die boutiques and one- or two-woman manufacturing companies - diese versions of artisan capitalism, rather dian more generalised and unspecific phenomena, situate the dialectic of commercial 'manipulation'. However, it would be mistaken to insist on the absolute autonomy of'cultural' and commercial processes. As Lefebvre (1971) puts it: 'Trade is... both a social and an intellectual phenomenon', and commodities arrive at the market-place already laden with significance. They are, in Marx's words (1970), 'social hieroglyphs'9 and their meanings are inflected by conventional usage. Thus, as soon as the original innovations which signify 'subculture' are translated into commodities and made generally available, they become 'frozen'. Once removed from their private contexts by the small entrepreneurs and big fashion interests who produce them on a mass scale, they become codified, made comprehensible, rendered at once public property and profitable merchandise. In this way, the two forms of incorporation (the semantic/ideological and the 'real'/commercial) can be said to converge on the commodity form. Youth cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones (think of the boost punk must have given haberdashery!). This occurs irrespective of the subculture's political orientation: the macrobiotic restaurants, craft shops and 'antique markets' of the hippie era were easily converted into punk boutiques and record shops. It also happens irrespective of the startling content of the style: punk clothing and insignia could be bought mail-order by the summer of 1977, and in September of that year Cosmopolitan ran a review of Zandra Rhodes' latest collection of couture follies which consisted entirely of variations on the punk theme. Models smouldered beneath mountains of safety pins and plastic (the pins were jewelled, the 'plastic' wet-look satin) and the accompanying article ended with an aphorism - 'To shock is chic' - which presaged die subculture's imminent demise. Subculture: The Unnatural Break 211 The Ideological Form The second form of incorporation - the ideological — has been most adequately treated by those sociologists who operate a transactional model of deviant behaviour. For example, Stan Cohen has described in detail how one particular moral panic (surrounding the mod-rocker conflict of the mid-60s) was launched and sustained.10 Although this type of analysis can often provide an extremely sophisticated explanation of why spectacular subcultures consistently provoke such hysterical outbursts, it tends to overlook the subtier mechanisms through which potentially threatening phenomena are handled and contained. As die use of the term 'folic devil' suggests, rather too much weight tends to be given to the sensational excesses of the tabloid press at the expense of the ambiguous reactions which are, after all, more typical. As we have seen, the way in which subcultures are represented in the media makes them both more and less exotic than they actually are. They are seen to contain both dangerous aliens and boisterous ldds, wild animals and wayward pets. Roland Barthes furnishes a key to this paradox in his description of 'identification' - one of the seven rhetorical figures which, according to Barthes, distinguish die meta-language of bourgeois mythology. He characterizes the petit-bourgeois as a person '...unable to imagine the Other... the Other is a scandal which threatens his existence' (Barthes, 1972). Two basic strategies have been evolved for dealing witii this threat. First, the Other can be trivialized, naturalized, domesticated. Here, the difference is simply denied ('Otherness is reduced to sameness'). Alternatively, the Other can be transformed into meaningless exotica, a 'pure object, a spectacle, a clown' (Barthes, 1972). In this case, die difference is consigned to a place beyond analysis. Spectacular subcultures are continually being defined in precisely diese terms. Soccer hooligans, for example, are typically placed beyond 'the bounds of common decency' and are classified as 'animals'. ('These people aren't human beings', football club manager quoted on the News at Ten, Sunday, 12 March 1977.) (See Stuart Hall's treatment of the press coverage of football hooligans in Football Hooliganism (edited by Roger Ingham, 1978).) On the other hand, the punks tended to be resituated by die press in die family, perhaps because members of the subculture deliberately obscured tiieir origins, refused the family and willingly played die part of folk devil, presenting themselves as pure objects, as villainous clowns. Certainly, like every other youth culture, punk was perceived as a threat to the family. Occasionally this threat was represented in literal terms. For example, the Daily Mirror (1 August 1977) carried a photograph of a child lying in the road after a punk-ted confrontation under die headline 'VICTIM OF THE PUNIC ROCK PUNCH-UP: THE BOY WHO FELL FOUL OF THE MOB'. In this case, punk's threat to die family was made 'real' (tiiat could be my child!) tiirough the ideological framing of photographic evidence which is popularly regarded as unpro-blematic. None the less, on other occasions, the opposite line was taken. For whatever reason, die inevitable glut of articles gleefully denouncing the latest punk outrage was counterbalanced by an equal number of items devoted to die small details of 212 Dick Hebdige punk family life. For instance, the 15 October 1977 issue of Woman's Own carried an article entitled 'Punks and Mothers' which stressed the classless, fancy dress aspects of punk.11 Photographs depicting punks with smiling mothers, reclining next to the family pool, playing with the family dog, were placed above a text which dwelt on the ordinariness of individual punks: 'It's not as rocky horror as it appears'... 'punk can be a family affair'... 'punks as it happens are non-political', and, most insidiously, albeit accurately, 'Johnny Rotten is as big a household name as Hughie Green'. Throughout the summer of 1977, the People and the News of the World ran items on punk babies, punk brothers, and punk-ted weddings. All these articles served to minimize the Otherness so stridently proclaimed in punk style, and defined the subculture in precisely those terms which it sought most vehemently to resist and deny. Once again, we should avoid making any absolute distinction between the ideological and commercial 'manipulations' of subculture. The symbolic restoration of daughters to the family, of deviants to the fold, was under taken at a time when the widespread 'capitulation' of punk musicians to market forces was being used throughout the media to illustrate the fact that punks were 'only human after all'. The music papers were filled with the familiar success stories describing the route from rags to rags and riches - of punk musicians flying to America, of bank clerks become magazine editors or record producers, of harassed seamstresses turned overnight into successful business women. Of course, these success stories had ambiguous implications. As with every other 'youth revolution' (e.g., the beat boom, the mod explosion and the Swinging Sixties) the relative success of a few individuals created an impression of energy, expansion and limitless upward mobility. This ultimately reinforced the image of the open society which the very presence of the punk subculture -with its rhetorical emphasis on unemployment, high-rise living and narrow options -had originally contradicted. As Barthes (1972) has written: 'myth can always, as a last resort, signify the resistance which is brought to bear against it' and it does so typically by imposing its own ideological terms, by substituting in this case 'the fairy tale of the artist's creativity'12 for an art form 'within the compass of every consciousness', a 'music' to be judged, dismissed or marketed for 'noise' - a logically consistent, self-constituted chaos. It does so finally by replacing a subculture engendered by history, a product of real historical contradictions, with a handful of brilliant nonconformists, satanic geniuses who, to use the words of Sir John Read, Chairman of EMI 'become in the fullness of time, wholly acceptable and can contribute greatly to the development of modern music'.1 Notes 1 Although Williams had posited a new, broader definition of culture, he intended this to complement rather than contradict earlier formulations: It seems to me that there is value in each of these kinds of definition.... die degree to which we depend, in our knowledge of many past societies and past stages of our Subculture: The Unnatural Break 213 own, on the body of intellectual and imaginative work which has retained its major communicative power, makes the description of culture in diese terms if not complete, then at least reasonable... there are elements in the 'ideal' definition which... seem to me valuable. (Williams, 1965) 2 In his Course in General Linguistics (1974), Saussure stressed the arbitrary nature of die linguistic sign. For Saussure, language is a system of mutually related values, in which arbitrary 'signifiers' (e.g., words) are linked to equally arbitrary 'signifieds' ('concepts ... negatively defined by tiieir relations with other terms in the system5) to form signs. These signs together constitute a system. Each element is defined through its position within the relevant system - its relation to other elements - through the dialectics of identity and difference. Saussure postulated that other systems of significance (e.g., fashion, cookery) might be studied in a similar way, and that eventually linguistics would form part of a more general science of signs - a semiology. 3 The fashionable status of this word has in recent years contributed to its indiscriminate use. I intend here the very precise meaning established by Louis Althusser: 'the problematic of a word or concept consists of the theoretical or ideological framework within which that word or concept can be used to establish, determine and discuss a particular range of issues and a particular kind of problem' (Althusser and Balibar, 1968; see also Bennett, 1979). 4 This was part of a speech made by Dr George Simpson, a Margate magistrate, after the mod-rocker clashes of Whitsun 1964. For sociologists of deviance, this speech has become the classic example of rhetorical overkill and deserves quoting in full: 'These long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums, diese sawdust Caesars who can only find courage like rats, in hunting in packs' (quoted in Cohen, 1972). 5 On 1 December 1976 the Sex Pistols appeared on the Thames twilight programme Today. During the course of the interview with Bill Grundy they used die words 'sod', 'bastard' and 'fuck'. The papers carried stories of jammed switchboards, shocked parents, etc., and there were some unusual refinements. The Daily Mirror (2 December) contained a story about a lorry driver who had been so incensed by the Sex Pistols' performance that he had kicked in the screen of his colour television: T can swear as well as anyone, but I don't want this sort of muck coming into my home at teatime.' 6 The police brought an unsuccessful action for obscenity against the Sex Pistols after tiieir first LP Never Mind the Bollocks was released in 1977. 7 On 4 January 1977 the Sex Pistols caused an incident at Heathrow Airport by spitting and vomiting in front of airline staff. The Evening News quoted a check-in desk girl as saying: 'The group are the most revolting people I have ever seen in my life. They were disgusting, sick and obscene.' Two days after this incident was reported in the newspapers, EMI terminated the group's contract. 8 The 1 August 1977 edition of the Daily Mirror contained just such an example of dubious editorial concern. Giving 'serious' consideration to the problem of ted-punk violence along the King's Road, the writer makes the obvious comparison with the seaside disturbances of the previous decade: '[The clashes] must not be allowed to grow into the pitched battles like the mods and rockers confrontations at several seaside towns a few years back.' Moral panics can be recycled; even the same events can be recalled in the same prophetic tones to mobilise the same sense of outrage. 9 The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life before man seeks to decipher, not tiieir 214 Dick Hebdige historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. (Marx and Engels, 1970). 10 The definitive study of a moral panic is Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics. The mods and rockers were just two of the 'folk devils' - 'the gallery of types that society erects to show its members which roles should be avoided' - which periodically become the centre of a 'moral panic'. Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by tire mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. (Cohen, 1972) Official reactions to the punk subculture betrayed all the classic symptoms of a moral panic. Concerts were cancelled; clergymen, politicians and pundits unanimously denounced the degeneracy of youth. Among the choicer reactions, Marcus Lipton, the late MP for Lambeth North, declared: 'If pop music is going to be used to destroy our established institutions, then it ought to be destroyed first.' Bernard Brook-Partridge, MP for Havering-Romford, stormed, 'I think the Sex Pistols are absolutely bloody revolting. I think their whole attitude is calculated to incite people to misbehaviour___It is a deliberate incitement to anti-social behaviour and conduct' (quoted in New Musical Express, 15 July 1977). 11 See also 'Punks have Mothers Too: They tell us a few home truths' in Woman (15 April 1978) and 'Punks and Mothers' in Woman's Own (15 October 1977). These articles draw editorial comment (a sign of recognition on the part of the staff of tire need to reassure the challenged expectations of the reader?). The following anecdote appeared beneath a photograph showing two dancing teddy boys: The other day I overheard two elderly ladies, cringing as a gang of alarming looking punks passed them, say in tones of horror: 'Just imagine what their children will be like'. I'm sure a lot of people must have said exactiy tire same about the Teddy Boys, like the ones pictured... and Mods and Rockers. That made me wonder what had happened to them when tire phase passed. I reckon they put away their drape suits or scooters and settled down to respectable, quiet lives, bringing up the kids and desperately hoping they won't get involved in any of these terrible Punk goings-on. 12 'The fairy-tale of the artist's creativity is western culture's last superstition. One of Surrealism's first revolutionary acts was to attack this myth...' (Max Ernst, 'What is Surrealism?' quoted in Lippard, 1970). 13 'Surrealism is within the compass of every consciousness' (surrealist tract quoted in Lippard, 1970). See also Paul Eluard (1933): 'We have passed tire period of individual exercises'. Subculture: The Unnatural Break 215 The solemn and extremely reverential exhibition of Surrealism, mounted at London's Hayward Gallery in 1978 ironically sought to establish the reputation of individual surrealists as artists and was designed to win public recognition of their 'genius'. It is fitting that punk should be absorbed into high fashion at the same time as the first major exhibition of Dada and surrealism in Britain was being launched. 14 On 7 December one month before EMI terminated its contract with the Sex Pistols, Sir John Read, the record company's Chairman, made die following statement at the annual general meeting: Throughout its history as a recording company, EMI has always sought to behave within contemporary limits of decency and good taste - taking into account not only die traditional rigid conventions of one section of society, but also the increasingly liberal attitudes of other (perhaps larger) sections ... at any given time... What is decent or in good taste compared to the attitudes of, say, 20 or even 10 years ago? It is against this present-day social background that EMI has to make value judgements about the content of records ... Sex Pistols is a pop group devoted to a new form of music known as 'punk rock'. It was contracted for recording purposes by EMI... in October, 1976 ... In this context, it must be remembered drat the recording industry has signed many pop groups, initially controversial, who have in die fullness of time become wholly acceptable and contributed greatiy to die development of modern music... EMI should not set itself up as a public censor, but it does seek to encourage restraint. (Quoted in Vermorel and Vermorel, 1978) Despite die eventual loss of face (and some £40,000 paid out to die Pistols when die contract was terminated) EMI and die otiier record companies tended to shrug off die apparent contradictions involved in signing up groups who openly admitted to a lack of professionalism, musicianship, and commitment to die profit motive. During die Clash's famous performance of'White Riot' at the Rainbow in 1977 when seats were ripped out and tiirown at die stage, the last two rows of the theatre (left, of course, intact) were occupied almost exclusively by record executives and talent scouts: CBS paid for die damage witiiout complaint. There could be no clearer demonstration of the fact diat symbolic assaults leave real institutions intact. Nonedieless, die record companies did not have everytiiing tiieir own way. The Sex Pistols received five-figure sums in compensation from botii A & M and EMI and when tiieir LP (recorded at last by Virgin) finally did reach the shops, it contained a scatiiing attack on EMI delivered in Rotten's venomous nasal whine: You diought that we were faking That we were all just money-making You don't believe tiiat we're for real Or you would lose your cheap appeal. Who? EMI - EMI Blind acceptance is a sign Of stupid fools who stand in line Like EMI - EMI ('EMI', Virgin, 1977) 216 DickHebdige References Althusser, L. (1969), For Marx, Allen Lane. ------ (1971a), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New Left Books. Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1968), Reading Capital, New Left Books. Arnold, M. (1868), Culture and Anarchy. Bardies, R. (1972), Mythologies, Paladin. Bennett, T. (1979), Formalism and Marxism, Methuen. Clarke, J. (1976a), 'The Sldnheads and the Magical Recovery of Working Class Community', in S. Hall et al. 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