Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979)
By Dick Hebdige

Synopsis: This book investigates the styles of subculture and the processes through which mundane objects take on symbolic dimensions. In doing so, Hebdige seeks to "recreate the dialectic between action and reaction which renders the objects meaningful" (2). Basically, this is a study of the meaning of style. Grounded in a cultural studies/semiotics perspective, Hebdige looks at case studies (Rastafarianism, hipters, teddy boys, punks, glam rockers) and performs "readings" on them, focusing on the functions of subculture, the use of styles, style as a type of communication, and style as embedded in subcultural meaning. Argues that tensions between dominant and subordinate groups are found in the surfaces of subcultures and their styles. "The meaning of subculture is, then, always in dispute, and style is the arena in which the opposing definitions clash with the most dramatic force" (3). Argues that the use of "common sense" is a way to bury ideology, i.e. of "naturalizing" it. Subcultures, he argues, represent noise and interference, as well as "symbolic challenges to a symbolic order" (page?). "Others" can either be dealt with via trivialization/domestication or turned into meaningless exotica. Bottom line: Subcultural style is intentional communication which means to be read (unlike "normal" style which attempts to be "natural" or "invisible"). Subcultural style all about collage and re-organization and mutations, rather than "pure" expressions.

Interesting Specifics:

Sometimes objects/styles become "a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile" (2).

"...ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common sense" (12).

"Hegemony can only be maintained so long as the dominant classes 'succeed in framing all competing definitions within their range' [Hall, 1977]" (16).

"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...We can watch, played out on the loaded system of British working-class youth cultures, a phantom history of race relations since the war" (45).

"...the punk aesthetic can be read in part as a white 'translation' of black 'ethnicity'" (64).

"Reggae and punk were audibly opposed" (68).

"The twin concepts of conjuncture and specificity, (each subculture representing a distinctive 'moment' - a particular response to a particular set of circumstances) are therefore indispensable to a study of subcultural style" (84).

By subverting "conventional uses and inventing new ones, the subcultural stylist gives the lie to what Althusser has called the 'false obviousness of everyday practice'...and opens up the world of objects to new and covertly oppositional readings. The communication of a significant difference then...is the point" (102).

Subcultures can be conservative or progressive - "integrated into the community, continuous with the values of that community, or extrapolated from it, defining themselves against the parent culture" (127).

"...no amount of stylistic incantation can alter the oppressive mode in which the commodities used in subculture have been produced" (130).

Interacts With:

Many books on Janet's list, especially Stuart Hall and anything that deals with the flexibility of popular culture and the subversive potential embedded in it.
Barthes (through focus on semiotics).
Foucault ("naturalizing" of ideology by dominant class)
Gramsci (hegemony)
This is a key cultural studies book as it focuses on the totality of society, and not just on the "high" culture elements

Design in the U.S.A.

Design in the U.S.A. (2005)
By Jeffrey L. Meikle

Synopsis: "The purpose of this book is to trace the history of design in the U.S. as a functional tool, as an economic force, and as the expression of a consumer culture that continues to transform everyday life" (17). It traces the history of U.S. design from 1790-present, and is divided into five sections: 1) The Emergence of the American System, 1790-1860 (increased urbanization at the end of this period; Americans had democratic passion for physical comforts that influenced design; 1853 NY Exhibition showed fanciness that would soon be available to the middle class too); 2) Art and Industry in the Gilded Age, 1860-1918 (rise of visual appearance over touch-based production; increased focus on taste and personal expression; aesthetic vs. moral views of design; Arts and Crafts Movement, 1880s - ); 3) Designing the Machine Age, 1918-1940 (birth of the industrial design profession in 1930s; rise of streamlining = desire for a less complex world; increased mobility and efficiency); 4) High Design vs. Popular Styling, 1940-1965 (rise of functionalism; rise of populuxe; shift from material to immaterial existence); 5) Into the Millennium: Moving Beyond Modernism (fracturing of any single design vision; playful mixing of postmodern style; information age as extension of modernity). Most interesting argument (as this book is more of a survey as opposed to an argument-driven book) is that the increased malleability of everything in the information age (today) and the increased catering to a multitude of subcultures marks the dissolution of the "modernist vision of rational, universal coherence" (210). American design is largely about the massive proliferation of stuff.

Interesting Specifics:

"...The democratic pursuit of happiness was related to an increasing flow of material goods - all of them products of design" (12).

It is said that design imposes order - but whose order, and for what purposes? (15-16)

Catherine Beecher = 1800-78

Transcontinental Railroad Completed = 1869

Model T Ford = 1908

Frederick Taylor = 1856-1915

Ford shuts down River Rouge plant in 1927.

Fiestaware = 1930s

Journal Industrial Design launched in 1954.

1960s = shift from a material to immaterial world (information age - isnt' this also when "postmodernism" began?)

Defines what it means to be a consumer: "how to invest time and energy in shopping, how to gain emotional release by acquiring material things, and how to construct and express personal identity by arranging and displaying possessions" (52).

"Visual appearance...assumed greater economic and cultural significance, as a 'touch-oriented, local world of production' yielded to a 'sight-oriented, broader world of consumption'" (52).

There were two schools of British design philosophy - the aesthetic and the moral - "one advocating design as a source of visual and tactile pleasure, the other as a source of moral reform" (67).

Tiffany lamp craze was in the 1900s.

Arts and Crafts Movement big in 1880s-1900s.

Stickley started making mission style furniture in 1902.

Industrial design profession emerged in the 1930s.

Streamlining "represented a common assumption that society's larger processes had to be rendered smoother, less complex, more frictionless in operation" (125). Also, "its rounded, enclosing forms, particularly when applied to architecture, suggested a need for protection and stability" (125).

Ford Taurus as radical design breakthrough, and car historians regard it as "'the single most important American production design of the 1980s'" (191).

Says Learning from Las Vegas (1972) launched the postmodern movement (192). [Hmm, don't others say it was a little earlier? Maybe it's that these guys were the first to really defend it and make it a "taste of the people" movement to embrace - ]

Grid was the first laptop.

Interacts With:

Rudeness and Civility, Class (any book that deals with middle class obsession with comfort)
Meaning of Things
Land of Desire (focus on the rise of the visual)
Did consumer culture kill Modernism?

Class: A Painfully Accurate Guide Through The American Status System

Class: A Painfully Accurate Guide Through The American Status System (1983)
by Paul Fussell

Synopsis: Fussell's basic goal is to debunk the very American idea that we live in a classless society. He does this by providing a tongue-in-cheek, yet somewhat accurate, taxonomy of the various class markers. He shows that even the most minute details can be seen as clear depictions of class. He discusses body shape, gestures, recreation habits, clothing, household objects, decor, materials, attitude, reading preferences, ways of speaking, food preferences, higher education, and architecture. The book's tone is self-consciously ironically snobby and playful, and is decidedly non-scholarly and footnote-free. His final point seems to be that the only way to escape your class is to bow-out of the system completely and become a self-made "inner-directed" "Category-X" person. This is the escape route he grants to (presumably) all his clever, creative, in-the-know readers (and himself). Overall, he argues that the middle class is intensely insecure about its status, and hence is obsessed with the inoffensive (which is perceived as "tasteful") and un-ideological. The middle class is horrified of conflict, controversy, and ideas, and this shows in most of what they do. The implication of this is that the middle class is a very dangerous class to be immersed in, as it avoids all conflict and pain to the point of ignorance and inaction. [This really connects to Radway].

Interesting Specifics:

"Style and taste and awareness are as important as money" (16), and the source of ones money is more important than the amount.

Really emphasizes the fact that the middle class suffers from status anxiety and intense desire to belong (35). For the middle class "Argument or even disagreement must be avoided at all costs" (97).

"Classy people never deal with the future" (74).

Says the desire for privacy is an upper class marker [but don't all people desire privacy, and it's just that the upper class has more access to it?]

The term "weekend" came about in 1878, "a moment marking what can be said to be the flowering of high bourgeois culture" (120).

"We're pretty much stuck for life in the class we're raised in" (198).

Says all of U.S. culture is immersed in a class-lowering, or "prole-drift" (205)

"It's only as an X, detached from the constraints and anxieties of the whole class racket, that an American can enjoy something like the Liberty promised on the coinage" (223). [Geez, that's not too overdramatic).

Interacts With:

Bourdieu (Class can be seen as an obscenely simplified and lay-person version of Distinction, without the theoretical framework. Is basically about the role of "stuff" in constructing a self. Departing from Bourdieu, Fussell does grant people some agency by allowing them to sneak off into the Category X realm if they want to.)
Connects with all the books that discuss the role of "stuff" in constructing a self/identity.
Rudeness and Civility (in the use of labels and clothing and goods to distinguish one person and "type" from another; also in the rise of "gentility" and its scorn of anything that seems offensive or rude).
Radway, Reading the Romance and A Feeling For Books (both demonstrate the ways in which middle class women go out of their way to avoid reading anything that is too heavy or upsetting - especially Reading the Romance; fits with Fussell's argument that the middle class goes out of its way to avoid pain and conflict of all kinds)
The Lonely Crowd (Fussell seems to run with a tweaked version of the "inner-directed" person in constructing his glorified class-dodger "Category X")