DICK HEBDIGE
(PDF) BOOK
SUBCULTURE THE MEANING OF STYLE
IN THE SAME SERIES The Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in postcolonial literatures Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin Translation Studies Susan Bassnett Rewriting English: Cultural politics of gender and class Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke, and Chris Weedon Critical Practice Catherine Belsey Formalism and Marxism Tony Bennett Dialogue and Difference: English for the nineties ed. Peter Brooker and Peter Humm Telling Stories: A theoretical analysis of narrative fiction Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shires Alternative Shakespeares ed. John Drakakis The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir Elam Reading Television John Fiske and John Hartley Linguistics and the Novel Roger Fowler Return of the Reader: Reader-response criticism Elizabeth Freund Making a Difference: Feminist literary criticism ed. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn Superstructuralism: The philosophy of structuralism and post-structuralism Richard Harland Structuralism and Semiotics Terence Hawkes Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world Michael Holquist Popular Fictions: Essays in literature and history ed. Peter Humm, Paul Stigant, and Peter Widdowson The Politics of Postmodernism Linda Hutcheon Fantasy: The literature of subversion Rosemary Jackson Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist literary theory Toril Moi Deconstruction: Theory and practice Christopher Norris Orality and Literacy: The technologizing of the word Walter J. Ong Narrative Fiction: Contemporary poetics Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan Adult Comics: An introduction Roger Sabin Criticism in Society Imre Salusinszky Metafiction: The theory and practice of self-conscious fiction Patricia Waugh Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in practice Elizabeth Wright
DICK HEBDIGE
SUBCULTURE THE MEANING OF STYLE
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published in 1979 by Methuen & Co. Ltd Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. © 1979 Dick Hebdige All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data available ISBN 0–415–03949–5 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-13994-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-22092-7 (Glassbook Format)
GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
IT is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. Here, among large numbers of students at all levels of education, the erosion of the assumptions and presuppositions that support the literary disciplines in their conventional form has proved fundamental. Modes and categories inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation. New Accents is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. Some important areas of interest immediately present themselves. In various parts of the world, new methods of analysis have been developed whose conclusions reveal the limitations of the Anglo-American outlook we inherit. New concepts of literary forms and modes have been proposed; new notions of the nature of literature itself, and of how it communicates are current; new views of literature’s role in relation to society flourish. New Accents will aim to expound and comment upon the most notable of these. In the broad field of the study of human communication, more and more emphasis has been placed upon the nature and function of the new electronic media. New Accents will try to identify and discuss the challenge these offer to our traditional modes of critical response. The same interest in communication suggests that the series should also concern itself with those wider anthropological and sociological areas of investigation which have begun to involve scrutiny of the nature of art itself and of its relation to our whole way of life. And this will ultimately require attention to be focused on some of those activities which in our society have hitherto been excluded from the prestigious realms of Culture. Finally, as its title suggests, one aspect of New Accents will be firmly located in contemporary approaches to language, and a continuing concern of the series will be to examine the extent to which relevant branches of linguistic studies can illuminate specific literary areas. The volumes with this particular interest will nevertheless presume no prior technical knowledge on the part of their readers, and will aim to rehearse the linguistics appropriate to the matter in hand, rather than to embark on general theoretical matters. Each volume in the series will attempt an objective exposition of significant developments in its field up to the present as well as an account of its author’s own views of the matter. Each will culminate in an informative bibliography as a guide to further study. And while each will be primarily concerned with matters relevant to its own specific interests, we can hope that a kind of conversation will be heard to develop between them: one whose accents may perhaps suggest the distinctive discourse of the future.
TERENCE HAWKES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
MANY people have assisted in different ways in the writing of this book. I should like in particular to thank Jessica Pickard and Stuart Hall for generously giving up valuable time to read and comment upon the manuscript. Thanks also to the staff and students of the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and to Geoff Hurd of Wolverhampton Polytechnic for keeping me in touch with the relevant debates. I should also like to thank Mrs Erica Pickard for devoting so much time and skill to the preparation of this manuscript. Finally, thanks to Duffy, Mike, Don and Bridie for living underneath the Law and outside the categories for so many years.
INTRODUCTION: SUBCULTURE AND STYLE
I managed to get about twenty photographs, and with bits of chewed bread I pasted them on the back of the cardboard sheet of regulations that hangs on the wall. Some are pinned up with bits of brass wire which the foreman brings me and on which I have to string coloured glass beads. Using the same beads with which the prisoners next door make funeral wreaths, I have made star-shaped frames for the most purely criminal. In the evening, as you open your window to the street, I turn the back of the regulation sheet towards me. Smiles and sneers, alike inexorable, enter me by all the holes I offer. . . . They watch over my little routines. (Genet, 1966a)
IN the opening pages of The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet describes how a tube of vaseline, found in his possession, is confiscated by the Spanish police during a raid. This ‘dirty, wretched object’, proclaiming his homosexuality to the world, becomes for Genet a kind of guarantee – ‘the sign of a secret grace which was soon to save me from contempt’. The discovery of the vaseline is greeted with laughter in the record-office of the station, and the police ‘smelling of garlic, sweat and oil, but . . . strong in their moral assurance’ subject Genet to a tirade of hostile innuendo. The author joins in the laughter too (‘though painfully’) but later, in his cell, ‘the image of the tube of vaseline never left me’. I was sure that this puny and most humble object would hold its own against them; by its mere presence it would be able to exasperate all the police in the world; it would draw down upon itself contempt, hatred, white and dumb rages. (Genet, 1967) I have chosen to begin with these extracts from Genet because he more than most has explored in both his life and his art the subversive implications of style. I shall be returning again and again to Genet’s major themes: the status and meaning of revolt, the idea of style as a form of Refusal, the elevation of crime into art (even though, in our case, the ‘crimes’ are only broken codes). Like Genet, we are interested in subculture – in the expressive forms and rituals of those subordinate groups – the teddy boys and mods and rockers, the skinheads and the punks – who are alternately dismissed, denounced and canonized; treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffoons. Like Genet also, we are intrigued by the most mundane objects – a safety pin, a pointed shoe, a motor cycle – which, none the less, like the tube of vaseline, take on a symbolic dimension, becoming a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile. Finally, like Genet, we must seek to recreate the dialectic between action and reaction which renders these objects meaningful. For, just as the conflict between Genet’s ‘unnatural’ sexuality and the policemen’s ‘legitimate’ outrage can be encapsulated in a single object, so the tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces of subculture – in the
styles made up of mundane objects which have a double meaning. On the one hand, they warn the ‘straight’ world in advance of a sinister presence – the presence of difference – and draw down upon themselves vague suspicions, uneasy laughter, ‘white and dumb rages’. On the other hand, for those who erect them into icons, who use them as words or as curses, these objects become signs of forbidden identity, sources of value. Recalling his humiliation at the hands of the police, Genet finds consolation in the tube of vaseline. It becomes a symbol of his ‘triumph’ – ‘I would indeeed rather have shed blood than repudiate that silly object’ (Genet, 1967). The meaning of subculture is, then, always in dispute, and style is the area in which the opposing definitions clash with most dramatic force. Much of the available space in this book will therefore be taken up with a description of the process whereby objects are made to mean and mean again as ‘style’ in subculture. As in Genet’s novels, this process begins with a crime against the natural order, though in this case the deviation may seem slight indeed – the cultivation of a quiff, the acquisition of a scooter or a record or a certain type of suit. But it ends in the construction of a style, in a gesture of defiance or contempt, in a smile or a sneer. It signals a Refusal. I would like to think that this Refusal is worth making, that these gestures have a meaning, that the smiles and the sneers have some subversive value, even if, in the final analysis, they are, like Genet’s gangster pin-ups, just the darker side of sets of regulations, just so much graffiti on a prison wall. Even so, graffiti can make fascinating reading. They draw attention to themselves. They are an expression both of impotence and a kind of power – the power to disfigure (Norman Mailer calls graffiti – ‘Your presence on their Presence . . . hanging your alias on their scene’ (Mailer, 1974)). In this book I shall attempt to decipher the graffiti, to tease out the meanings embedded in the various postwar youth styles. But before we can proceed to individual subcultures, we must first define the basic terms. The word ‘subculture’ is loaded down with mystery. It suggests secrecy, masonic oaths, an Underworld. It also invokes the larger and no less difficult concept ‘culture’. So it is with the idea of culture that we should begin.
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