J103-Reading Analysis-10/10: Subculture; 21st Nov 2006

In Dick Hebdige’s essay on subculture he doesn’t put any new ideas forward. What he does do is bring together a lot of material on the subject from many different social commentators and shows effectively how it all fits together and how useful it is to us when we try and understand subculture.
By bringing everything together Hebdige has produced an essay that simply (in about fifteen pages) summarises the signs left behind by and the effects that subculture has on modern day society.
Firstly, he refers to his own writing from 1979 (Subculture: The Meaning of Style). He makes clear from referring to this and other writings at this time that his main expertise is on the first major fracturing of youth culture seen during the 1960’s and 70’s. In the first passage he defines what a subculture really is and what it means the mass culture it leaves behind.
Using the example of the punk movement of the 1970’s Hebdige has free-roam among these many effects upon society at large. With the punk movement comes the breaking of common society’s rules and regulations, the disregard for society’s common conventions about dress, behaviour etc. The problem with this explanation is that it gives no idea of size. From what Hebdige is saying I could be a subculture in and of myself as long as keep myself as far from the normal as possible. Maybe that was true in 1979, but today the idea of subculture itself has been accommodated by society and made mundane.
This focus on one period goes a long way to describing the limitations of this essay and one might argue, the general study of subculture as a whole. The 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s were a boom time for subculture. With plenty of subcultures going around almost every young person was accommodated in some way and made to feel like they belonged. What hasn’t been realised by this essay is that this period of about thirty years was, on a far larger scale, a naturalisation of subculture. The many factions present in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s are still (mostly) alive and well today in some form or another.
So, using Hebdige’s own words the incorporation of these subcultures is the process that has won in the end. A subculture using the capitalist definition is successful if it is profitable to move it into mainstream society. If it is possible to commodify the subculture then you then have something to sell to the rest of the community, you can make money with it and turn it into just another part of the mainstream.
This is where we are now. With communication technology as it is now it is impossible to keep something in the minority for long if it is desirable. I would suggest that Hebdige’s arguments, whilst relevant to a study of modern history, are now out of date. In today’s technology saturated world it just simply isn’t possible for a major subculture to develop. Communication is too quick, corporations are too able to assess an idea on its merits and make a decision about selling to this or that market.
I would argue that this piece is well written and puts across its ideas in an easy to read manner, it just doesn’t makes sense in today’s world of high-speed internet access. It isn’t necessarily useful to know how the newspapers of the time described the Mods or the Rockers. The only way that this is useful to a modern audience is if that audience was concerned with the study of subculture and the impact that it had on late 20th Century society.