A Scenic Move

The term subculture was coined in the 1940s and has since been used to describe and analyze all kinds of social groups (punks, football hooligans, homosexuals). The Birmingham Centre of Cultural Studies set the agenda in the 1970s with two major publications: Resistance Through Rituals (Hall & Jefferson 1976) and Hebdige's Subculture, The Meaning of Style (1979). Whereas the former predominantly uses class as the key to discovering subcultural meanings, the latter uses style and race as their organising principles. Hebdige unravels different youth styles, which according to him are ‘pregnant with significance. (…) 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.’ (1979: 18) Oppositional styles, which deliberately transform the meaning of symbols of the dominant discourse, emerge to counter dominant culture. Through accommodation or neglect, mainstream society is in the end able to pacify the potential threat of subcultures. Subcultures thus do not allow much potential for real change; they are, as Kahn-Harris (2004: 96) puts it, ‘heroic failures.’

In later publications, Hebdige (1988) develops a more subtle approach, by adopting Foucault's ideas of power and surveillance. According to Foucault, ‘Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. (…) We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.’ (Foucault 1983: 216) Heb dige shows how different forms of surveillance emerged around the category ‘youth’ during the 20th century. He traced two dominant images of youth: youth as fun, and youth as trouble. For Hebdige, the subcultural response is a new form of subjectivity. ‘Subculture forms up in the space between surveillance and the evasion of surveillance, it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched. It is a hiding in the light.’ (1988: 35)