Hebdige’s ‘Subculture: The Unnatural Break’: a Review
Dick Hebdige’s ‘Subculture: The Unnatural Break’ explores the ways in which subcultures represent challenges to the established social order and examines how subcultures are incorporated into ‘mainstream’ society (Hebdige 1979, p. 92). In the following paper I provide a brief summary of Hebdige’s thesis and analyse his main supporting arguments.
‘Subculture: The Unnatural Break’ appears as chapter six of Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style and attempts to situate the phenomena that is subculture against ‘mainstream’ society (ibid.). Hebdige doesn’t just establish a binary of subculture against ‘mainstream’ society, however, but argues that subculture is an aspect of ‘mainstream’ society (Hebdige 1979, p 97). It is this complicated relationship between subculture and ‘mainstream’ society that Hebdige addresses with this chapter.
Hebdige presents an argument given by Stuart Hall that the media, as an institution of ‘mainstream’ society, has two, always dominant, relationships with subcultures: as a recorder of resistance, and as a tool that ’situates’ the subculture within the dominant or ‘mainstream’ framework of meanings (Hebdige 1979, p. 94). Hebdige establishes early on that there is a relationship of domination and subordination, a top down (de)valuing of subcultures, that is enforced via the dominant or ‘mainstream’ society upon the various subcultures. This approach, Hebdige argues, is to recuperate the deviant subculture back into ‘mainstream’ society (ibid.).
Hebdige presents what he argues are the two forms of this recuperation process: taking subcultural signs (i.e. forms of music, dress, makeup etc.) and converting them into mass-produced commodity items (the commodity form of recuperation); and (re)defining deviant behaviour (subcultural behavioural norms) and labeling it by dominant, ‘mainstream’, social groups such as the media, the judiciary and the police (the ideological form of recuperation) (ibid.). Hebdige’s treatment of this process is well balanced, especially his analysis of the ideological form of recuperation, in which he argues that some sociologists, notably Stan Cohen, have presented sophisticated transactional models of deviant behaviour, but that these accounts nevertheless overlook the subtleties through which these deviant behaviours, these subcultures, are isolated and contained (Hebdige 1979, p. 97).
Hebdige separates his ideological form of recuperation into a further two ‘basic strategies’ of containment inspired by Roland Barthes’ ideas surrounding ‘identification’. The first of these follows a general position articulated throughout the earlier portions of Hebdige’s chapter, that the subculture becomes trivialised, naturalised, and domesticated. That the differences between the ‘mainstream’ and the subculture are denied, that there is no longer an Other (ibid.). The Other is not removed in any physical sense, or even incorporated in any physical sense, but the existence of the Other is simply denied: the Other has always been the Same and was simply mistaken as Other.
The second strategy is that the subculture is enforced as ‘meaningless exotica’ (ibid.). The subculture becomes the object of the ‘mainstream’; and like a bird in a cage, the subculture cannot reach the boundaries of the ‘mainstream’. In this way, the differences between the ‘mainstream’ and the subculture are simply beyond analysis (ibid.).
Hebdige presents an interesting example of the punk subculture in from the 1970’s and illustrates the various techniques that the ‘mainstream’ utilised in dealing with it (Hebdige 1979, pp. 97 – 99). It is apparent that both aspects of the ideological form of recuperation were utilised along with the commodity form of recuperation. Hebdige illustrates how punks were simultaneously depicted in the media as both ‘meaningless exotica’ and as members of the ‘mainstream’ (as ordinary family members); and how punk culture, particularly punk music, was commodified and capitalised upon by ‘mainstream’ record companies (ibid.). This example of the punk subculture is utilised by Hebdige to illustrate how the ideological and commodity forms of recuperation are not mutually exclusive – the becoming of punk music into ‘mainstream’ musical norms and capital was used by the media to illustrate how punks were ‘only human after all’ (Hebdige 1979, p. 99).
Hebdige’s treatment of how subcultures are dealt with by the ‘mainstream’ is both well articulated and balanced. He doesn’t simply follow a single line of argument, nor ignore opposing points of view, but incorporates criticism where it is needed. The various nuances of the power relations between ‘mainstream’ society and subcultures, and the various means which the ‘mainstream’ utilise in dealing with, and explaining away, subcultures, are well presented.
References
Hebdige, D 1979, ‘Subculture: The Unnatural Break‘, in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Methuen & Co. Ltd., pp. 90 – 99.
