Dick Hebdige, Subculture- The Meaning of Style

EIGHT

Style as homology

THE. punk subculture, then, signified chaos at every

level, but this was only possible because the styleitself was so thoroughly ordered. The chaos cohered

as a meaningful whole. We can now attempt to solve thisparadox by referring to another concept originally em-ployed by Levi-Strauss: homology.

Paul Willis (1978) first applied the term 'homology' tosubculture in his study of hippies and motor-bike boys usingit to describe the symbolic fit between the values and life-styles of a group, its subjective experience and the musicalforms it uses to express or reinforce its focal concerns. InProfane Culture, Willis shows how, contrary to the popularmyth which presents subcultures as lawless forms, the in-ternal structure of any particular subculture is characterizedby an extreme orderliness: each part is organically relatedto other parts and it is through the fit between them that thesubcultural member makes sense of the world. For instance,it was the homology between an alternative value system(`Tune in, turn on, drop out'), hallucogenic drugs and acidrock which made the hippy culture cohere as a 'whole wayof life' for individual hippies. In Resistance Through Rituals,

114 SUBCULTURE: THE MEANING OF STYLEHall et al. crossed the concepts of homology and bricolageto provide a systematic explanation of why a particular sub-cultural style should appeal to a particular group of people.The authors asked the question: 'What specifically does asubcultural style signify to the members of the subculturethemselves?'

The answer was that the appropriated objects reassembledin the distinctive subcultural ensembles were 'made toreflect, express and resonate . . . aspects of group life' (Hallet al., 1976b). The objects chosen were, either intrinsically orin their adapted forms, homologous with the focal concerns,activities, group structure and collective self-image of thesubculture. They were 'objects in which (the subculturalmembers) could see their central values held and reflected'(Hall et al., 1976b).

The skinheads were cited to exemplify this principle. Theboots, braces and cropped hair were only consideredappropriate and hence meaningful because they communi-cated the desired qualities: 'hardness, masculinity andworking-classncss'. In this way 'The symbolic objectsdress, appearance, language, ritual occasions, styles ofinteraction, music were made to form a unity with thegroup's relations, situation, experience' (Hall et al., 1976b).

The punks would certainly seem to bear out this thesis.The subculture was nothing if not consistent. There was ahomological relation between the trashy cut-up clothes andspiky hair, the pogo and amphetamines, the spitting, thevomiting, the format of the fanzines, the insurrectionaryposes and the 'soulless', frantically driven music. The punkswore clothes which were the sartorial equivalent of swearwords, and they swore as they dressed with calculatedeffect, lacing obscenities into record notes and publicityreleases, interviews and love songs. Clothed in chaos, theyproduced Noise in the calmly orchestrated Crisis of everydaylife in the late 1970s a noise which made (no)sense inexactly the same way and to exactly the same extent as a

STYLE AS HOMOLOGY 115

piece of avant-garde music. If we were to write an epitaph forthe punk subculture, we could do no better than repeatPoly Styrene's famous dictum: 'Oh Bondage, Up Yours!',or somewhat more concisely: the forbidden is permitted, butby the same token, nothing, not even these forbiddensignifiers (bondage, safety pins, chains, hair-dye, etc.) issacred and fixed.

This absence of permanently sacred signifiers (icons)creates problems for the semiotician. How can we discernany positive values reflected in objects which were chosenonly to be discarded? For instance, we can say that the earlypunk ensembles gestured towards the significd's 'modernity'and 'working-classness'. The safety pins and bin linerssignified a relative material poverty which was eitherdirectly experienced and exaggerated or sympatheticallyassumed, and which in turn was made to stand for thespiritual paucity of everyday life. In other words, the safetypins, etc. 'enacted' that transition from real to symbolicscarcity which Paul Piccone (1969) has described as themovement from 'empty stomachs' to 'empty spirits andtherefore an empty life notwithstanding [the] chrome andthe plastic ... of the life style of bourgeois society'.

We could go further and say that even if the poverty wasbeing parodied, the wit was undeniably barbed; that be-neath the clownish make-up there lurked the unacceptedand disfigured face of capitalism; that beyond the horrorcircus antics a divided and unequal society was being elo-quently condemned. However, if we were to go furtherstill and describe punk music as the 'sound of the Westway',or the pogo as the 'high-rise leap', or to talk of bondage asreflecting the narrow options of working-class youth, wewould be treading on less certain ground. Such readings arcboth too literal and too conjectural. They are extrapolationsfrom the subculture's own prodigious rhetoric, and rhetoricis not self-explanatory: it may say what it means but it doesnot necessarily 'mean' what it 'says'. In other words, it is

VA,

116 SUBCULTURE: THE MEANING OF STYLE

opaque: its categories are part of its publicity. To returnonce more to Mepham (1974), 'The true text is recon-structed not by a process of piecemeal decoding, but by theidentification of the generative sets of ideological categoriesand its replacement by a different set.'

To reconstruct the true text of the punk subculture, totrace the source of its subversive practices, we must firstisolate the 'generative set' responsible for the subculture'sexotic displays. Certain semiotic facts are undeniable. Thepunk subculture, like every other youth culture, wasconstituted in a series of spectacular transformations of awhole range of commodities, values, common-sense atti-tudes, etc. It was through these adapted forms that certainsections of predominantly working-class youth were able torestate their opposition to dominant values and institutions.However, when we attempt to close in on specific items, weimmediately encounter problems. What, for instance, wasthe swastika being used to signify?

We can see how the symbol was made available to thepunks (via Bowie and Lou Reed's 'Berlin' phase). More-over, it clearly reflected the punks' interest in a decadentand evil Germany a Germany which had 'no future'. Itevoked a period redolent with a powerful mythology. Con-ventionally, as far as the British were concerned, the swas-tika signified 'enemy'. None the less, in punk usage, thesymbol lost its 'natural' meaning fascism. The punks werenot generally sympathetic to the parties of the extreme right.On the contrary, as I have argued (see pp. 66-7) theconflict with the resurrected teddy boys and the widespreadsupport for the anti-fascist movement (e.g. the Rock againstRacism campaign) seem to indicate that the punk sub-culture grew up partly as an antithetical response to the re-emergence of racism in the mid-7os. We must resort, then, tothe most obvious of explanations that the swastika wasworn because it was guaranteed to shock. (A punk asked byTime Out (17-23 December 1977) why she wore a swastika,

STYLE AS SIGNIFYING PRACTICE 117

replied: 'Punks just like to be hated'.) This representedmore than a simple inversion or inflection of the ordinarymeanings attached to an object. The signifier (swastika) hadbeen wilfully detached from the concept (Nazism) it con-ventionally signified, and although it had been re-positioned(as 'Berlin') within an alternative subcultural context, itsprimary value and appeal derived precisely from its lack ofmeaning: from its potential for deceit. It was exploited asan empty effect. We are forced to the conclusion that thecentral value 'held and reflected' in the swastika was thecommunicated absence of any such identifiable values. Ul-timately, the symbol was as 'dumb' as the rage it provoked.The key to punk style remains elusive. Instead of arriving atthe point where we can begin to make sense of the style, wehave reached the very place where meaning itself eva-porates.

Style as signifying practiceWe are surrounded by emptiness but it is an emptinessfilled with signs. (Lefebvre, 1971)

It would seem that those approaches to subculture basedupon a traditional semiotics (a semiotics which begins withsome notion of the 'message' of a combination of elementsreferring unanimously to a fixed number of signifieds) fail toprovide us with a 'way in' to the difficult and contradictorytext of punk style. Any attempt at extracting a final set ofmeanings from the seemingly endless, often apparently ran-dom, play of signifiers in evidence here seems doomed tofailure.

And yet, over the years, a branch of se4liotics has emergedwhich deals precisely with this problenti Here the simplenotion of reading as the revelation of a fixed number of con-cealed meanings is discarded in favour of the idea ofpolysemy whereby each text is seen to generate a potentiallyinfinite range of meanings. Attention is consequently directed

I I8 SUBCULTURE: THE MEANING OF STYLEtowards that point or more precisely, that level in anygiven text where the principle of meaning itself seems mostin doubt. Such an approach lays less stress on the primacyof structure and system in language (gangue), and moreupon the position of the speaking subject in discourse('parole'). It is concerned with the process of meaning-construction rather than with the final product.

Much of this work, principally associated with the TelQuel group in France, has grown out of an engagement withliterary and filmic texts. It involves an attempt to go beyondconventional theories of art (as mimesis, as representation,as a transparent reflection of reality, etc.) and to introduceinstead 'the notion of art as "work", as "practice", as aparticular transformation of reality, a version of reality, anaccount of reality'.'

One of the effects of this redefinition of interests has beento draw critical attention to the relationship between themeans of representation and the object represented, betweenwhat in traditional aesthetics have been called respectivelythe `form' and 'content' of a work of art. According to thisapproach, there can no longer be any absolute distinctionbetween these two terms and the primary recognition thatthe ways in which things are said the narrative structuresemployed impose quite rigid limitations on what can besaid is of course crucial. In particular, the notion that adetachable content can be inserted into a more or lessneutral form the assumption which seems to underpin theaesthetic of realism is deemed illusory because such anaesthetic 'denies its own status as articulation. . . . [in thiscase] the real is not articulated, it is' (MacCabe, 1974)2

Drawing on an alternative theory of aesthetics, rooted inmodernism and the avant-garde and taking as its modelBrecht's idea of an 'epic theatre',3 the Tel Quel group sets outto counter the prevailing notion of a transparent relationbetween sign and referent, signification and reality, throughthe concept of signifying practice. This phrase reflects exactly


the group's central concerns with the ideological implica-tions of form, with the idea of a positive construction and de-construction of meaning, and with what has come to becalled the 'productivity' of language. This approach seeslanguage as an active, transitive force which shapes andpositions the 'subject' (as speaker, writer, reader) while al-ways itself remaining 'in process' capable of infinite adapta-tion. This emphasis on signifying practice is accompaniedby a polemical insistence that art represents the triumph ofprocess over fixity, disruption over unity, 'collision' over

the triumph, that is, of the signifier over thesignified. It should be seen as part of the group's attempt tosubstitute the values of 'fissure' and contradiction for thepreoccupation with 'wholeness' (i.e. the text 'conceived as aclosed structure' (Lackner and Matias, 1972)) which is saidto characterize classic literary criticism.

Although much of this work is still at a tentative stage, itdoes offer a radically different perspective on style in sub-culture one which assigns a central place to the problemsof reading which we have encountered in our analysis ofpunk. Julia Kristeva's work on signification seems particu-larly useful. In La Revolution du Langage Poetique she exploresthe subversive possibilities within language through astudy of French symbolist poetry, and points to 'poeticlanguage' as the 'place where the social code is destroyedand renewed' (Kristeva, 1975). She counts as 'radical' thosesignifying practices which negate and disturb syntax 'thecondition of coherence and rationality' (White, 1977) andwhich therefore serve to erode the concept of `actantialposition' upon which the whole 'Symbolic Order,'" is seento rest.

The 'symbolic order' to which I have referred throughout should notbe confused with Kristeva's 'Symbolic Order' which is used in a sensederived specifically from Lacanian psychoanalysis. I use the term merelyto designate the apparent unity of the dominant ideological discourses inplay at any one time.

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Tim Legierse

'Is

120 SUBCULTURE: THE MEANING OF STYLETwo of Kristeva's interests seem to coincide with our own:

the creation of subordinate groups through positioning inlanguage (Kristeva is specifically interested in women), andthe disruption of the process through which such positioningis habitually achieved. In addition, the general idea ofsignifying practice (which she defines as 'the setting in placeand cutting through or traversing of a system of signs") canhelp us to rethink in a more subtle and complex way therelations not only between marginal and mainstream cul-tural formations but between the various subcultural stylesthemselves. For instance, we have seen how all subculturalstyle is based on a practice which has much in common withthe 'radical' collage aesthetic of surrealism and we shall beseeing how different styles represent different signifyingpractices. Beyond this I shall be arguing that the signifyingpractices embodied in punk were 'radical' in Kristeva'ssense: that they gestured towards a 'nowhere' and activelysought to remain silent, illegible.

We can now look more closely at the relationship betweenexperience, expression and signification in subculture; at thewhole question of style and our reading of style. To return toour example, we have seen how the punk style fitted to-gether homologically precisely through its lack of fit (hole:tee-shirt: : spitting: applause: : bin-liner: garment:: anarchy:order) by its refusal to cohere around a readily identifi-able set of central values. It cohered, instead, ellipticallythrough a chain of conspicuous absences. It was charac-terized by its unlocatedness its blankness and in it thiscan be contrasted with the skinhead style.

Whereas the skinheads theorized and fetishized their classposition, in order to effect a 'magical' return to an imaginedpast, the punks dislocated themselves from the parent cultureand were positioned instead on the outside: beyond the com-prehension of the average (wo)man in the street in a sciencefiction future. They played up their Otherness, 'happening'


on the world as aliens, inscrutables. Though punk rituals,accents and objects were deliberately used to signify working-classness, the exact origins of individual punks were dis-guised or symbolically disfigured by the make-up, masks andaliases which seem to have been used, like Breton's art, asploys 'to escape the principle of identity'.7

This workingclassness therefore tended to retain, even inpractice, even in its concretized forms, the dimensions of an idea.It was abstract, disembodied, dccontextualized. Bereft ofthe necessary details a name, a home, a history itrefused to make sense, to be grounded, 'read back' to itsorigins. It stood in violent contradiction to that other greatpunk signifier sexual 'kinkiness'. The two forms of de-viance social and sexual were juxtaposed to give animpression of multiple warping which was guaranteed todisconcert the most liberal of observers, to challenge the glibassertions of sociologists no matter how radical. In this way,although the punks referred continually to the realities ofschool, work, family and class, these references only madesense at one remove: they were passed through the fracturedcircuitry of punk style and re-presented as 'noise', disturb-ance, entropy.

In other words, although the punks self-consciouslymirrored what Paul Piccone (1969) calls the 'pre-categoricalrealities' of bourgeois society inequality, powerlessness,alienation this was only possible because punk style hadmade a decisive break not only with the parent culture butwith its own location in experience. This break was both in-scribed and re-enacted in the signifying practices embodiedin punk style. The punk ensembles, for instance, did not somuch magically resolve experienced contradictions as re-present the experience of contradiction itself in the form ofvisual puns (bondage, the ripped tee-shirt, etc.). Thus while itis true that the symbolic objects in punk style (the safety pins,the pogo, the ECT hairstyles) were 'made to form a "unity"


with the group's relations, situations, experience' (Hall et al.,1976b), this unity was at once crupturaT and 'expressive',or more precisely it expressed itself through rupture.

This is not to say, of course, that all punks were equallyaware of the disjunction between experience and significa-tion upon which the whole style was ultimately based. Thestyle no doubt made sense for the first wave of self-consciousinnovators at a level which remained inaccessible to thosewho became punks after the subculture had surfaced andbeen publicized. Punk is not unique in this: the distinctionbetween originals and hangers-on is always a significant onein subculture. Indeed, it is frequently verbalized (plasticpunks or safety-pin people, burrhcad rastas or rasta band-wagon, weekend hippies, etc. versus the 'authentic' people).For instance, the mods had an intricate system of classi-fication whereby the 'faces' and 'stylists' who made up theoriginal coterie were defined against the unimaginativemajority the pedestrian 'kids' and 'scooter boys' who wereaccused of trivializing and coarsening the precious modstyle. What is more, different youths bring different degreesof commitment to a subculture. It can represent a majordimension in people's lives an axis erected in the face of thefamily around which a secret and immaculate identity canbe made to cohere or it can be a slight distraction, a bit oflight relief from the monotonous but none the less para-mount realities of school, home and work. It can be used asa means of escape, of total detachment from the surroundingterrain, or as a way of fitting back in to it and settling downafter a week-end or evening spent letting off steam. In mostcases it is used, as Phil Cohen suggests, magically to achieveboth ends. However, despite these individual differences, themembers of a subculture must share a common language.And if a style is really to catch on, if it is to become genuinelypopular, it must say the right things in the right way at theright time. It must anticipate or encapsulate a mood, amoment. It must embody a sensibility, and the sensibility


which punk style embodied was essentially dislocated,ironic and self-aware.

Just as individual members of the same subculture can bemore or less conscious of what they are saying in style and inwhat ways they are saying it, so different subcultural stylesexhibit different degrees of rupture. The conspicuouslyscruffy, 'unwholesome' punks obtruded from the familiarlandscape of normalized forms in a more startling fashionthan the mods, tellingly described in a newspaper of thetime . . pin-neat, lively and clean', although the twogroups had none the less engaged in the same signifyingpractice (i.e. self-consciously subversive bricolage).

This partly explains or at least underpins internal sub-cultural hostilities. For example, the antagonism betweenthe teddy boy revivalists and the punk rockers went beyondany simple incompatability at the level of 'content'different music, dress, etc. beyond even the differentpolitical and racial affiliations of the two groups (see p. 67),the different relationships with the parent community, etc.(sec pp. 81-4) and was inscribed in the very way in whichthe two styles were constructed: the way in which theycommunicated (or refused to communicate) meaning.Teddy boys interviewed in the press regularly objected tothe punks' symbolic 'plundering' of the precious 50s ward-robe (the drains, the winklepickers, quiffs, etc.) and to theironic and impious uses to which these 'sacred' artefactswere put when 'cut up' and reworked into punk style wherepresumably they were contaminated by association (placednext to 'bovver boots' and latex bondage-wear !).8 Behindpunk's favoured 'cut ups' lay hints of disorder, of brcakdownand category confusion: a desire not only to erode racial andgender boundaries but also to confuse chronological se-quence by mixing up details from different periods.

As such, punk style was perhaps interpreted by the teddyboys as an affront to the traditional working-class values offorthrightness, plain speech and sexual puritanism which

,as


they had endorsed and revived. Like the reaction of therockers to the mods and the skinheads to the hippies, theteddy boy revival seems to have represented an 'authentic'working-class backlash to the proletarian posturings ofthe new wave. The way in which it signified, via a magicalreturn to the past, to the narrow confines of the com-munity and the parent culture, to the familiar and thelegible, was perfectly in tune with its inherent conservatism.'Not only did the teds react aggressively to punk objects and'meanings', they also reacted to the way in which thoseobjects were presented, those meanings constructed anddismantled. They did so by resorting to an altogethermore primitive 'language': by turning back, in GeorgeMelly's words (1972), to a "then" which was superior to"now" 'which, as Melly goes on to say, is 'a very anti-popconcept'.

We can express the difference between the two practicesin the following formula: one (i.e. the punks') is kinetic,transitive and concentrates attention on the act of transforma-tion performed upon the object: the other (i.e. the teds') isstatic, expressive, and concentrates attention on theobjects-in-themselves. We can perhaps grasp the nature of thisdistinction more clearly if we resort to another of Kristeva'scategories signifiance' . She has introduced this term todescribe the work of the signifier in the text in contrast tosignification which refers to the work of the signified.Roland Barthes defines the difference between the twooperations thus:

Signifiance is a process in the course of which the 'subject'of the text, escaping (conventional logic) and engaging inother logics (of the signifier, of contradiction) struggleswith meaning and is deconstructed ('lost'); signifianceand this is what immediately distinguishes it from signifi-cation is thus precisely a work; not the work by whichthe (intact and exterior) subject might try to master the


language. . . but that radical work (leaving nothing in-tact) through which the subject explores entering notobserving how the language works and undoes him orher. . . . Contrary to signification, signifiance cannot bereduced therefore, to communication, representation, ex-pression: it places the subject (of writer, reader) in thetext not as a projection . . . but as a 'loss', a 'disappear-ance'. (see Heath, 1977)

Elsewhere, in an attempt to specify the various kinds ofmeaning present in film, Barflies refers to the 'moving play'of signifiers as the 'third (obtuse) meaning' (the other twomeanings being the 'informational' and the 'symbolic'which, as they are 'closed' and 'obvious' arc normally theonly ones which concern the semiotician). The third mean-ing works against ('exceeds') the other two by 'blunting'them rounding off the 'obvious signified' and thus causing'the reading to slip'. Barthes uses as an example a still fromEisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin which shows an oldwoman, a headscarf pulled low over her forehead, caught ina classical, grief-stricken posture. At one level, the level ofthe obvious meaning, she seems to typify 'noble grief' but, asBarthes observes, her strange headdress, and rather 'stupid'fish-like eyes cut across this typification in such a way that'there is no guarantee of intentionality' (Barthes, 1977a).This, the third meaning, flows upstream as it were, againstthe supposed current of the text, preventing the text fromreaching its destination: a full and final closure. Barthes thusdescribes the third meaning as 'a gash rased [sic] of meaning(of the desire for meaning) . . . it outplays meaning sub-verts not the content but the whole practice of meaning'.

The ideas of `signifiance' and 'obtuse meaning' suggestthe presence in the text of an intrinsically subversive com-ponent. Our recognition of the operations performed withinthe text at the level of the signifier can help us to understandthe way in which certain subcultural styles seem to work


against the reader and to resist any authorative interpreta-tion. If we consider for a moment it becomes clear that notall subcultural styles 'play' with language to the same extent:some are more 'straightforward' than others and place ahigher priority on the construction and projection of a firmand coherent identity. For instance, ifwe return to our earlierexample, we could say that whereas the teddy boy stylesays its piece in a relatively direct and obvious way, andremains resolutely committed to a 'finished' meaning, to thesignified, to what Kristeva calls 'signification', punk style isin a constant state of assemblage, of flux. It introduces aheterogeneous set of signifiers which are liable to be super-seded at any moment by others no less productive. It invitesthe reader to 'slip into"signifiance' to lose the sense ofdirection, the direction of sense. Cut adrift from meaning,the punk style thus comes to approximate the state whichBarthes has described as 'a floating (the very form of thesignifier); a floating which would not destroy anything butwould be content simply to disorientate the Law' (Barthes,1977b).

The two styles, then, represent different signifying prac-tices which confront the reader with quite different prob-lems. We can gauge the extent of this difference (which isbasically a difference in the degree of closure) by means of ananalogy. In The Thief's Journal, Genet contrasts his relation-ship to the elusive Armand with his infatuation with themore transparent Stilittano in terms which underline thedistinction between the two practices: 'I compare Armandto the expanding universe. . . . Instead of being defined andreduced to observable limits, Armand constantly changes asI pursue him. On the other hand, Stilittano is already en-circled' (Genet, 1967).

The relationship between experience, expression andsignification is therefore not a constant in subculture. It canform a unity which is either more or less organic, strivingtowards some ideal coherence, or more or less ruptural,

STYLE AS SIGNIFYING PRACTIVE 127

reflecting the experience of breaks and contradictions. More-over, individual subcultures can be more or less 'conserva-tive' or 'progressive', integrated into the community, con-tinuous with the values of that community, or extrapolated

from it, defining themselves against the parent culture.Finally, these differences are reflected not only in the objectsof subcultural style, but in the signifying practices which re-present those objects and render them meaningful.

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Dick Hebdige, Subculture- The Meaning of Style