Subcultures

 

In a brilliant section entitled ‘Style as bricolage’,

 Dick Hebdige (Subculture, the Meaning of Style, Routledge, 1991) says:

 

“…the concept of bricolage can be used to explain how subcultural styles

 are constructed. In The Savage Mind Levi-Strauss shows

how the magical modes utilized by primitive peoples

(superstition, sorcery, myth)

can be seen as implicitly coherent,

though explicitly bewildering,

systems of connection between things

which perfectly equip their users to ‘think’ their own world….

 

“…the teddy boy’s theft and transformation of the Edwardian style

revived in the early 1950s by Savile Row for wealthy young men

about town can be construed as an act of bricolage.

Similarly the mods could be said to be acting as

bricoleurs when they appropriated another

 range of commodities by placing them in a

symbolic ensemble which served to erase

or subvert their original straight meanings….

 metal combs, honed to a razor like sharpness,

turned narcissism into an offensive weapon.

Union jacks were emblazoned on the backs of

grubby parka anoraks or cut up and converted into

smartly tailored jackets…

 

It is as if Teddy Boy attire, combs and Union Jacks were titles of books,

but what was inside the cover was radically different to that

expected. Same title, same outer wrapper, same container, but different meaning.

Surprise, surprise...

 

“…we could use Umberto Eco’s phrase ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’

 (Eco, ‘Towards a Semiotic Enquiry into the Television Message’,

 W.P.C.S. 3, University of Birmingham, 1972)

to describe these subversive practices.

The war may be conducted at a level

beneath the consciousness of the individual members

 of a spectacular subculture

(though the subculture is still, at another level, an intentional communication

 … but with the emergence of such a group,

‘war – and it is Surrealism’s war – is declared

on a world of surfaces

(Annette Michelson, quoted Lippard, 1970)

 

“The radical aesthetic practices of Dada and Surrealism

dream work, collage, ‘ready mades’, etc – are certainly relevant here. …

Breton’s manifestos (1924 and 1929) established the basic premise of surrealism:

that a new ‘surreality’ would emerge through the subversion of common sense,

the collapse of prevalent logical categories and oppositions

(e.g. dream/reality, work/play)

and the celebration of the abnormal and the forbidden.

This was to be achieved principally through a

‘juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities’

(Reverdy, 1918) exemplified for Breton in Lautreamont’s bizarre phrase:

‘Beautiful like a chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table’…”

 

“Obviously these practices have their corollary in bricolage,

the subcultural bricoleur, like the ‘author’ of a surrealist collage,

typically ‘juxtaposes two apparently incompatible realities

(i.e. “flag”: “jacket”; “hole”: “teeshirt”; “comb”: “Weapon”)

on an apparently unsuitable scale…and…it is there that the explosive junction occurs’

(Max Ernst, ‘Beyond Painting and Other Writing by the Artist and His Friends’, ed. B. Karpel, Sculz, 1948)

 

Contrast,

as we saw in the case of colour,

gets attention.

It is a form of ‘Spike’

information surges associated with a sharp

boundary.