“Thus, as soon as the original innovations which signify ‘subculture’ are translated into commodities and made generally available, they become ‘frozen.” once removed from their private contexts by the small entrepreneurs and big fashion interests who produce them on a mass scale, they become codified, made comprehensible, rendered at one public property and profitable merchandise. (132)
This quote was the most impactful to me out of what Hebdige discusses. He writes that once a subculture is taken by the mainstream, it loses its uniqueness because the mainstream does not understand the original innovation that went into the subculture. The mainstream wants to take the style of the subculture and mass produce for the masses. Walter Benjamin writes about authenticity is key to the value of the original work. Thus, when a subculture becomes replicated for the mainstream, it loses its authenticity and thus its true value.
This quote reminds me of the current Youtube sphere and the mainstream style that has developed because of it. When Youtube started out, it became a subculture of creators who used a specific style of editing and method of speaking in order to talk about/ review/ vlog or anything else they wanted to do. However, as Youtube has become more mainstream, media outside of media has started to replicate the style of Youtube. The use of a “jump cut” has become more used in cinema and has become mainstream. I argue that the appearance of Youtube helped to raise the amount of “Found footage” style films that have come out in the past couple of years. However, due to this translation of the subculture innovations, whenever the mainstream uses Youtube style editing or manner of speech, it comes off as fake and detracts from the value of the creators on the platform.
Allison, I appreciate your insights on Hebdige’s argument and can see that he is making various points regarding the underlying fabric of subcultures, as well as how they are fully capable of disrupting the current ideology through their profit-seeking reproduction. In fact, he seems to suggest that subcultures even threaten ideologies if they dominate too much within society, hence subcultures represent “noise,” not “sound.” Furthermore, Hebdige is saying that subcultures break off from what is considered to be the norm and insinuates that they have massive potential to develop their own set of values for consumers to partake in. Based on my observations, most people perceive subcultures as an “interference” because they are not relevant enough to significantly impact their lives. Plus, Benjamin’s theory alludes to how the authenticity of any work of art becomes lost once the original reaches replication [on a mass scale] and fails to be founded on ritual [as a result of being founded on politics]. Subcultures will always fascinate me due to the notion that they are not “fixed” or “frozen” on their own, but change once they are made generally available. Hot Topic is a great example from class that relates to multiple arguments proposed by Hebdige, since it involves the retail of clothing and accessories whose trends have come and gone. Upon closer inspection, trends are yet another instance of subcultures interfering with the “orderly sequence” and thus becoming codified, since they disrupt what consumers deem normative and eventually burn out, only to reappear later with slight variations. Perhaps this is why the culture industry is infected with sameness, which refers back to what Horkheimer and Adorno discuss in their text. Overall, Hebdige is synthesizing the theorists who came before him, specifically De Saussure regarding the community assigning significance to the various signs of subcultures and Althusser regarding how we are unconsciously bound to countless ideologies of subcultures.
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