Subculture

P2.3In the style made up of mundane objects which have a double meaning. On the other hand, they warn the ‘straight’ world in advance of a sinister presence—the presence of difference—and draw down upon themselves vague suspicious, uneasy laughter, ‘white and dumb rages’. On the other hand, for those who erect them into icons, who use them as words or as curses, these objects become signs of forbidden identity, sources of value.P100Style as intentional communicationI speak through my clothes. (Eco, 1973)Not only the expressly intended communicative object….but every object may be viewed….as a signEco,U (1973) ‘Social Life as A Sign System’, in D.Robey(ed.),Structuralism: The Wolfson College Lectures 1972, CapeP101The conventional outfits worn by the average man and women in the street are chosen within the constraints of finance, ‘taste’, preference, etc, and these choices are undoubtedly significant. Each ensemble has its place in an internal system of differences—the conventional modes of sartorial discourse—which fit a corresponding set of socially prescribed roles and options. These choices contain a whole range of messages which are transmitted through the finely graded distinctions of a number of interlocking sets—class and status, self-image and attractiveness, ect.P102The communication of a significant difference, then (and the parallel communication of a group identity) is the ‘point’ behind the style of all spectacular subcultures.Style as bricolage

When I approached this book, it was the last reading-list book required by Prof. Shi which gave a more inside view to the progress of the youth history. The subculture development and the youth engagement within were regarded as a chronile history of the races and the relationship: the mingling of the each other tells us the world is a whole, nonthing could be absolutely detached from it. In this book, it defines culture as a product and a process (p.5) with a critical attention on a whole range of controversial issues: The quality of life, the effects in human terms of mechanization, the division of labour and the creation of a mass society. culture studies sat rather uncomfortably on the fence between these two conflicting defitinations: culture as a standard of excellence and culture as a whole way of life. It requires the scholars to read the society within the requisite subtlety and the two ideas could finally be reconciled. Here semiotics provides a wat of reading signs derived from the linguist Saussure. Barthes, concerned with how all the apparently spontaneous forms and rituals of contemporary bourgeois society are subject to a systemetic distortion. The culture extends beyond the library, the operahouse and the theatre to encompass the whole of everyday life. Barthes set out to examine the normally hidden set of rules codes and conventions through which meanings particular to specific social groups are rendered universal and given for the whole of society. Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring classes (p 15). The term hegemony refers to a situation in which a provisional alliance of certain social groups can exert total social authority over other subordinate groups, not simply by coercion or by direct imposition of ruling ideas, but by winning and shaping consent so that the power of the dominat classes aprears legitimate and natural. But how the subversive culure, the black, the working class culture overthrow the the white, the middle class. The punk culture, with the mose invasive elements, dominates the Britain YOuth history ever since the 70s.