Dick Hebdige's Conception Of Sub-Culture

A survey of Punk: From Political and Cultural Production to Recuperation

As for everything that has to do with culture, identifying what a subculture is and which groups can be considered subcultures is particularly challenging. In an attempt to pose the bases for an academic understanding of subcultures, Dick Hebdige (Subcultures: The Meaning of Style, 1979) provides a peculiar metaphor to explain what subcultures are. He compares subculture to a “noise” (p. 90) that interferes with the perfectly orchestrated “sounds” of the dominant culture and thus identifies subculture as a culture within a culture that poses itself against the dominant. Just like any culture, then, subcultures are constituted of a specific set of shared practices and

Punk was born with the intent to set itself apart from the dominant culture, even going as far as choosing a name that is a denigrating in itself, its defiant nature was encoded into a specific set of shared cultural products (music, zines) and visual signifiers (dyed hair, clothes, patches, pins) taken from the dominant culture and stripped off their original meaning. In the subculture, they found a new expression that communicated at once defiance and political engagement, as they were a direct manifestation of Punk ideology: an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist ethic expressed by DIY and a strong stress on individual freedom and non-conformity. Born in the ‘70s, some of its elements were influenced by preexisting youth subcultures, for example, fashion was inspired by Mods, Skinheads, and bikers, while its ideological components owe in part to the Hippie nonviolent and antiauthoritarian movement and just like Hippie it spread all over the world and came to inspire new subcultures, like Goth, Steampunk, and

For example, the DIY ethic effectively embodied Punk values: a profound desire for independence and the rejection of consumerism inspired Punks to stop asking the society to provide for their needs but start producing products and ideology by themselves, a practice that reechoes Benjamin’s notion of the author as producer. Thanks to the notion of prefigurative politics, Walter Benjamin advocates the presence of political practice in the very act that is being performed, by arguing that the form needs to mimic the politics and enact social change through one’s own means of production (as cited in Ducombe, 2002). Punk was politically invested, sympathizing with left-wing ideology and anarchism, and this political sensibility was reflected in every aspect of the subculture, cultural products