Page 215 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

and cultural structures are often said to be constraining and determining of actors
and action and as such are often contrasted to the notion of agency.
For example, class structure can be understood as a classification of persons into
192 groups based on shared socio-economic conditions who are a part of a system of
relations involving other classes in the context of an overall stratification system.
As such, a class structure is a relational set of patterned inequalities with economic,
social, political and ideological dimensions. However, in both the linguistic and
social sense structures are ‘virtual’ in that they do not exist as things or entities that
one can find. Rather, a structure exists in the mind of the beholder and is deployed
as an analytic tool for specific purposes.
Links Agency, determinism, poststructuralism, semiotics, structuralism, structuration

Style The idea of style played an important part in the early youth subculture theory
developed within cultural studies and in the work of Dick Hebdige in particular. In
this context, style was constituted by the signifying practices of youth subcultures,
including the display of codes of meaning achieved via the transformation of
commodities as cultural signs. Here style involves the organization of objects in
conjunction with activities and attitudes through active bricolage to signify
difference and identity.
Thus, according to Hebdige, British Punk style of the late 1970s was both ordered
and meaningful even as it signified noise and chaos. Punk was a ‘revolting style’
that created an ensemble of the perverse and abnormal: safety pins, bin liners, dyed
hair, painted faces, graffitied shirts and the iconography of sexual fetishism (leather
bondage gear, fishnet stockings, etc.). In Hebdige’s account, Punk was not simply
responding to the crisis of British decline manifested in joblessness, poverty and
changing moral standards but dramatized it in an expression of anger and
frustration. At the same time, Punk was an especially dislocated, self-aware and
ironic mode of signification.
Other members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies had also argued
that youth subcultural style can be understood as a form of symbolic resistance. For
example, it had been suggested that youth subcultures sought to reinvent the lost
community and values of the working class through stylization. Thus, Skinheads
were held to be enacting an imaginary recapturing of working class male ‘hardness’
through their cropped hair, boots, jeans and braces. Their style stressed the resources
of working class collectivism and territoriality through the coherence and loyalty
of ‘the gang’ of mates.
It should be noted that cultural studies writers have tended to explore the more
spectacular youth cultures. That is, the visible, loud, different, avant-garde youth
styles that have stood out and demanded attention. Further, critics of Hebdige
argued that the concept of style in his hands had become over-inflated as resistance
while resistance was reduced to questions of style. Thus it was said that style had
been robbed of its elements of fun and flattened down to become only a political
question.

Links Bricolage, code, homology, identity, resistance, semiotics, subculture, youth culture