Page 217 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

outside and opposed to the mainstream culture, as represented by the mass media,
but are instead formed within and through the media. Further, subcultures are not
unified but marked by internal differences so that youth cultural difference is not
194 necessarily a form of resistance but is better grasped as cultural capital or
distinctions of taste. Indeed, such is the fragmentation of youth culture and the loss
of ‘authenticity’ and ‘style’ that we are said to be in a post-subculture period where
style marks not the politicization of youth but the aestheticization of politics.
The deconstruction of authenticity at the level of theory does not prevent
participants in youth subcultures from laying claim to it. Indeed, authenticity
claims remain at the heart of contemporary youth subcultures. Further, subcultures
can be understood as domains of creative consumption by which members act as
bricoleurs selecting and arranging elements of material commodities and
meaningful signs as the basis of multiple identity construction. This is now the
topsy-turvy postmodern world in which style is on the surface, subcultures are
mainstream, high culture is a subculture and fashion is retro.
Links Authenticity, bricolage, cultural capital, homology, popular culture, style

Subject position A subject position can be understood in terms of the empty spaces
or functions in discourse from which the world makes sense. Here, discourse
constitutes the ‘I’ through the processes of signification and the speaking subject is
dependent on the prior existence of discursive positions. Thus, for Foucault, bodies
are ‘subject to’ the regulatory power of discourse by which they become ‘subjects
for’ themselves and others. In this conception, the speaking subject is not the
author or originator of a statement but depends on the prior existence of discursive
positions. Virtually any individual can fill a particular subject-position when he or
she formulates a statement and the same individual may occupy a series of different
positions and thus assume different forms of subjectivity. Through identification or
‘emotional investment’ with the subject positions of discourses we create an
identity that embodies an illusion of wholeness.
Links Agency, discourse, identification, identity, poststructuralism, subjectivity

Subjectivity Subjectivity can be described as the condition of being a person and/or the
processes by which we become persons, that is, how we are constituted as subjects
and come to experience ourselves. Thus, to ask about subjectivity is to pose the
question ‘what is a person?’ and to answer the question is to construct a narrative
or story about the self. For cultural studies, subjectivity is often regarded, after
Foucault, as an ‘effect’ of discourse because subjectivity is constituted by the subject
positions that discourse obliges us to take up.
According to Foucault, the discourses of disciplinary power that constitute
subjectivity can be traced historically so that we can locate particular kinds of
‘regimes of the self’ in specific historical and cultural conjunctures. That is, the
subject is held to be wholly and only the product of history generated by discourses
that enable speaking persons to come into existence. Foucault describes a subject
that is the product of power that individualizes those subject to it. Here power is not