Perspective

Dick Hebdige's Subculture is an academic work that tries to articulate the relationship between style and culture. Hebdige's depiction of style, which is strongly informed by Marxist philosophy, is both materialist and subversive. Subcultures, the author argues, use iconographic objects to define a social space separate from an all-defining mass culture. Hebdige values the hows and whys of social definition, depicting a cultural struggle between those with power and those without.

Subculture often reads like a textbook on semiotics. There is much emphasis placed on material objects and the conflicting ways in which they are defined and used. Of particular concern to Hebdige is the way in which one culture dominates another by deciding the meaning of common objects. What Hebdige presents is a revolution of language, as subcultures dare to redefine objects by changing their use or context. In this way, argues Hebdige, a subculture might bring...