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 style: different meanings in different circumstances

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1  style: different meanings in different circumstances

2 “London calling, now don’t look to us,
Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust. London calling, see we ain’t got no swing Except for the reign of that truncheon thing. The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in, Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin, Engines stop running, but I have no fear, ‘Cause London is drowning and I live by the river.” The Clash

3  dominant representation: individual freedom, non-conformity
within a permissive British society  Britishness

4 “... each subculture represents a different handling of the ‘raw material of social ... existence’.”
“Each subcultural 'instance' represents a 'solution' to a specific set of circumstances, to particular problems and contradictions ... in response to different conjunctures ...” “The twin concepts of conjuncture and specificity (each subculture representing ... a particular response to a particular set of circumstances) ...” ‘set of circumstances’  subculture: specific response (‘specificity’) to specific set of circumstances (‘conjuncture’), expressed in style

5 economic recovery and cautious optimism,
1950s Teddy Boys conjuncture: economic recovery and cautious optimism, anxieties about effects of black immigration Teddy Boys: anti-immigrant, working-class ‘theft’ of upper-class style from dandies of Edwardian period ( ), narcissism and sexual aggressiveness

6 ‘revival’ makes Teddy Boys part of British heritage,
conjuncture: working-class disillusionment with politics, decline of welfare state, faltering economy, industrial disputes, shutdowns, picket-line clashes etc. 1970s Teddy Boys: ‘revival’ makes Teddy Boys part of British heritage, reactionary, close to parent culture

7 Sex Pistols

8 Malcolm McLaren/Vivienne Westwood:
Sid Vicious Johnny Rotten Malcolm McLaren/Vivienne Westwood: S&M-inspired “anti-fashion”: safety pins, chains, dog collars etc.; tartan

9 Sid Vicious by Jamie Reid

10  bricolage: objects appropriated and given new meanings

11 “God save our gracious Queen, Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen: Send her victorious, Happy and glorious, Long to reign over us: God save the Queen.” “God save the Queen, She ain’t no human being. There is no future in England’s dreamland.”  destruction of traditional forms of meaning

12 “... the punks seemed to be parodying the alienation and emptiness which have caused sociologists so much concern, realizing in a deliberate and wilful fashion the direst predictions of the most scathing social critics, and celebrating in mock-heroic terms the death of the community and the collapse of traditional forms of meaning.”

13 “The typical members of a working-class youth culture in part contest and in part agree with the dominant definitions of who and what they are, and there is a substantial amount of shared ideological ground not only between them and the adult working-class culture ... but also between them and the dominant culture ...”

14 “... the punks were not only directly responding to increasing joblessness, changing moral standards, the rediscovery of poverty, the Depression etc., they were dramatizing what had come to be called 'Britain's decline' ...” “The punks appropriated the rhetoric of crisis which had filled the airwaves and the editorials throughout the period and translated it into tangible (and visible) terms.”  : “Winter of Discontent” (The Sun)  1979: Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the general elections

15 “... punk now is a joke, actually, it's been turned into a commercial carnival. I don't think it bears any resemblance to what it started out as, and I don't think it's fulfilled very many of its original aims ...”

16 carnivalesque (literary mode)  carnival (social institution)
“As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.” “... the popular-festive carnival principle is indestructible. Though narrowed and weakened, it still continues to fertilize various areas of life and culture.”  Punk: anarchic, libertarian, utopian tendency; contests who can say what how

17 “... to consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted.” re-functioning of commonplace objects “contrary to their common use”  Punk: new meanings through incongruous combination, bricolage appropriation

18  Punk: collective participation, DIY aesthetics;
“Freedom and equality are expressed in familiar blows, a coarse bodily contact. ... Everybody participates.”  Punk: collective participation, DIY aesthetics; riot gig: participation, pleasure, loss of self

19 “... punk now is a joke, actually, it's been turned into a commercial carnival ...”

20 “Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art. As Shakespeare's Olivia remarks, there is no slander in an allowed fool.” “Over the centuries, popular carnival throughout Europe ... providing the common people with a safety valve for subversive feelings ...” (Eagleton, "Football: A Dear Friend to Capitalism").  individual freedom and non-conformity: permitted by hegemony, maintains established order

21 Storey, John. “Rockin’ Hegemony: West Coast Rock and Amerika’s War in Vietnam."
“... the process Gramsci called hegemony: the way dominant groups in society negotiate oppositional voices on to a terrain which secures for the dominant groups a continued position of leadership. West Coast rock was not denied expression, but its expression was articulated in the economic interests of the capitalist music industry.” “... like all popular cultural initiatives under capitalism, it faced three possible futures: marginalization, disappearance, or incorporation into the system’s profit-making concerns.”  Hebdige (1988): power of commercial culture to appropriate and indeed produce counter-hegemonic styles

22 http://www. isisgallery

23

24  incorporated into/appropriated by commercial culture as manifestation of postmodernism, form of radical chic etc. and /15.jpg

25  dominant representation: individual freedom, non-conformity within a permissive, culturally diverse British society

26 Review subculture: conjuncture and specificity (Hebdige) bricolage (Lévi-Strauss) carnival (Bakhtin, Eagleton) hegemony (Gramsci)


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