Lei's questions for week 7

(1)/(2)Hebdige’s “from Subculture: the Meaning of Style” raised a seemingly irreconcilable contradiction between subculture and mainstream media. On the one hand, subculture such as Punk could only serve to challenge the dominating culture if it keeps in the local level. But a local-based Punk group could do little to influence the whole society. On the other hand, we agree that mainstream media is an arena where various groups contest for constructing meanings. But as long as the subculture is incorporated by mainstream industry/media, their challenging meanings become “frozen”. The band Oasis is just one of the examples. Its music got recognition and then soon got incorporated by mainstream music company. “Youth culture style may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones.”(P156)

It seems that Williams had the similar concern when he talked about “the complexity of hegemony”. There are some alternative opinions/values/meanings within the hegemony, “whatever the degree of internal controversy and variation, they do not in the end exceed the limits of the central corporate definitions.” (P137)

My questions are:

(1) How can we deal with the paradoxical relationship between subculture and mainstream culture? Is that subculture will be inevitably mainstreamalized if they win the public attention?
(2) Is that alternative opinion/value/meanings could only be alternative to the hegemony when it is expressed through alternative media? Can mainstream media still be the battlefield?


(3)Hall proposed three hypothetical positions of decoding, namely, dominant-hegemonic position, negotiated position, and oppositional position. In terms of the third one, Hall said that “it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and the connotative inflection given by a discourse but to decode the message in a globally contrary way. He/she detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the massage within some alternative framework of reference.” My impression is that these three positions are all interrelated. It seems impossible for a viewer exactly understand the way in which the producer encoded the message. In addition, a viewer’s understanding, thus the decoding, is always restricted by his/her own cultural construction. So my question is, does there really exist an oppositional position? Is that most viewers hold the second position, negotiated position?

(4)Questions about “class”.
When speculating on “hegemony”, “ideology”, and other concepts in cultural studies, many scholars would use the concept “class”. For example, Hebdige “if we pause to reflect for a moment, it should be obvious that access to the means by which ideas are disseminated in our society) is not the same for all classes.” Hall “Hegemony… is not universal and ‘given’ to the continuing rule of a particular class.” Volosinov, “Sign becomes the arena of the class struggle.” I feel the concept “class” kind of confusing. And the understanding of “class” even influences my understanding of the author’s point. Some times these scholars referred to Marx’s use of “class” in the context of capitalist society. Some times it seems that scholars deconstructed Marx’s concept of “class” and regarded it as gender, race and other social dimensions. So my question turns out that, how can we understand, or use, “class”? If we regard sign/media/culture is the arena of class struggle, can we say gender is also a class in a patriarchy society? Or we can only use “class” in socio-economic sense?


(5) Williams said that “we should look not for components of a product but for the conditions of a practice. When we find ourselves looking at a particular work, or groups of works, often realizing, as we do so, their essential community as well as their irreducible individuality, we should find ourselves attending first to the reality of their practice and the conditions of the practice as it was then executed.” But he further argued that such conditions “have been alienated to…mere background.” (P143) Is “condition of practice” as Williams coined different to historical context? How can we understand the “condition of the practice”?