Subcultures

Although I consider the Williams piece a very good introduction to the rest of the readings, I can’t help but differ greatly in some points. As always, I want to start by stating that all of this could simply be the result of me misinterpreting the piece. In any case, I’ll start with his discussion of workers: “the most important thing a worker produces is himself, himself in the fact of that kind of labour, or the broader historical emphasis of men producing themselves, themselves and their history” (p. 133). I understand what he was going for, but when we read this 29 years later, we have a different perspective on the importance of what worker produce and what they are. I also think that “piano-maker is base, but pianist is superstructure” (p. 133) is really going back to all those things that we had already established were wrong with Horkheimer and Adorno and their hi/low culture debate. Am I alone on this?
Next, I found his… concern with emphasizing “that hegemony is not a singular” (p. 135) a little weird. I don’t think hegemony is a concept that everyone uses as part of their daily vocabulary. Those that do, I’m wiling to bet, are in academia, thus, those people are aware of the definition of hegemony and thoroughly understand that it’s not “a” or “the” but simply hegemony and all that it entails.
Last but not least, his idea that “most writing, in any period, including our own, is a form of contribution to the effective dominant culture” (p. 140) threw me off a bit. Does that mean that “subculture” books are hegemonic in some way? Revolutionary literature and banned books contribute to the dominant culture? What is the role of censorship in all this?
The Hebdige piece was very interesting. My thesis was on a very interesting subculture in Puerto Rico and I read parts of the translated Subculture: The Meaning of Style. I think this reading not only brings back almost everything we have read and puts it into perspective; it also serves as a starting point to discuss the interaction between hegemony and culture. I believe the central point of the piece is that, by a process that has been repeated time and time again, media takes the “noise” (p. 153) and somehow finds a way to incorporate it into society. We could say that the essence of subcultures is killed by turning them into mainstream, understood, almost accepted, imitated “sounds” that even contribute to capitalism (i.e. clothing). In other words, Otherness is always reduced to Sameness. Is there a way to escape this? How much of that can be blamed on the research we do?
Also, I couldn’t help feeling like this had a lot to do with our society being “spectaclist”, as discussed last week. We like to look at “freaks”, put them in magazines and reality shows; they’ll eventually become regular. As Dr. Tremayne once explained, this practice forces us to perpetually reinvent what a freak is.
The Encoding/Decoding piece is central to all that we are doing in our individual research in one way or another. When we accept the fact that if no “meaning” is taken, there can be no “consumption” (p. 164), we can start to see why broadcast is more or less like a unidirectional train that leaves many, many consumers on the side. Then again, if we do a very specific product that will have much meaning for, say, Latinos, are we loosing Asians, withes and African Americans? Are they simply decoding in a very different way?
On the three hypothetical positions on TV deconstruction, I think the “dominant-hegemonic position” (p. 171) is, unfortunately, still seen today. Should we blame it on lack of education? The second one, the “negotiated code” (p. 172), is, hopefully, what that thing we insist on calling the “mass” is doing. Last, the “oppositional code” (p. 173) is, I believe, not only a tool but also a weapon. Now, for those quantitative intellects in class, how do we measure this?
This brings me to Ang. I think this piece should be re-titled: The power of interpretation. In any case, while reading it I couldn’t help but feeling like it was a call to move towards an academic understanding that respects the methodological differences: “What matters is not the certainty of knowledge about audiences, but an ongoing critical and intellectual engagement with multifarious ways in which we constitute ourselves through media consumption” (p. 189).
Now that the impossibility of achieving that one Truth has been stated, I completely agree with the idea that “the moment of decoding should be considered as a relatively autonomous process in which a constant struggle over the meaning of the text is fought out. Textual meanings do not reside in the texts themselves: a certain text can come to mean different things depending on the interdiscursive context in which viewers interpret it” (p. 177). What about the interdiscursive context in which the text is encoded? How do we deal with cultural differences inside an equal political/economical context?
The last thing I want to discuss about this is the female/male TV watching issue. Things have changed a lot since 1991, not enough, but a lot nonetheless. To say that the way women watch TV is more or less culturally arranged and not due to some “essential femininity” (p. 187) could de debated. I believe research has shown that men think in a more linear, simplistic way while women have the capacity to process many thoughts at one time. Men talk about one thing at a time while women can focus on a few things at once without getting them mixed. Isn’t this very important to all of our research? Is it politically incorrect to say that men are women are different in research?

I finally got my acrobat reader to work last night so I haven’t finished he Parameswaran article yet, but I will bring my thoughts to class.