The Appropriation and Obliteration of
Subculture by Mass Culture
Advertising in the 1990's is
increasingly utilizing images of the working class and production to
sell products to hip young consumers. This is especially interesting
since advertisers have long tried to sell the idea of a
production-free society while courting the possibility of upward
mobility through commodity consumption. This new imagery, which seems
to be expressly interested in the production of products and the
workers who produce them, is an attempt to turn the working class'
decreased consumption abilities - i.e., Bourdieu's "choice of the
necessary" - into a style for the bourgeois to consume.
Dick Hebdige describes the commodity
form of reappropriation, by which deviant ideological subcultures are
reabsorbed into the system by turning their rejection of mass culture
back into mass culture through commodification. The ideological form
of reappropriation is the reverse, the exoticising of subcultures to
deny their cultural validity - remember punk?
Due to these processes, and the high
rate at which marketable images are exhausted, subculture is no
longer a realistic form of cultural resistance: as soon as subculture
forms, it is reincorporated into the system. In response, the only
form of resistance is to cease consuming, to adopt the choice of the
necessary and buy only what is needed. By ransacking working class
images, adopting the working class as a style, advertisers hope to
make mass-production and mass-consumption authentic again, and to
deny the power of those who do not consume. Interestingly, this trend
is being applyed with both realist and non-realist codes. The use of obviously non-realist codes (as
opposed to a the formally authentic codes of realism employed by
companies like Miller) in conjunction with working class images turns
the working class into iconography of the inauthentic. It should be
noted, of course, that working class images are not true
representations, but rather a fabrication of imagined working class
conditions. A pastiche of different working class scenes and times
have been thrown together in order to create a world in which
bourgeois youth can consume authenticity and reality. The "white
trash" chic appeals as if it is counter to bourgeois norms of
behavior, and because it is ostensibly free of consumption worries.
Out of the flotsam and jetsam of mass culture images, advertisers are
inventing the appearence of a subculture, complete with a
counter-consumption ideology. Yet, it is fraught with contradictions
and ideologically hollow.
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