8 Subcultures and Countercultures The

8 Subcultures and Countercultures Not a moment passes without each one of us experiencing, on every level of reality, the contradiction between oppression and freedom; without each one of us being caught up and weirdly twisted by two antagonistic perspectives simultaneously. (Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 4) The Mainstream and Other Streams To a large degree, the way in which we have been addressing popular culture in this book has been to focus on the dominant or most prevalent forms of culture in the Western world today. By “dominant” we mean what is usually described as mass culture—forms of culture that are accessible, widely available, and intended for consumption by as many people as possible. There is no real mystery about the forms of popular culture that one might consider to be dominant: Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters, pop music on the Billboard Top 40, broadcast television, video games, Google, and so on. There are two ways in which such things might be seen as dominant. First, if we measure the prevalence of this or that form of culture by the sheer number of people that listen to it, watch it, or otherwise participate in it (whether this is measured by attendance, sales, or revenue figures), James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) or Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012) would be dominant in ways in which films such as Gary Burns’s Waydowntown (2000) or Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007) could only hope to be. Second, dominance can refer to the core set of beliefs, ideas, and identities that are circulated through forms of popular culture. In this respect, Waydowntown might be seen as an expression of dominant culture, too. Though made on a small budget and shot in the Western Canadian city of Calgary, the critique of dead end business culture articulated in Waydowntown shares a great deal with other much more popular films, such as American Beauty or Office Space (see Figure 8.1). Even though Waydowntown is an indie film, financed outside of the major studio system, formally and structurally it resembles the most common forms of movie making (My Winnipeg’s mockumentary style is slightly more adventurous). In this second, wider understanding of dominance, a small or limited audience is not in and of itself a guarantee that a film or any other form of popular culture advocates or expresses views and ideas contrary to mainstream, dominant culture. Copyright © 2017. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved. & Sons, Incorporated. © 2017. John Wiley Copyright Szeman, I., & O'Brien, S. (2017). Popular culture : A user's guide. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from ufvca on 2020-11-24 19:32:16. Figure 8.1 Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg is a formally inventive and adventurous mockumentary about his hometown, Winnipeg. Source: © AF archive/Alamy While we have tended to focus on the meaning and impact of dominant forms of popular culture, some of the ideas that we have been discussing in the preceding chapters cannot help but cast doubt on the existence of this very fact—that is, that there is anything like a single, dominant culture. In Chapter 4, we challenged Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry thesis, which imagines people as little more than consumers who are completely duped by the nature of the capitalist world in which they live; in our discussion of consumption in Chapter 5, we drew attention to the multiple ways in which people make meaning through their varied practices of consumption; and in our discussion of groups and identities in the previous two chapters, it is clear that identity formation, too, is more complicated than might be suggested by the idea of dominant forms of popular culture. In the context of these discussions, “mainstream” culture looks a lot less mainstream than we Copyright © 2017. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved. & Sons, Incorporated. © 2017. John Wiley Copyright generally tend to imagine when we employ this term. Or to put this another way: one of the things that becomes clear when studying popular culture is that our idea of the mainstream is sometimes less a reality than it is a cultural construction that regulates our activities through the Szeman, I., & O'Brien, S. (2017). Popular culture : A user's guide. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from ufvca on 2020-11-24 19:32:16. establishment of very powerful cultural norms—norms that everyone adheres to in some ways, but that everyone also contravenes or goes against in numerous others. No one is purely mainstream, not even the characters in the television series Friends (who, for instance, revel in free pornography, engage in sexual relationships outside of marriage, and engage in other forms of behavior that belie their otherwise straight, cleancut image). As popular culture itself has pointed out over and over again, there is an infinity of strange and unusual things happening behind the “normal,” everyday façade of white picket fences and suburban garage doors (as you can see in any episode of Big Love, Breaking Bad, or Weeds). Yet to say that the idea of the mainstream is a creation is not to say that there is no such thing. There do seem to be general, widespread patterns of social behavior present within societies that guide both individual and group activity. As we have seen throughout this book, one of the main reasons why scholars have become interested in the study of popular culture is because of the powerful role it plays in generating and regulating social behavior. Scholars are also interested in how popular culture has been used to work against dominant ways of behaving and acting, in both the minor ways in which (as we suggested above) everyone goes against the grain of the mainstream in some way, but also in more extreme or direct ways. In this chapter, we will be focusing on groups that challenge the values, ideas, and structures of mainstream culture consciously and directly through their actions and practices: subcultures and countercultures. In their actions and practices, subcultures and countercultures oppose dominant structures that they see as limiting, repressive, and/or problematic. Subcultures and countercultures are engaged in the struggle to create new and different forms of social reality. In many cases, but especially since the Second World War, this struggle has often been directed against popular or mass culture itself; paradoxically, this attack on popular culture has frequently come through the creation of new forms of popular culture, which themselves tend to be absorbed into mainstream culture in a perpetual backandforth that has shaped contemporary experience profoundly. Minority–Majority Relationships In the next section, we will establish some preliminary distinctions between these two kinds of groups. But first, we need to note that the very idea of subcultures and countercultures immediately reinvokes the idea of a dominant culture that we challenged above. Each of the prefixes “sub” and “counter” implies a number of things, as we will see below. One of the main things that they signify, however, is the relationship of a smaller “culture,” however understood, to the larger, defining culture of a given society at a given moment. In other words, whatever else they might signal, the concepts of subcultures and countercultures oppose a minority group to the majority: it makes no sense to speak of a subculture or a counterculture that is “dominant.” Furthermore, this minority–majority relationship is generally an antagonistic one. While it has Copyright © 2017. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved. & Sons, Incorporated. © 2017. John Wiley Copyright become common to use the term “subculture” to refer to all kinds of practices and activities that might be considered strange or unusual, we will try to use these concepts somewhat more precisely. For example, people who play Scrabble seriously enough to attend tournaments and vie for national (and even global) championships might be interesting or unusual. But these Szeman, I., & O'Brien, S. (2017). Popular culture : A user's guide. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from ufvca on 2020-11-24 19:32:16. Scrabble players do not constitute a genuine subculture. Why not? First, players of Scrabble— no matter how attentively or religiously—are, in the end, playing a popular game by its prescribed rules. This stands in contrast to, for instance, writers of “slash fiction,” who express their own desires and fantasies by writing original (and often erotically charged) stories that borrow characters from popular televisions shows such as Star Trek. Similarly, Scrabble players don’t bend a popular cultural form into a different shape—like, for example, the numerous fans who produced and distributed online “improved” versions of George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, or have mocked films, videos, and television programs on YouTube. Through their actions, writers of slash fiction, the creators of the “phantom edits,” and YouTube “mockumentarians” all express dissatisfaction with the limits and constraints of popular culture; the same cannot be said of serious Scrabble players, who can easily indulge their passion for the game while being otherwise upstanding, productive citizens. Of course, the same could be said for our other two examples: a phantom editor by night could well be a university professor by day, and YouTube videomakers can be students, lawyers, doctors, or whatever.

Load more