I. Hebdige's semiotic analysis, continued

A. How punk style works

1. "The punk subculture, like every other youth culture, was constituted in a series of spectacular transformations of a whole range of commodities, values, common-sense attitudes, etc. It was through these adapted forms that certain sections of predominantly working-class youth were able to restate their opposition to dominant values and institutions" (116)
2. Chaos, signs don't make sense to straights
3. Ruptures signifier-signified relationship, uses bricolage: swastika example
4. Not just inversion of meanings, but lack of meaning

B. Reading punk style

1. polysemy: signs generate infinite number of meanings
2. Julia Kristeva: "signifying practice" = "the setting in place and cutting through or traversing of a system of signs" (120); people as creators and manipulators of signs
3. Hebdige: punk = radical signifying practice, tries to remain illegibile

a. Working class identity is decontextualized
b. Floating Noise

C. Why punk?

1. Uproot dominant ideologies behind class system
2. Stylistic refusal to participate in consensus of meaning
3. Display power to deform

D. Punk's internal cohesion: homology, the elements of the lifestyle fit together
E. Does resistance succeed?

1. Punk signifiers are reappropriated as capitalist commodities, become "fit for public consumption" (130)
2. Reappropriation makes punk style comprehensible, conventional, absorbs subversion
3. Subcultural resistance through style is fleeting

 

II. Discussion: The Filth and the Fury

A. Noise
B. Semiotic guerrilla warfare
C. Polysemy
D. Homology

 

III. Is Language an Apt Metaphor for Understanding Clothing as Symbolic or Communicative?

A. Too much langue, not enough parole or individual agency

1. Signs seem more important than people
2. Neich: Doesn't show us individual clothing choices for moka: Scene from Ongka's Big Moka
3. "Unconscious" problem: How do we know what symbols mean?
4. Barthes: capital "F" Fashion: what is role of this knowledge in everyday clothing choices? Are the signs really so systematic and clear?

B. Lack of history

1. How are new meanings created?
2. Semiotic focus on system of signs fixes meanings, ignores clothing as agent to create and express social change

C. McCracken: We read clothing signs differently from how we read language signs

1. Ubiquity of clothing as language metaphor obscures how we read clothing
2. Ways we construct and read speech

a. Choose word from a category (paradigmatic class)
b. Combine with other words in syntagmatic chain
c. Result: Comprehensible communication that allows for infinite individual expression

3. Ways we construct and read outfits

a. We don't read outfits as syntagmatic chains, link by link
b. We read the overall effect of an outfit
c. Combinations aren't infinite
d. What happens when the overall look can't be read?

i. Puzzle solving: "Well, he wears that jacket because he used to be a businessman, but it doesn't fit with the pants and shoes because he's lost his job and is on the skids" (65)
ii. Stress some items, ignore others
iii. Interpretive confusion: "The exercise of even a small degree of combinatorial freedom by the wearer created not discourse, but confusion" (66)

D. Madonna in 1980s: code ruptures (first picture, second picture)
E. Smaller subsets understand the code of clothing: age, gender, class, etc.
F. McCracken's conclusion: If clothing is a communicative language, it's not an effective, complex, or flexible one
G. Clothing as self-construction?