style . communication . bricolage

"Subculture: The Meaning of Style" by Dick Hebdige

[p.102] By repositioning and recontextualizing commodities, by subverting their conventional uses and inventing new ones, the subcultural stylist gives the lie to what Althusser has called the 'false obviousness of everyday practice' [Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1968), Reading Capital, New Left Books.], and opens up the world of objects to new and covertly oppositional readings. The communication of a significant difference, then (and the parallel communication of a group identity), is the 'point' behind the style of all spectacular subcultures. (that's what i am doing~)

CASE-EXAMPLE [p.103] In The Savage Mind Levi-Strauss shows how the magical modes utilized by primitive peoples (superstition, sorcery, myth) can be seen as implicitly coherent, though explicitly bewildering, systems of connection between things which perfectly equip their users to 'think' their own world. These magical systems of connection have a common feature: they are capable of infinite extension because basic elements can be used in a variety of improvised combinations to generate new meanings within them.

[p.103-104] [Bricolage] refers to the means by which the non-literate, non-technical mind of so-called 'primitive' man responds to the world around him. The process involves a 'science of concrete' (as opposed to our 'civilized' science of the 'abstract') which far from lacking logic, in fact carefully and precisely orders, classifies and arranges into structures the minutiae of the physical world in all their profusion by means of a 'logic' which is not our own. The structures, 'improvised' or made up (these are rough translation of the process of bricoler) as ad hoc responses to an environment, then serve to establish homologies and analogies between the ordering of nature and that of society, and so satisfactorily 'explain' the world and make it able to be lived in. [Hawkes, T. (1977), Structuralism and Semiotics, Methuen.]

[p.104] Together, object and meaning constitute a sign, and, within any one culture, such signs are assembled, repeatedly, into characteristic forms of discourse. However, when the bricoleur re-locates the significant object in a different position within that discourse, using the same overall repertoire of signs, or when that object is placed within a different total ensemble, a new discourse is constituted, a different message is conveyed. [Clarke, J. and Jefferson, T. (1976), 'Working Class Youth Cultures' in G. Mungham and C. Pearson (eds), Working Class Youth Culture, Routledge & Kegan Paul.]

[p.105] The radical aesthetic practices of Dada and Surrealism - dream work, collage, 'ready-mades', etc. - are certainly relevant here.

[p.105] Breton's manifestos [Breton, A. (1924), 'The First Surrealist Manifesto', in R. Seaver and H. Lane (eds), Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, 1972. & Breton, A. (1929), 'The Second Surrealist Manifesto', in R. Seaver and H. Lane (eds), Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, 1972.] established the basic premise of surrealism: that a new 'surreality' would emerge through the subversion of common sense, the collapse of prevalent logical categories and oppositions (e.g. dream/reality, work/play) and the celebration of the abnormal and the forbidden. This was to be achieved principally through 'juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities' [Reverdy, P. (1918), Nord-Sud.] exemplified for Breton in Lautreamont's bizarre phrase: 'Beautiful like the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table' [Lautreamont, Comte de (1970), Chants du Maldoror, Alison & Busby.].

[p.105-106] In The Crisis of Object, Breton further theorized this 'collage aesthetic', arguing rather optimistically that an assault on the syntax of everyday life which dictates the ways in which the most mundane objects are used, would instigate 1)...a total revolution of the object: acting to divert the object from its ends by coupling it to a new name and signing it. 2)...Perturbation and deformation are in demand here for their own sakes. ...Objects thus reassembled have in common the fact that they derive from and yet succeed in differing from the objects which surround us, by simple change of role. [Breton, A. (1936), 'Crisis of the Object', in L. Lippard (ed.), Surrealists on Art, Spectrum, 1970.]

- BRICOLAGE -
The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler, the core meaning in French being, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "to make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". In contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself, and is seen on large shed retail outlets throughout France.
(i'm so amused that my beloved Gondry is under this category~ i love bricolage.)