Dick Hebdige’s “Subculture: The Meaning of Style” considers the effects of a clash between ideology and semiotics: that clash being in the form of subcultures. He also discusses how the emergence of these subcultures tips the delicate social order off its axes via their grave “violations of [the] authorized codes” (2482). However, his main topic of debate appears to be how these violations and “horrendous aberrations” (2482) are transformed into desirable commodities that are sold and resold to the public until they lose all initial shock value and no longer pose a threat to a society’s conventional manner of conduct.

Through my reading of the essay, a completely unrelated image had to present itself and show some sort of correlation to what Hebdige was discussing (according to my twisted imagination, anyway). I was confronted with the image of a cut on the arm or leg – any external body part, really. The damage done to the blood vessel interrupts the entire mechanism of the body and diverts some attention to the cut. In response, the body secretes platelets and strands of fibrin through the site of the damage to form a mesh layer of sorts over the cut to form a scab and, eventually, restrict the loss of blood to a minimum. This “damage control” allows the body to resume its function. I think this connects to Hebdige’s theory of society’s reassessment of these rising subcultures to manipulate how they are perceived by the public and to “minimize the Otherness” (2487). The burst blood vessel is the emerging subculture and the body signifies community, while the scab symbolizes the restoration of conventional, every day goings on. This marketing method results in these subcultures’ “diffusion and defusion” (2483) into the conventions of society. All order and normality is thus re-established. Huzzah.

The “process of recuperation” (2484) by which the scab is formed is compressed by Hebdige into two courses of action: 1) making sub-cultural staples into mass-marketed commodities, widely desired by members of the public, and 2) marketing the deviancy of these subcultures differently than the way observers have been viewing them. These methods of “dealing with the threat” (2486) are labeled “the commodity form” and “the ideological form”, respectively. Though entirely oppressive and domineering, these are quite brilliant strategies of eliminating the “otherness”; Rather than projecting hostility towards anything that presents conflict to a particular community’s ideologies, that tension-creator is met with deceiving acceptance which will, in time, transform that controversial subculture into a negligible component of community, hereby eradicating its menace.