ABSTRACT
Ever since the work of the Birmingham School in the 1970s, subcultural studies has been heavily focused on materiality and consumption, the effect of which has been to render language invisible in theoretical attempts to link subcultural formation and ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams 1977). Commodity fetishism à la Marx and commodity stylization were major features of this theoretical move, an example of which was the do-it-yourself nature of punk rock in the 1970s, where an objet trouvé (ou cherché) such as a safety pin could be incorporated into a coherent dress style via homologous signs (Hebdige 1979: 107). More recent writings on the subject (McRobbie 2000; Thornton 1993; Brown 2003b) continue to understand subcultures primarily through artifacts and commodities, though occasionally references to space and place are made as the focus shifts from local to globalized/ing youth subcultures (Nayak 2003). Subcultures and scenes have been identifi ed through larger social moral panics (S. Cohen 1972), through musical tastes, and through consumption and the fashioning thereof, regardless of whether this fashioning takes place on the street, in the bedroom, or at raves and clubs. Conspicuously absent have been the structures of language as the vehicle for all this fashioning (striking U.K. counterexamples include Hewitt 1986; Rampton 1995, 1999; Stuart-Smith et al. (in press); Moore 2004). For CCCS and post-CCCS scholars, oppositional self-fashioning through the acquisition of material distinctions and their related impact on taste is at the core of the defi nition of a subculture.
