ABSTRACT
In The Rhetoric of the Image, Roland Barthes contrasts the ‘intentional’ advertising image with the apparently ‘innocent’ news photograph. Barthes’ distinction can be used analogously to point up the difference between subcultural and ‘normal’ styles. The subcultural stylistic ensembles – those emphatic combinations of dress, dance, argot, music, and so on – bear approximately the same relation to the more conventional formulae that the advertising image bears to the less consciously constructed news photograph. Discoveries made in the field of anthropology are helpful. In particular, the concept of bricolage can be used to explain how subcultural styles are constructed. In Resistance Through Rituals, Hall et al. crossed the concepts of homology and bricolage to provide a systematic explanation of why a particular subcultural style should appeal to a particular group of people. ‘The symbolic objects – dress, appearance, language, ritual occasions, styles of interaction, music – were made to form a unity with the group’s relations, situation, experience’.
