Punk: A Form of Resistant Meaning-Making
Like other counter cultural movements that occurred throughout the course of the 20th century, the punk movement emerged out of an environment of rapid political and technological change. In many ways, punk is the anti-thesis to these cultural milieus, sharing many similarities with the Beat Poet movement of the 1950’s, and the Hippie “Flower Power” movement of the late 1960’s. Originating in Britain in the late 1970’s, amid Margaret Thatcher’s rise to political power, and following the OPEC oil crises, one way for the working class to express their distaste with the dismal economic climate and strict conservatism of the “Iron Lady” was through the subculture of punk.
Early on in the essay Hebdige makes reference to graffiti. This serves both as an entry point, and the foundation, for his assessment of the resistant meaning-making to be observed, or read, within punk subculture. Hebdige notes that Norman Mailer calls graffiti “Your presence on their Presence… hanging your alias on their scene.”1 By employing the logic of this statement we can proceed to examine the dualistic meaning found within mundane objects such as: paperclips, lavatory chains, or fragments of school uniforms. Punk subculture tends to re-purpose these items as anti-fashion statements, a form of living—or animated graffiti, to be adorned and gallivanted around by the punks, the teddy boys, mods, and rockers alike. Their use as such, stimulated the cultivation of a big “middle finger” which is then shoved into the face of the status quo. This is cultural criticism expressed via anti-fashion, with the intention to be as offensive and disturbing as possible. Hebdige writes, “the perverse and the abnormal were valued intrinsically,” thus exposing the absurd nature of counter cultural ideals.2
As a retaliation to the monotony of factory work and the dullness of office life, fashion was not the only outlet for angst. The pogo dance mimicked the robotic nature of the working stiffs. Hebdige comments that the pogo resembles something akin to “anti-dancing” and was in fact “a caricature—a reductio ad absurdum of all the solo dance styles associated with rock music.”3 With little to no wiggle room for improvisation, the pogo created a room full of drones. The only dynamic that could be accounted for was tempo. When the the meter sped up, the pogo took on a frantic, borderline manic character. When the meter slowed down, a catatonic state was induced on the “anti-dancers.”4
While Rock and Roll has always been fueled by the spirit of rebellion, punk’s iteration on this muse took the degenerate anti-establishment embellishment to the edge. With band names like the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Unwanted, and the Rejects, an apocalyptic music scene was created. The meaning-makers had truly fulfilled their “scumbag” aspirations as Hebdige has presciently observed.
Directionality in Media Production: Message in a Bottle
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky are well known for focusing their ideological criticism of media on what they call the propaganda model of media production, as explicitly detailed in their essay “A Propaganda Model.” They tend to focus heavily on the linear delivery methodology of mass media production delivered to a passively receptive pop culture or mass society. Stuart Hall on the other hand, stresses the context of both the production and reception of messages transported via media. In the search for meaning within the experience of media interaction, one must never omit a study of the audience. The cycle of production of a message that is to be transported through various media, for the end result of consumption by the receiver of the message, completes a circuit of interaction notes Hall.5 It is in these interactions that the meaning of cultural artifacts is derived.
Traditionally, media theorists have been heavily influenced by the Shannon & Weaver model of linear delivery. It was not until the famous Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan popularized the aphorism “the medium is the message” in the mid 1960s, that the emphasis on content was expanded to include a study of the influence of particular mediums on the people who used them.6 While this idea took some time to circulate, it eventually became accepted in academic media rhetoric after the publication of McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964. This supports Hall’s suggestion that the context of “encoding” a message is the first intersection, or nexus point, of meaning making. The context of “decoding” is then the second intersection of meaning making, at the receiving end of a message conveyed through various forms of media.
While Herman and Chomsky maintain that mass media is an instrument of control for the political and economic elite,7 they do not give much attention to what happens on the opposite end of a broadcast. Apparently, they just assume that passive automatons will be waiting in droves on the receiving end of the mass media’s linear, one way, broadcasting style. It is Hall who brings up the point, that when using this linear model of delivery, the context of the production and consumption have intrinsic effect on how media messages are experienced.8 An audience’s mind set and cultural setting have a huge influence on how messages transported in the “bottle of media” are to be decoded, and meaning therefor derived.
Ultimately it is the consumption process of media, on the receiving end, where meaning is coalesced. It is, after all, the purpose of media production for a message to be cast into the sea of culture and to be discovered, decoded, and made sense of by a recipient. Whether that be an individual, or society en masse, the message received becomes a cultural artifact of that larger audience where meaning is experienced through interaction and active conversation via culture.