Rochelle Ann P.

Reyes

ABE 4-2

Popular Literature

Sub Cultures, Cultures and Class

The essay is divided into five main sections.

A.
B.
C.
D.
E.

Some definitions
Dominant and Subordinate Cultures
The subcultural response
Sources of style
Rise of the counter-cultures

First, some definitions, this essay is tackles about Youth Culture; this topic has been massively
treated, above all in the mass media. It defined the Youth culture as the cultural aspect of youth, their
distinct patterns of life and how they express their social and material life experiences. This reading used
the term culture for a group of class as the peculiar and the distinctive way of life and the meanings,
values, and ideas related to everything. There are two symbolic ordering of social life, the law of
society and the law of culture which is defined as one. It shapes but also limit, modify and constrain
the way groups live and reproduce. Every human being is form through society, culture and history. The
existing culture acts as the main source to be transform and develop. Groups in the same society often
shares the same culture, however, they are unequally ranked based on productive relations, wealth and
power so they oppose one another. This does not mean that the greatest influence is the only set of ideas
or cultural forms in the society, but the dominant culture represents itself as the culture. With this, other
cultural configuration will try to struggle with it, seek to modify, negotiate, resist and even overthrow its
reign.
This essay gave distinction between culture and ideology between the dominant and the
subordinate culture. The culture have its distinction in the two groups while their ideology often based on
the dominant with given circumstances. The dominant culture is not made up of the same kinds but it is
layered and reflects different interests. The subordinate culture will not always be in open conflict with it,
they will not always be opposing the dominant culture, it may co-exist with it because it is smaller, more
localized and made up o differentiated structures. The subcultures always have a distinct part in the wider
class-cultural network but will always have some things in common with the parent culture. They
(subcultures) all derive in the first instance from a working class parent culture. Youth sub-cultures
are a regular and persistent of the parent class-culture.

Rochelle Ann P. Reyes

ABE 4-2

Popular Literature

Second, dominant and subordinate culture, broad shifts in class relations over the post war period
are discussed in this section. One general result is the widening of gap between old and new. This is
not about the general idea social change but the restructuration by economic forces. Some changes are in
the economic mode of production, skills workshops, a particular mix of occupational cultures, the
specific distribution of different class strata within them. There are also changes in housing and ecology
of the working class neighbourhood. The impact of post-war redevelopment had gone through three broad
phases. First, the break-up of traditional housing patterns by post war re-housing. The changes are
overlaid by the spectacular ideology of affluence but with uneven distribution. This ideology aimed to
give the working-classes a stake in a future and to bind the class to the hegemonic order but what
mattered most was the dislocations it produced and the responses it provoked. Hegemony refers to the
moment when a ruling class is able to exert a total social authority over subordinate classes and it requires
an alliance or a historical bloc to be sustained. So hegemony cannot be taken for granted, it has to be won.
The relations between a subordinate and dominant culture are always intensely active, always
oppositional, in a structural sense and the outcome is not given but made.
Third, the subcultural response, We return to the question of sub-cultures. Working class is form
and shaped on the level of the social and cultural class relations of the subordinate classes. They also win
space or influence the young and not just being an ideological construct but they have an ideological
dimension and it became more prominent in the problematic situation of the post war period. Subcultural
strategies cannot meet or answer the structuring dimensions emerging in the period, they solve but in an
imaginary way. Working class sub-cultures are considered as the response to a problem which youth and
members of the parent class shares. It structures the adolescents experience in distinct ways, and also
structures the young individuals life chances. When the young encounters these structures, it will be a
crucial point in their biographical career.
There are three main life areas to specify a generation. These are education, work and leisure.
Education has the most intense impact live of the young ages between five and sixteen. Work has an
impact to both young and the working-class but having the young choose and enter a job, learning both
the formal and informal cultures of work are the difficult transition from education to work for them.
Lastly, leisure is a significant life area for the class, however, there are major differences in the ways
working class adults and young people experience and regard education, work and leisure so we see that
the forces working right across a class is differentially experienced between generations. This may form
the basis for generating an outlook, a generational consciousness

Rochelle Ann P. Reyes

ABE 4-2

Popular Literature

Fourth, sources of style, generational style depends to the post-war formation of the youth subculture. Working class youth have a distinct structural and cultural milieu that is defined by territory,
objects, and things, relations, institutional and social practices. Many form of adaptation, negotiation, and
resistance by the parent culture when encountering the dominant culture are adapted by the young but
they apply and transform them to the given situation and experiences of their own group-life and
generational experience. There are also focal concerns specific to youth and their situation and activities.
This element must be taken seriously in any account. These are the materials available to the group for the
construction of subcultural identities; examples are the dress and music. And also their contexts like
activities, exploits, places and day-trips. Working class sub-cultures must have a real economic base but
income alone does not make a style. The objects were there, available, but were used by the groups in the
construction of different styles. They actively construct a style by selecting specific things.
Working-class youth needed money to spend on expressive goods, objects and activities but
money cannot dictate what these groups used to say or signify themselves. The more important were the
aspects of life which theses appropriated objects and things were made to reflect, express and resonate.
Lastly, rise of the counter-cultures, the first four sections dealt exclusively with working class
youth subcultures. This part will deal with rise of the distinctive kinds of expressive movements among
middle class youth and the appearance of quite distinct subcultural currents: examples given are the
Hippie movement, the various deviant drug, drop-out and gay sub-cultures; the elements of cultural
revolt in the student protest movements. It differ the working-class sub-cultures as articulated, collective
structes while middle class counter-cultures are diffuse, less group-centered, more invidualised. Workingclass sub-cultures are often assimilated by the control culture. Because of these two, there have been a
weakening of the bonds of social attachment so they are both marked as crisis in authority. However,
this middle-class counter-cultures dissent from their own, dominant parent culture because some of the
groups aimed for a systematic inversion, a symbolic upturning, of the whole bourgeois ethic. These
counter-cultures were born by breaking the dominant culture but they perform an important task, by
pioneering and experimenting with new social form in the system which gave it greater flexibility. At
some point, middle-class counter-cultures also attempted to work through like the working-class subcultures but because they inhabit a dominant culture, they are strategically placed where working-class
sub-cultures does not exist.