Resistance

Resistance against Consumer Culture

The first definition of resistance emerged from the initial forms of critical theory, the development of the counterculture in the late 1960s, and the first studies of youth subcultures in the so-called Birmingham school during the 1970s. The originators of critical theory, particularly Theodor W. Adorno, could not conceive of resistance as emerging from within consumer culture when it was in its nascent stages during the mid-twentieth century. Adorno saw consumerism as the product of a manipulative culture industry that churned out standardized and superficial forms of commercial entertainment in a manner that was no different from any other commodity churned out on the assembly lines. Such products of the culture industry expressed the reified culture of capitalism while pacifying the exploited masses with diversionary forms of escapism. Adorno believed that the only cultural forms that expressed a negation of [Page 1214]the capitalist system and pointed the way to alternate possibilities of social organization were to be found in certain forms of “high culture” within modernist art and literature and what is now called “classical” music. By definition, these cultural forms were beyond the purview of the culture industry and its techniques of mass reproduction.

The development of the hippie counterculture and youthful forms of social protest in the 1960s created new possibilities for resistance, especially in their connection to rock music. The rock music of the 1960s was clearly a commodity sold by the corporate music industry to a massive demographic of young consumers, but the claims to rock music's power of resistance were made by denying or minimizing these aspects of commercialization and consumerism. Rock was sharply differentiated from popular music because it was supposed to be created by artists who were motivated to express personal and/or political sentiments rather than manufacturing hit singles using standardized formulas for commercial success. Rock was supposed to enlighten and empower its audience rather than just give them something with a good beat they could dance to, and rock audiences were thought to comprise a community à la Woodstock Nation. Therefore, the intrusions of the music industry were thought to dilute the resistant qualities of the counterculture. The most infamous case in point was an advertisement run by Columbia Records in 1968, which depicted youthful revolutionaries in prison above the caption, “But the Man Can't Bust Our Music.”

In the 1970s, the concept of subculture that originated with the famed Chicago school of sociology in the first half of the twentieth century was revived by British scholars at the Contemporary Centre for Cultural Studies (CCCS), better known as the Birmingham school, to describe how youth cultures including teddy boys, skinheads, mods, hippies, and punks performed symbolic acts of refusal against the hegemonic social order. The Birmingham school proceeded from the humanist/Western Marxist idea that culture, ideology, and consciousness are crucial to the maintenance and reproduction of class power and inequality, and so, therefore, the music and style of youth subcultures are loaded with significant possibilities for resistance. In relation to consumer culture, one key idea that developed within the Birmingham school was that subcultures take on a spectacular form by appropriating commodities and using them in innovative and unintended ways that assign new subversive meanings to those commodities in the process of creating style. Since ideology and hegemony operate at the level of common sense in making power and inequality appear to be natural, timeless, and inevitable, symbolic resistance of this sort disrupts those taken-for-granted meanings, revealing them to be arbitrary and socially constructed and therefore subject to change.

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