Subversion

In a general sense, subversive consumer practices are practices that challenge the stylistic canons of consumer culture by using and/or combining consumer goods in unintended ways. These practices become subversive in the sense that they undermine the evident desirability of established symbolic rules by presenting concrete stylistic alternatives. Famous examples of subversive consumer practices in this sense are the “punk” or “skin” styles that emerged among British youth in the 1960s and 1970s. Such subversive strategies remain often on the stylistic level, but sometimes they go deeper. In those cases, such as in the case of the hippie movement or of 1960s counterculture more generally, subversive consumption enters as an element to a larger alternative cultural universe with fairly precise political connotations. [Page 1400]However, subversive consumption does not necessarily contain a broader political dimension but can, and often does, remain a purely aesthetic practice where the challenge remains stylistic.

Subversion in this more limited, stylistic sense has arguably been an integral element of modern consumer culture throughout its history. Whereas most consumers may be content using goods in ways intended and presented by advertising and marketing, a smaller “vanguard” group has always seen consumption as a field for innovation and creativity, redefining the meaning of consumer goods and using them in unintended ways. This is by no means a new phenomenon; nineteenth-century proletarian consumers, like New York b'hoys, were famous for their appropriation of bourgeois garments and their mocking subversion of established tastes in rearticulating a provocative style of their own. After them, twentieth-century youth cultures excelled in this kind of creative appropriation in their deployment of creative recombination of established fashions in articulating a style of their own, from the flappers in the 1920s, through the zoot-suiters of the 1940s, to the punks in the 1970s. Consequently, concerns about the supposedly subversive effects of consumer goods run as a constant theme through the social science reception of consumer culture, from nineteenth-century philanthropists worrying about irrational proletarian consumption patterns, via Italian demographers in the fascist period connecting the use of cosmetics to infertility, to today's concerns about online games or Internet pornography.

Where does this inherently subversive element of modern consumer culture come from? Whereas people in all societies seem to have used goods—objects with one form of use value or another—to represent or enact social relations, modern consumer practices are more biased toward innovation. This does not mean that premodern consumer culture was entirely static, but it means that modern consumer practices contain a greater element of innovation. There are two reasons for this. First, the advancement of modern consumer culture is often coupled with a declining power of traditional identities. This means that modern consumers have little choice but to create such cultural frameworks anew. They are compelled to agency and reflexivity. Second, modern consumer goods are heavily mediatized; that is, they come with a large array of symbolic and discursive meanings attached to them. This way, modern consumer goods have an ability to enhance individual fantasy beyond what is socially sanctioned, and by virtue of their tangible materiality, they have the ability to make real such subversive fantasies, institutionalizing them as tangible social facts, like new gender roles or new conceptions of proletarian identity with less disciplined and humble attitudes toward power. Consequently, consumer goods become powerful cultural tools. To use them in unexpected combinations can become a powerful expressive strategy.

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