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The relationship between mainstream, "hegemonic" culture and the
subcultures that split off from it mirrors the relationship of a linear,
dominant narrative strain to the skein of other paths that could be
pursued by the reader of hypertext. In other words, the way power is
distributed in society relates to the way meaning is distributed in a
hypertext narrative. In Subculture, The Meaning of Style, Dick
Hebdige describes hegemony and the battle for subcultural meaning that
resides beneath it:
"Maps of meaning [in society] are charged with a potentially explosive
significance because they are traced and retraced along the lines laid
down by the dominant discourses about reality, the dominant ideologies.
Thus they tend to represent, in however obscure and contradictory a
fashion, the interests of the dominant groups in society...
"The term hegemony refers to a situation in which a provisional alliance
of certain social groups can exert total social authority over other
subordinate groups, not simply by coercion or by the direct imposition of
ruling ideas, but by winning and shaping consent so that the power of the
dominant classes appears both legitimate and natural. Hegemony can only
be maintained so long as the dominant classes succeed in framing all
competing definitions within their range...
"The symbiosis in which ideology and the social order, production and
reproduction, are linked is neither fixed nor guaranteed. It can be
prised open. The consensus can be fractured, challenged, over-ruled, and
resistance to the groups in dominance cannot always be lightly dismissed
or automatically incorporated...
"The struggle between different discourses, different definitions and
meanings within ideology is therefore always, at the same time, a
struggle within signification: a struggle for possession of the sign
which extends to even the most mundane areas of everyday life."
(A. G.)
http://www.feedmag.com/html/document/98.02nelson/98.02nelson1.3.html
NO CULTURAL STUDIES BOOK has been more widely read than Dick Hebdige's 1979 Subculture: The Meaning of Style, from which this essay is taken. It brought a unique and supple blend of Althusser, Gramsci and semiotics (as propounded by Barthes and the "Prague School") to bear on the world of, or at any rate near to, the young British academics and students who first became immersed in cultural studies. That was the world of "subcultures" more visible in Britain than anywhere else: teds, skinheads, punks, Bowie-ites, hippies, dreads . . .