Looking at subcultures
Subcultures or subcultural movements are largely identity based or community based – their function is to create a shared communal space outside of the conventional or mainstream society. (I can’t remember where in the reading I spotted it but the triumvirate of “knowledge/culture/affect” stood out to me. It’s a good way to break down what makes a subcultural movement a shared experience or process.) Community can be a way to party with others who are into the same cultural products and experiences as you or community can function as a way to survive and organize against the dominant paradigm of the society you find yourself within. Community in my opinion has never been solely or explicitly identifiable as a physical-spatial place or region, it can exist digitally, and pre-internet has existed via older media and technologies, through print culture or via the telephone. I, myself am a member of several subcultures, some which are identity based in an intrinsic way and some which are relative to the cultural affects I enjoy.
Breaking down the word, subculture – the prefix sub literally means below or beneath. The word itself implies a binary relationship, an unequal or an offset power dichotomy. Maybe it’s useful to think of a subculture as something that cleaved off of the main culture or dominant culture. It’s not as hegemonically demonstrative but it possesses vitality and gathers it adherents in a powerful counteraction to the dominant mode. That said, I think that subcultures tend to be romanticized from within as well as from without. There is a particular kind of idealization of a movement or community of likeminded individuals that replicates (or perhaps just is and has always been) a form of commodification akin to the process of commodification that is the life force of capitalism. I think it’s human to want or desire a fixed symbol – we live in an unfixed world – and by extension, the internet is even more amorphous and unsteady than the actualities we have been dealing with for centuries before it’s creation.
The main idea is that all current cultures sub or dominant exist within a capitalist framework. Terranova gets that, and clears up any misgivings that even the most savvy Marxist or lefty political enthusiasts almost organically assign to a reading of the digital economy as appropriating the labor of various networked subcultural protagonists.
Drudging up the knowledge/culture/affect triumvirate again, is key here because Terranova gets that what is being offered and also commodified is an extension of human intelligence – which is not just facts or mind focused, its feelings focused. Terranova talks about this in the beginning of her essay, as the reflexive consumption/production action. The commodification of feelings, sensation of belonging, conformity of appearance, anything that communicates membership, ownership, and authenticity is what is being produced, willingly by members of subcultures via products or ephemera that is a part of capital. There is already consumption going on – but now in the networked age, it’s not easily or neatly identifiable as just consumption, it’s also a labor being performed as it offers something in response or through utilizing the consumable.
