The Transcendence Of Subculture:A Visual Culture Study Of Ontheroad Store App

Today,with the rapid development of the Internet,youth subculture has been criticized for its seriousness while gaining huge economic benefits as a highly successful means of differentiation in the free market.Contemporary youth subculture is full of visual stimuli that seem to be nothing but superficial pleasure,and only costing money in exchange for a fleeting style.This leads to the question that this paper seeks to explore: youth subculture will only be swallowed up and completely deconstructed in the wave of consumerism and postmodernism.The object of this study is the On the Road Store,which was formerly a self-published magazine that examined hippie culture and later transformed into a subcultural e-commerce company.In the process,it struggled between complete commercialization and preservation of its subcultural roots,and its typicality of traditional youth subculture makes the On the Road Store a perfect object for contemporary youth subculture research.Through the study of the On the Road Store,we try to explore the current situation of youth subculture in the visual culture context,the dilemma it faces,and the possibility of its transcendence.In this paper,the visual culture study of it is divided into three parts: image,visual image,and media space from small to large,and the research method mainly adopts textual analysis and discursive research methods.The second chapter of the constitutive interpretation of the On the Road Store app image mainly takes the image as the research object,through analyzing the content,color,and spatial organization of its image,we find that the On the Road Store tries to create an artistry in the image;the third chapter of the semiotic analysis of the On the Road Store app about the image through dismantling the symbolic pool of it and how it forms the representation and reference system,and finally forms the abstract the social representation of "cool".Chapter 4 analyzes the special media space of the On the Road Store app,including several parts such as the weak peddling and reproduction prohibition of merchandise exhibition,the youth subculture community in the discovery page,Changle Road Wine Shop and Boknon Bookstore,Poet’s Corner,and the wandering library.By summarizing the above spaces and their characteristics,most of the above media spaces are a kind of hierarchical striped space.the On the Road Store app as a cyber subspace should have been more nomadic in character than hierarchical and solidified in quality,but it contributes to a normative cyber subspace by adding striped spaces.Chapter 5 summarizes the previous visual study of the road store,points out its problems and the transcendence of On the Road store itself,and discusses the transcendence of On the Road store app as a visual youth subculture and the possibility of further transcendence from both sides of the subcultural subject and object.The ultimate goal of the self-technology,including the generation of artistic "non-human" and the development of "mixed" identity,is to achieve the transcendence of youth subculture by stimulating new subjectivity from both the subject itself and the cultural object produced by the subject.The subculture’s self-technique and self-writing can liberate people from the individual typology associated with the dominant ideology,reject the individuality imposed on them,and thus stimulate a new subjectivity.Although self-writing as a technique still bypasses the essential realities such as capital profit,and the youth subculture represented by on the road store app still cannot truly escape the logic of consumption of late capitalism,the subject’s disobedience is still practical for mastering a certain degree of spiritual and cultural freedom to achieve transcendence.The rejection of the subject’s individual typological subordination by self-writing is not only applicable to the youth subculture,but also to everyone living in the late capitalist society,affected by the accelerated development of capitalism,and clamped by the production efficiency and visual pleasure.