The Scholar and the Punk: Hebdige’s Master Narrative and the Deceptive Self-Knowledge of the Subaltern

Abstract

Dick Hebdige’s text Subculture: The Meaning of Style summed up punk with admirable promptness in 1979. The text remains well worth reading. However, the summary of punk it offers can also be faulted in several regards. Some issues cannot be blamed upon Hebdige: punk looked to be finished at his time of writing and whilst punk has spread around the world with marked tenacity in the decades since, he could hardly have predicted such a thing. Even the structuralist thinking which Hebdige employs, and which this chapter critiques, is quite understandable given that the twin attack of post-structuralism and postmodernism was little known in the Anglophone world at his time of writing. Nonetheless, this chapter uncovers several problems with Hebdige’s approach from a post-structuralist perspective. Most problematic, in this regard, is his employment of the concept of ‘bricolage’, as borrowed from the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss: as is often the case, the scholar assumes a position of mastery which the ‘bricoleur’ is presumed to lack. The chapter suggests that bricolage can retain some value within a post-structuralist paradigm, but only if placed ‘under erasure’ (as Derrida puts it). No such placement is made by Hebdige, however: instead, he writes explicitly of ‘signified’ meaning which ‘we’ can uncover but of which the bricoleur will be blissfully unaware. Despite such problems in this regard, and in Hebdige’s general tendency towards sweeping generalisations, the chapter concludes that Subculture: The Meaning of Style retains value for the fast-growing field of punk studies.