Revolt into Style: Graham Greene Meets the Sex Pistols

N A 1986 ESSAY, Angela McRobbie argues that the cross referencing between forms in postmodern culture, notably between pop music and 'art,' between aesthetics and commerce, . can create a vibrant critique of advanced capitalist society (114; emphasis added)-contrary to the belief of many theorists of postmodernism. Only Dick Hebdige, she finds, in his Subculture: The Meaning of Style, perhaps the most famous studies text, broken out of [the] reproduction of the old divide between culture and the pop arts. His analysis of the punk subculture demonstrates the possibility of a positive postmodernism in theory, by bringing together art, literature, music, style, dress, and even attitude (109). That attitude, Hebdige has subsequently averred, is one of contumacy (Postmodernism 94); studies, according to Meaghan Morris, should seek out the unambivalently discontented, or aggressive theorizing subject (20). As Hebdige realizes in Subculture, his positive postmodernism resuscitates the original avant-garde impulse, the subversive desire of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, for example, to draw together art and everyday life. But Hebdige does not directly address just what role high art-literature in particular-did and might play in the sort of antiauthoritarian subcultural ensemble he describes in punk, and the question has remained essentially unanswered in the decade since Subculture was published. An approach to literature based in studies, seeking out the social uses of texts, often necessarily starts from minor incidents beneath the notice of those holding authority (or cultural capital [see Pierre Bourdieu 466-500]). Such an approach would expand