Hebdige, Punk and the Post-subcultural Meaning of Style

Abstract

This chapter revisits and re-evaluates Hebdige’s work in Subculture the Meaning of Style (1979) and his later work Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (1988). I suggest that Hebdige’s work is actually closer in proximity to the post-subcultural accounts that were to emerge after the postmodern turn in the 1980s but more particularly in the work of David Muggleton in his post-subcultural work; Inside Subculture (2000). I argue that the reading of punk subculture as a style that can be seen to symbolise an end of history through its reliance on signs and signifiers reconfigured from previous youth subcultures that have been emptied of their meaning, and that this emptiness was being used by punks often in a highly individualised manner, in a strategy of visual shock tactics, is the first development of a reflection on youth subculture of having a postmodern sensibility.