THE DESTRUCTIVE CHARACTER: WALTER BENJAMIN AND A SITUATIONIST APPROACH TO ENGLISH LITERATURE AND POP MUSIC SINCE THE 1930S (GRAHAM GREENE, COLIN MACINNES, MARXIST CRITICISM, INTERNATIONAL, MASS CULTURE)

The Destructive Character presents radical and reactionary theories of the relations between literature and mass culture, and then the interpenetration of literary and musical voices since the rise of the phonograph in England. Walter Benjamin's position refuses elitism like that of Theodor Adorno and T. S. Eliot: the technological basis of modern mass culture holds the potential to produce "shock-effects" that expose domination in social relations. Benjamin emphasizes, much more consistently than previous commentators suggest, an iconoclastic, "destructive" attitude towards conventional distinction and separation of "mass" and "high" cultural levels. Brecht, Barthes, and recent pop music analysts argue, like Benjamin, that the writer and popular singer project a style (or attitude or tone of voice) that may only acquire from the other's technique the innervation necessary to produce a startling expression of negation. Disdaining Baudelaire's unnerving by the daguerreotype, and the Symbolist retreat from everyday life, Benjamin espoused tactics like Lautreamont's: the estranging juxtapositions (the famous sewing machine on a dissecting table) that evolved into plagiarism and alteration of venerated literary works, or detournement. In cultural flux, the dialectical allegory in ressentiment (the Trauerspiel's melancholy, Lautreamont's politics of evil) produces action, not the inhibition assigned by Nietzsche and much subsequent criticism. The Situationist International, which mounted a critique of the "society of the spectacle" that fueled the French May Revolution of 1968, claimed the first genuine realization of Lautreamont's revolutionary iconoclasm, and represents the final link in the chain from him to recent cultural and social upheavals in England. From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, the force of the ideological myth of the Affluent Society is registered in English literature and popular music alike: the source of the most determined resistance to pacification by "affluence" migrated from literature (the "Angry Young Men," Colin MacInnes, Alan Sillitoe) to style in the working-class youth subcultures focused on pop music. Finally, with the arrival of a new Depression, punk style was led by bohemians well-versed in the Situationist practice of detournement. Graham Greene's Thirties fiction was quite appropriately, given its concern with evil and social injustice and use of popular music, brought into play by the Sex Pistols.