Post-Punk Then and Now

Preface

Post-Punk Then and Now is based on a series of talks, lectures, and discussions organised by Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher in the autumn of 2014. The series was part of the Public Programme of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. The motivations for organising the series were anything but academic. For all three organisers, who were teenagers during the post-punk period, post-punk served as a heady initiation into culture. In its restlessness, its allusiveness, its overreaching, post-punk vigorously affirmed the possibility that culture could be at once popular, experimental and intellectually-driven. Post-punk happened at a particularly fraught historical juncture: it came at the end of a long wave of extraordinary invention in popular music culture, but it also coincided with the rise of what Stuart Hall called Thatcherism. The Post-Punk Then and Now series took place some 35 years after the election of Margaret Thatcher, when another Conservative Prime Minister was presiding over an austerity programme which seemed set to implement the final phase of neoliberalism. This therefore seemed a particularly opportune moment to gather together musicians, critics and artists — some of whom directly participated in the original post-punk moment, some of whom came to it later — for a sustained ten-week examination of post-punk and its legacy. In this volume, we have sought to preserve the energy and the spirit of the conversations which took place in that ten-week period. Perhaps more than most, this book is the product of collective work, and we would like to thank all the speakers for their hard work in assisting us to convert the series into a book.

1 Introduction

Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher in Conversation (2|10|14)

Gavin Butt: We’ve organised this programme of talks together because we share an interest in post-punk art and music, and the era that gave rise to them. Given that there is relatively little scholarship on the period, we thought it would be a good idea to put together a series of events at Goldsmiths involving in-conversations and talks by leading post-punk artists and musicians, alongside some new critical voices on the subject. One of the questions that cropped up as we began to think about doing this was: Why post-punk now? Why are the three of us interested in post-punk at this particular historical juncture? And why, given that so many of you have turned out today, is this relatively narrow period in cultural history of interest to you too? So we thought we’d try and answer that question today, or at least begin to answer that question in a rudimentary way, by having a three-way conversation before opening up to hear your contributions and ideas.

I think I became conscious of the fact that post-punk was beginning to occupy my thoughts over the past few years as I began to reflect on the post-punk scene in the northern English city of Leeds, which is where I did my PhD at the university. There had been a very dynamic and interesting scene that preceded my time there, which I caught the tail-end of, and which was still in the air, if you like, in the late 80s when I was there. But, before that, I was also a fan and fellow traveller of many post-punk acts from differing city scenes across the UK and elsewhere. I guess, as I look back, I have begun to assess the formative impact of this time upon my political and aesthetic values, as well as upon my mature intellectual and cultural preoccupations. I discovered, quite by chance, that other professor friends of mine — Jennifer Doyle, from the University of California Riverside, and the late José Muñoz, former Professor in Performance Studies at NYU — had also, quite independently, begun research on punk and post-punk at more or less the same time. Since we are — or rather were — all of the same age in our mid-40s, it perhaps wouldn’t be unreasonable to answer the question Why post-punk now? by saying it’s a middle-aged thing, and that our interest in it is explained away as the expression of a generational nostalgia, of us enjoying the pleasure of returning to the primal scene of our youths. I’m sure there is some mileage in this. But I know Mark, Kodwo, and I are not happy to let the explanation rest there — in large part because understanding a return to post-punk as simply and only nostalgic obscures any possible exploration into its specific conditions of creation, and naturalises interest in it to normatively understood stages of an individual life-cycle.

Another way of looking at things would be to say that only now does post-punk seem, as a period, remote enough from our contemporary moment to allow us a good enough vantage point to turn towards it and begin to understand it historically. Given that the conditions of cultural possibility then seem so remote, so markedly different to those of our neoliberal present, perhaps it is only now we have travelled so far that we can more fully appreciate exactly how different everything was.

For those of you who don’t know, the post-punk period is normally characterised as existing from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, usually from 1978, which is the year that the Sex Pistols split up, to 1984 or 1985, which of course in this country saw the miners’ strike and their ultimate defeat, with miners trudging back to work, facing an uncertain future. This was a future which, in many ways, is now our present-day, neoliberal reality. Mark, in his book Ghosts of My Life, has much to say about the futures of post-punk, the futures that post-punk artists and musicians envisaged, and about what has befallen those imagined futures today. His book is a sustained exploration of what was once — in post-punk — a ready cultural capacity to orient oneself by radical visions of what might yet come.

Maybe I’ll turn to Mark first, to ask for some observations from him. Is this something — the imagining of an alternative future — that you think has become more difficult in contemporary times? Can you say a little bit about what you value about looking back to then from the vantage point of now?

Mark Fisher: I think the first thing to say is that, in a certain way it is a bad sign that we are interested in post-punk in the way that we are. As we came in, we listened to a Fad Gadget track — it didn’t sound like something from 30 years ago. 30 years back from post-punk would take you to 1948, 1949, to something like Glenn Miller: who knew what the music of 1948 was, who was particularly interested in it in the late 70s? Certainly, anyone who did listen back to music of the late 40s then could not have experienced that music as sounding as if it belonged in any way to the contemporary moment of the 1970s. But I think, faced with many examples of post-punk, we are confronted with something that does feel uncannily contemporary.

GB: In what ways Mark?

MF: Well, it just doesn’t sound outmoded. Ironically, much post-punk might have sounded more out-of-date in 1983 than it does now, because there’s been a flattening of cultural time since then. Post-punk was an example of what I’ve called popular modernism. The principle behind post-punk was the popular-modernist idea that you couldn’t repeat things, you couldn’t use forms that had become kitsch — and yesterday’s innovation was today’s kitsch. So post-punk was driven by a principle of difference and self-cancellation; a constant orientation towards the new, and a hostility towards the outmoded, the already-existent, the familiar. That’s why Simon Reynolds called his book on post-punk Rip It Up and Start Again. I guess what I’m saying is that that hostility towards the already-familiar has weakened to the point that it has disappeared. We can’t be hostile to the past in the way that post-punk was because we don’t now have a sense of the present or the future anymore.

GB: Can I just press you on that point, because I think much of what you say is pretty undeniable in terms of the widespread experimentalism of post-punk music. But if we think about maybe Talking Heads or Throbbing Gristle, Karl Marx’s old dictum about the tradition of all dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living seems pertinent doesn’t it? Which is to say that as radically new as some of these bands may have sounded back in the day, today I sometimes hear the reworking of an earlier musical moment: Talking Heads reworking funk, for example, or Throbbing Gristle reworking 60s psychedelia in various kinds of ways. I wonder if you think that makes what you call popular modernism actually a form of postmodernism — with its habitual replaying of the past?

MF: Well, even high modernism was based on reworking; all forms of creativity originate in reworking. With the decline of popular modernism, though, we’ve increasingly seen already-existing reworkings presented as if they were new. No culture emerges ex nihilo, nothing comes out of nothing, there’s always a relationship to the past; it’s a question of whether that relationship is a passive one where it’s simply a matter of imitating and repeating, or an active one where a different kind of repetition is at stake. Take the example of Throbbing Gristle, for instance. Yes, Throbbing Gristle clearly were reaching back for 60s psychedelia as a reference, but their music doesn’t actually sound like 60s psychedelia. Post-punk depended on a set of strictures, often unstated but quite clear rules about what was acceptable. I think part of the reason it makes sense to describe it as post-punk, is that those rules were initially written by punk, and musically they were pretty boring rules. Punk is ultimately just a stripped-down form of rock music, but the shift into post-punk didn’t involve a simple setting-aside of those rules, it entailed a constant renegotiation. It was never a case that anything goes, there was a constant struggle over what was acceptable and what was not acceptable. It’s easy to forget how fierce those strictures were.

Kodwo Eshun: The idea of constraints is really important. When you see post-punk musicians or filmmakers now, that is the aspect that they are most apologetic about. They have learned to be ashamed of those self-strictures that are all too often dismissed as political correctness. Post-punk was an amateurist and autodidactic project that created a context for belief in your own incapacity rather than training or skill. What emerges is a drive towards self-authorisation in which people make up rules as they go. One of the norms that gets remade is the very idea of the rock group itself, its group dynamics of male bonding, its gang mentality; you can hear and see these notions coming under pressure and becoming disassembled in various ways. Green Gartside of Scritti Politti said that he wanted to make a music that was as uncertain and as unsure as he felt. Post-punk invented ways to dramatize that uncertainty.

GB: What that anxiety also pertains to, if you like, is the form of one’s cultural activity because it’s precisely at the moment when punk dies by becoming rock industry business-as-usual — maybe by 1977 but certainly by 1978 in this country — that simply making music becomes no longer the necessary limit of one’s cultural horizon. That it opens up to the anxiety of potentially working beyond music — sometimes without any sense of authority — and reaching out to other forms of art-making (performance, film, etc.) or different types of activity. Green Gartside, for example, was as driven by his reading of critical theory, of Gramsci or Derrida — by his intellectual practice — as he was by the writing of a lyric, or the improvising of a particular riff. Beyond a specific style of music then — discordant, angular guitars, or electronic, industrial soundscapes — post-punk might be more broadly characterised as creation within a permissive set of novel conjunctures between different disciplines or even institutions.

Lydia Lunch recalls the No Wave movement in New York as the connective tissue where the cultural division of art, film, music and literature was cauterized, causing a vast insane asylum, part Theatre of Cruelty, part Grand Guignol, all Dada, all of the time. Love the gothic drama of this! Post-punk then as a kind of expanded cultural playground where you risked your sanity, or at least the likelihood of being seen as deranged by cultural gatekeepers, as you went about making your idiosyncratic thing. Drawing from art, from film, from critical theory, or what have you — all this allowed for a re-imagining or a re-inhabiting of the public sphere, mixing things up in ways that allowed alternative visions to be forged.

MF: I think the point about the alternative public sphere is very important. When I interviewed Mark Stewart from the Pop Group, he said that they wanted to be an explosion in the heart of the commodity. They didn’t actually become a pop group, they certainly weren’t the Beatles. But nonetheless the overreaching Promethean ambition, the dissatisfaction with being confined to the margins, was crucial to post-punk.

Another dimension of that public sphere is the music press as it was shaped by post-punk culture. Probably the most important factor leading to me sitting here today would be the music press of the early 80s. The reason that I became interested in theory and philosophy etc. was seeing it in the pages of the New Musical Express, and that is another telling contrast between that period and the current moment. In the early 80s, its leading writers were autodidacts who had not gone to university but who were nevertheless steeped in post-structuralist thought and used to flaunt this in the pages of a music newspaper that was then selling hundreds of thousands of copies. There was a kind of contagion of autodidacticism, and the music press formed part of what was in effect an alternative education system. I think it was Jon Savage who has talked about music culture as a portal: an album, a single would be threshold that you could cross that would open up worlds to you. There would be all kinds of references, all kinds of distillations in the cover art — whether they’d be allusions to European art cinema or to theory, or to literature, to J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs (and in many ways Burroughs and Ballard were the most important influences on post-punk, more significant than any musical reference point).

Part of what made this culture popular-modernist rather than populist was its embrace of difficulty. It didn’t immediately make sense, references weren’t explained to you, and you had to rise to that challenge if you wanted to engage with it.

GB: The irony of all that is that despite post-punk being a permissive, DIY kind of world-making, a lot of post-punk artists went to art school to be taught how to become professional artists. I think that’s a really interesting paradox for us to toy with. But maybe that’s not right. Maybe people didn’t actually go there to become professional anythings. As I’ve been doing research on post-punk, I’m realising that a number of people actually went to art school to be in a band. That was even the principle reason they went. Not to become a famous painter. As Simon Frith and Howard Horne suggest, this was because art school was the place where you could get a local authority grant, have the costs of your tuition paid for by the government, and have three years to do whatever you wanted. Given the laissezfaire model in some art schools, you wouldn’t necessarily have to even talk to your tutor or show up in the studio. So it was a very, very different time. It feels remote from the seemingly more instrumentalised educational world of today. Especially given recent changes to the funding of higher education in this country, students are arguably under greater pressure today to focus on a career trajectory, and to appreciate their time at university as training for a graduate job. This is especially because education is now a costly consumer good, and students are encouraged to be mindful of getting a personal financial return for the investment in their studies. I wonder if going to art school in the 1970s and 1980s to be in a band opened up the possibilities of collective activity — both creative and political — that today’s individualising ethos serves to foreclose upon?

KE: A band is a very specific type of collective that accelerates and hybridises the tradition of artistic movements familiar from the history of 20th century modernisms. What you see in a group is a capacity to sustain a certain kind of insider mentality so that different theories, novels, art, all of these, are attitudinised through a stance that metabolises them quite dramatically. To quote a theorist or novelist is one thing; it is quite another to strike a pose with and through that quote. How you construct an attitude that is connoted through a gestural vocabulary, communicated in the way in which you hold your cigarette; all that is as important, more important than interviews or lyrics.

What is fascinating when look you at the era of 1978 to 1983 is that the generational resentments of the time targeted the welfare state that sustained that experimentation. People in this era were not grateful to the Labour Party for the welfare system. On the contrary, they were at odds with, if not antagonistic towards it. Post-punk, at least initially, was not targeting the Tories. It was attacking the Labour Party and the welfare system. The Song of the Shirt, which is set in 1979, begins with a discussion on welfare. A camera travels towards a television monitor on a table in a café that depicts a woman talking about welfare. She says that it is not worth her while to work because her husband can actually get more money through signing on for unemployment benefit. But he won’t go on the dole because he can’t bear to go through the interview process. She is trapped in low-paid work and decides to leave her husband which then obliges her husband to pay child-care support for her and her children. What man, she asks, will put up with this? These discontents animate The Song of the Shirt which then travels back into 1840 in order to understand the conditions for the formation of the welfare state. Just three days ago, at the Conservative Party’s annual conference, George Osborne promised to cap benefits for childcare and housing, stating that it was not fair that working families could earn less than families that claimed benefits. Between the arguments made by Osborne in 2014 and the arguments made by The Song of the Shirt in 1979 is a continuity that is articulated for quite different reasons by quite different political formations.

MF: That points to a problematic relationship between much of the organised left and the counterculture that goes back to the 60s. Nobody has described this bind better than the late critic Ellen Willis. She talks of a frustration she felt, an incompatibility between the kind of desires that were articulated and propagated by the counterculture, and mainstream left-wing politics, which she experienced as authoritarian and bureaucratic. We’re haunted by the failure of the left to come to some arrangement with the libertarian energies that came out of music culture. Instead, the right absorbed and converted the energies of the counterculture into its own project of re-individualisation. In retrospect, we can see the 80s as the moment when this happened, when things were lost: it was the period when neoliberalism really took control. You could say that the definitive end of post-punk was the defeat of the miners’ strike. Equally, I think the historical vantage point that we now have allows us to say that the things that post-punk was antagonistic towards, such as the welfare state, were actually part of the enabling conditions of post-punk cultural production. I think no one in post-punk culture who was targeting the left wanted the neoliberal solution that was offered. But at the same time this isn’t about fetishizing; celebrating social democracy as the ideal political form. Part of what haunts us in post-punk is the prospect of a kind of anti-authoritarian leftism, a kind of libidinal leftism, a leftism that could engage with those libertarian currents, that could engage with the desiring-fabric of style culture. That kind of leftism only ever appeared in fragments.

GB: It’s going to be interesting to pick up on these points with Agata Pyzik, who will share her thoughts on punk and post-punk in Poland. Of course, the political conditions of existence of that scene were very different to an ailing Labour government followed by a rampant Thatcherite one in the UK. You had instead military rule in the early 80s and then authoritarian communism. This will allow us to think the conditions of post-punk outside of the more customary Anglo-American context, and away from Western democracy. We will continue this in the conversation between Bruno Verner and Eliete Mejorado who will talk about post-punk in Brazil in the mid-80s at the time of a faltering military dictatorship and simultaneous resistances to it. I want to talk to them about how post-punk music might be understood as an integral part of a much broader cultural front organised, without any singular leader, as some kind of transversal libertarian movement. But I guess the thing that haunts all these conversations, and if you like, the political character of post-punk itself, is that it all took place before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War informed the imagined alternatives to this or that political regime, or economic system, and seeped into the mind-set for post-punk’s futurist imaginaries, in a way that is sometimes difficult to remember today — as you allude to in your book, Mark.

Maybe we could turn to something slightly different before we close: namely, the historicising of post-punk. One of the key books on the subject is Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again, published in 2005. But I know, Kodwo, you’ve been thinking about how the historicising of post-punk is not really happening so much in music journalism, even less in scholarly literature, but more recently in the blogosphere.

KE: Rip It Up and Start Again was published in around 2004. At around the same time, the blogosphere begins to assemble through a number of writers, such as Mark Fisher under the name k-punk, Matt Ingram under the name Woebot, and several others, each of whom analysed post-punk with an attention and ambition not seen since the 1970s. In the context of the discourse network of the blogosphere, this discussion was not nostalgic. On the contrary, it was urgent and necessary. Now why was this the case? And why was the writing actually more exciting than the majority of neo-post-punk recorded at the time by groups such as LCD Soundsystem or The Rapture. Because the new mode of online writing was theoretical rather than philosophical; because it circulated outside of the academy, creating a collective conversation that simultaneously functioned as libidinally charged speculation. The online discussions over post-punk went beyond questions of canonisation. A small number of writers exerted a massive influence by inventing new vocabularies for a music that had been quarantined in the precincts of old magazines. A new frame of reference was created that reset the terms for analysing the moment of post-punk.

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Audience member 1: I have a question about the notion of a future, or our future being cut off. I’m from the United States — so maybe post-punk was theorised there in a very different way. It was a very visceral, this idea that we had no future. Lydia Lunch said that, like in an interview, she said: I could get killed on the way home, we’re living in the worst area of New York, that’s been destroyed by Reaganomics. So I guess my question is how does that translate? I’ve always assumed that post-punk got popular again today because again we don’t have a future.

MF: Different senses of the future are at stake really. Maybe post-punk began with the line from the Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’: when there’s no future how can there be sin? Post-punk was a Cold War culture, and it fits the analysis that Jeff Nuttall put forward in Bomb Culture, his claim that the major post-war youth scenes are really only possible because of the shadow of the mushroom cloud. It’s easy to forget that Cold War dread. But when I was a teenager in the early 80s, I used to dream of nuclear war practically every night, and every night when I got home from school, I would turn on the TV anxiously; have we taken the first step to nuclear war yet? Certainly ’79 was a key period for post-punk, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, you could really feel like we were on the way to the third world war.

But of course the paradox of this is that the sense of urgency produced an existential imperative: we can’t waste time because we might not have any time. That is what generated aesthetic futures, that’s what made things sound like they hadn’t sounded before. So the sense that there might not be one type of future, generated another type of future.

KE: One way to make the future is to intervene in the present which then becomes history; the present could be described as an experience of breadth or narrowness that Thomas Pynchon characterised as ‘temporal bandwidth’ in Gravity’s Rainbow. Part of Simon Reynolds’ recent argument is that contemporary culture has moved, broadly speaking, from analogue scarcity to digital abundance. Which implies that the temporal bandwidth