Punk, Law, Resistance … “I have set my affair on nothing”

1. I, Punk

In 1977 I was six­teen. Everything I have to say about punk is col­oured by that fact, because six­teen was pre­cisely the right age to be if punk was going to have a decis­ive impact on you. Because punk was not about your social class, gender or race, it was about your age, it defined a gen­er­a­tion, and I belong to the punk gen­er­a­tion. It defined, redefined my musical taste, in a way which is still effect­ive, but more import­antly than that, if this is not going to be just another fifty year old telling you about the joys of Richard Hell and Altern­at­ive TV, which may or may not work for you in 2011, punk defined a sens­ib­il­ity that went bey­ond music. Punk, as well, was/​is a way of think­ing. Punk think­ing, at six­teen, meant ques­tion­ing what was taken for gran­ted, and this was not the ques­tion­ing of the protest singer who uses music as a plat­form to denounce society’s ills, it was first and fore­most a ques­tion­ing of the mech­an­isms of the pop industry and the consumer’s role within it. At six­teen, I was old enough to have bought Slade singles when they came out in 1973, and Beatles solo LP’s in 1974 (Wings!) and Led Zep­pelin and Pink Floyd in 1975. Old enough to listen to John Peel’s first Fest­ive 50 when it took all even­ing to play the top five, con­sist­ing as it did of long long slow slow tracks. When Peel duly played the Damned’s first single, New Rose/​Help!, it soun­ded impossibly fast and brief. I had enjoyed the hey­day of glam pop, but the young teen­ager needs cred­ib­il­ity and ser­i­ous­ness and I had bought into, like my peers, an altern­at­ive post-​hippy heavy metal prog rock sub­cul­ture which was not my own, which had its estab­lished clas­sics from years ago, which were duly pur­chased. And I was quite happy, in cheese­cloth and denim, see­ing the Who in a sta­dium play­ing Tommy, with this adop­ted identity.

At six­teen, what punk said was this: “Wake up! You’ve been cheated! Everything you think worth­while in the thing you think most import­ant (music) is actu­ally not excit­ing you! It is awful bor­ing tur­gid rub­bish!” You had to have been just old enough to have been immersed in what came before, to mark the impact of punk, but not old enough to be threatened by punk. A thir­teen year old might get into punk, but wouldn’t have the shock; a nine­teen year old would reject it. Punk’s gen­er­a­tion gap. What mattered was not that punk gave you new records and con­certs to acquire and attend, but that it required the whole­sale dis­card­ing of almost the entirety of your exist­ing record col­lec­tion. You could not place the Sex Pis­tols beside Mike Old­field — the old stuff had to go. Punk’s first great les­son: if this is right, that is wrong, which side are you on? No relativ­istic tol­er­ance of this and this, but an intem­per­ate demand do not tol­er­ate that. Now, in 2011, lots of mid-1970’s music has crept back into my listen­ing, but then, in 1977, scorched earth. Apart from the newly hon­oured pre­curs­ors — Vel­vets, Dolls, Stooges, MC5: year zero. The punk sens­ib­il­ity pro­moted first of all a con­scious reflex­iv­ity on aes­thetic choices. The key atti­tude: it is no longer pos­sible to … . Punk was a pro­foundly tele­olo­gical grand nar­rat­ive. It stated, now that the break­through has been achieved, the old is redund­ant, no look­ing back, that was then, this is now: it is no longer pos­sible, after the Sex Pis­tols, to be Led Zeppelin.

Here’s the thing: punk was not a roman­ti­cism, it was a neo-​classicism. It said, the cul­tural devel­op­ment has gone wrong, we must go back, return, to sim­pli­city, brev­ity, speed, to Nug­gets, to singles not albums, to bars not sta­di­ums. It turns out the mid-​70s was hippy culture’s baroque phase, and after the baroque comes neo-​classicism. Punk was both year zero and a return to a lost golden age, para­dox­ical as that might be. It was intensely focussed on its own situ­ation: what to listen to, how to dress, what must be dis­missed. It hated first of all, its own envir­on­ment: rock was dec­ad­ent, punk journ­al­ists had to scorn the inter­viewees from estab­lished bands, fan­dom was out. This breach in a cul­ture, the before and after it cre­ated, is the cru­cial mat­ter. This means I under­stood paradigm shift and epi­stem­o­lo­gical break intu­it­ively before the names Kuhn and Althusser meant any­thing to me.

2. The­or­et­ical detour

Address­ing punk as an event in and against pop cul­ture, an impli­cit cri­tique of the passiv­ity of the con­sumer, a nas­cent the­ory of ali­en­a­tion in which the fan cre­ates the star (see Vermorel’s Fan­de­monium), remem­ber­ing punk’s injunc­tion, do some­thing, means punk had a cri­tique of form, a self-​awareness which mil­it­ates against see­ing it as a plat­form for addressing/​critiquing soci­ety at large. As the idea of plat­form is too simple, how then do we think about punk’s polit­ics? Stew­art Home, in Cranked Up Really High, des­pite dis­avow­ing intel­lec­tual respect­ab­il­ity, offers a nuanced ana­lysis of punk (or per­haps he simply par­od­ies aca­demic hair-​splitting — it never does to take Home too straight­for­wardly). The book is sub­titled Genre The­ory and Punk Rock and in it he dis­tin­guishes punk (lower case), Punk (cap­it­al­ised) and PUNK (upper case). The argu­ment goes some­thing like this: punk rock is a dis­pos­able nov­elty genre, Punk is a coher­ent ideo­lo­gical con­tent and PUNK is a musical genre incor­por­at­ing punk and Punk. The ten­sion is between nov­elty and authen­ti­city; punk “is doomed to eternal repe­ti­tion”, Punk “can be treated tele­olo­gic­ally”. The twist in Home’s argu­ment lies in see­ing the dis­pos­able nov­elty punk as in a way more authen­tic than the ideo­lo­gical punk which com­mits to “authen­ti­city”. The tele­ology of ideo­lo­gical Punk is treated by Home dia­lect­ic­ally, as a dis­course that in the twenty years or so fol­low­ing punk moved through rhet­or­ics of class war (Punk), race war (Oi), gender war (Riot Grrrl) and eco­logy. Home goes out of his way to argue that the Sex Pis­tols were never PUNK and the so-​called “situ­ation­ist influ­ence” is a mis­un­der­stand­ing. He has in his tar­get here Greil Marcus’s free asso­ci­at­ive study of Punk and its claimed pre­curs­ors, Lip­stick Traces.

I find more merit in Marcus’s study than Home would con­cede, although it is true to say that the ques­tion that enlivens thought when you read Home, namely “is he ser­i­ous?”, never arises with Mar­cus, who is all too ser­i­ous. As a meth­od­o­logy, Marcus’s freely asso­ci­at­ive “secret his­tory” which allows him to leap from John Lydon to the six­teenth cen­tury heretic John of Ley­den is, shall we say, a rather loose applic­a­tion of Ben­jaminian “dia­lectics at a stand­still”, which leaves me won­der­ing why Steve Jones, gui­tar­ist, does not man­date a link­age to Steve Jones, genet­i­cist, and his start­ling claim that “evol­u­tion has been repealed”, a claim as ripe in its pos­sib­il­it­ies for the mil­len­nial dreamer as any Brethren of the Free Spirit. You see the prob­lem? What links have been established?

Home’s approach to ideo­lo­gical punk has the advant­age of remind­ing us that PUNK was appro­pri­ated as a plat­form for both left and right wing ideo­lo­gies, and that these ideo­lo­gies are extrinsic and not of the essence of Punk; how­ever, des­pite his Hegel­ian­ism, Home would not accept that Punk has any essence, pre­fer­ring recep­tion aes­thet­ics. Con­trary to Home, and in a move that makes me think Marcus’s less strict method non­ethe­less gets closer to the truth, I’ll take the Sex Pis­tols to be punks, and also take it that an essence of punk atti­tude can be isol­ated, before the Clash intro­duce class rhet­oric as a sup­ple­ment­ary attribute.

3. “you bet­ter under­stand I’m in love with my self, my beau­ti­ful self…”

The Sex Pis­tols first single put Anarchy back in cir­cu­la­tion as an idea, or at least cre­ated a new audi­ence for the polit­ical the­ory. On the scorched earth cre­ated by the break, in the space cre­ated by the destruc­tion of the past false cul­ture, Anarchy In The UK erec­ted a sign­post. The Anarch­ist /​/​Anti-​Christ rhyme, not to men­tion the B-​side I Wanna Be Me, not to men­tion the obses­sion with the effects of sov­er­eignty expressed in the second single God Save The Queen: wherever these lyr­ics came from in Johnny Rotten’s head or Mal­colm McLaren’s prompt­ing, they poin­ted dir­ectly to a spe­cific cur­rent of anarch­ist thought which was also the cul­min­a­tion of Left Hegel­ian the­or­ising that is to be found in Max Stirner’s The Ego And Its Own (Der Ein­zige und sein Eigentum) from 1844 [While walk­ing through the city yes­ter­day, think­ing about this piece, I was con­fron­ted by a large bill­board, stat­ing in large cap­it­als, A REVOLUTION STARTED IN 1844; if I were a psy­cho­geo­graph­ical mys­tic, I would take this sign for a sign, even though it turned out to be an advert for the Co-​operative bank].

Stirner’s book, best remembered out­side anarch­ist circles, if at all, via Marx and Engels’s denun­ci­ation in The Ger­man Ideo­logy, artic­u­lates clearly the ideas embod­ied by Punk:

The ego­ist, turn­ing against the demands and con­cepts of the present, executes piti­lessly the most meas­ure­less — desec­ra­tion. Noth­ing is holy to him! The desec­rator puts forth his strength against every fear of God, for fear of God would determ­ine him in everything that he left stand­ing as sacred.

For Stirner, dia­lect­ic­ally devel­op­ing Feuerbach’s cri­tique of Chris­tian­ity, any essence or hypo­s­tat­ised spirit is first an ali­en­a­tion then a reific­a­tion which becomes a mater­ial force stand­ing as enemy to the pro­ject of self-​sovereignty. That sac­red spirit may be called God, Man­kind, State, Com­munity, Com­mod­ity; all must be opposed by the unique self whose cre­ativ­ity and desire fol­lows from a reversal of per­spect­ive whereby all these phantoms are exposed as products of our cre­ation, rather than vice-​versa, see­ing ourselves as products of the cre­ation of Soci­ety, Fam­ily, God.

The paradigm shift or epi­stem­o­lo­gical break which punk enacted in pop­u­lar cul­ture is bet­ter named as an instance of this reversal of per­spect­ive, thus the Stirner­ite philo­sophy is not an optional add-​on polit­ics of punk, but the true and unique polit­ical con­tent of punk. Stirner can be and has been mis­read as a right wing liber­tarian, as a quasi-​Thatcherite “There is no such thing as soci­ety” ideo­logue, as mere selfish­ness. Rather he should be seen as the link between Hegel­ian and Niet­z­s­chian thought. His book concludes:

I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one the owner him­self returns into his cre­at­ive noth­ing … If I con­cern myself for myself (if I set my affair on myself) the unique one, then my con­cern rests on its trans­it­ory mor­tal cre­ator, who con­sumes him­self, and I may say: All things are noth­ing to me (I have set my affair on nothing).

Stirner dis­tin­guishes polit­ical revolu­tion from ego­istic rebellion/​insurrection:

Revolu­tion con­sists in an over­turn­ing of con­di­tions and is accord­ingly a polit­ical or social act; Revolu­tion aims at new arrange­ments, insur­rec­tion leads us to no longer let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves and sets no glit­ter­ing hopes on “insti­tu­tions”. To be without a con­sti­tu­tion is the endeav­our of the rebel.

The chances of mak­ing the cor­rect read­ing of Stirner are con­sid­er­ably enhanced by the avail­ab­il­ity of Vaneigem’s The Revolu­tion of Every­day Life (Traité de savoir-​vivre à l’usage des jeunes généra­tions), another cru­cial text which was given cur­rency in punk anarch­ist circles by the per­sist­ent rumour that all this had some­thing to do with the Situ­ation­ists. Vanei­gem basic­ally updated Stirner for the 1960s, as can be seen in this passage:

The reversal of per­spect­ive entails a kind of anti-​conditioning. Not a new form of con­di­tion­ing, but a new game and its tac­tics; the game of sub­ver­sion. The reversal of per­spect­ive turns know­ledge into praxis, hope into free­dom, and medi­ation into a pas­sion for imme­di­acy. … To reverse per­spect­ive is to stop see­ing things through the eyes of the com­munity, of ideo­logy, of the fam­ily, of other people. To grasp hold of one­self as of some­thing solid, to take one­self as start­ing point and centre. To base everything on sub­jectiv­ity and to fol­low one’s sub­ject­ive will to be everything.

This expresses the spirit and essence of Punk. Except, Stirner would object that to talk of the spirit of punk as some essence extract­able from the unique moment it happened (it happened to me) and trans­fer­able to another con­text is to cre­ate yet another tyr­an­nical phantom to which the unique indi­vidual would become enslaved. Bet­ter to say that the auto­bi­o­graph­ical con­tex­tu­al­ising of Sec­tion One above is there to say that punk as it happened to me is a unique non-​generalisable exper­i­ence of reversal of per­spect­ive from which no one else can draw any les­sons, par­tic­u­larly if you were not six­teen in 1977. “The door-​keeper … roars in his ear: ‘No one else could ever be admit­ted here, since this gate was made only for you.’ ” Unlike the par­able in Kafka it is to Liberty rather than Law that admit­tance is sought. Still, each their own door.

4. Defla­tion­ary Postscript

But, cer­tain read­ers of this might say, you are mak­ing a fool of your­self, tak­ing this juven­ile infatu­ation, this adoles­cent epis­ode so ser­i­ously. It may be so, but still a reader of Stirner, Punk, and the philo­sophy the sign­post of Punk poin­ted towards, left its mark on me suf­fi­ciently for my response to be that many many oth­ers make fools of them­selves by tak­ing God ser­i­ously, tak­ing Law ser­i­ously, tak­ing Philo­sophy ser­i­ously. One of Punk’s traits, on those of us marked by it, is an inab­il­ity to be ser­i­ous about socially sanc­tioned ser­i­ous mat­ters, and an obverse ser­i­ous­ness about pre­cisely these things soci­ety demarc­ates as trivial.

In 1978 I was sev­en­teen. Still wear­ing cheese­cloth and denim actu­ally, if truth be told, as a wit­ness from that time has just incon­veni­ently reminded me. So, as Badiou would recog­nise, the event is in large part con­struc­ted ret­ro­spect­ively, and, assidu­ous as I was in rede­fin­ing my record col­lec­tion, cloth­ing took a while longer. Nor did expos­ure to Vanei­gem break the habit of com­mod­ity accu­mu­la­tion — that record col­lec­tion again. How­ever when the time to decide what to study at uni­ver­sity came to this middle class teen­ager, my enthu­si­asm did not take me into cul­tural stud­ies and sub­cul­tural stud­ies, which always struck me as report­ing to power about the activ­it­ies of those seek­ing to escape power — act­ing as a kind of paid informer. Instead, recall­ing Stirner’s dis­cus­sion of State and Law as two of the major insti­tu­tions of ali­en­ated sov­er­eignty, I decided that know­ing the enemy might be a good use of the oppor­tun­ity free edu­ca­tion offered then. I went to the Law, as to enemy ter­rit­ory. I went to the Law, but I came from Punk. Punk think­ing informs crit­ical legal think­ing. Still here a third of a cen­tury later, con­front­ing the ali­en­a­tions and reific­a­tions which oppose the pro­ject of self-​sovereignty, Punk made me a crit­ical legal scholar.

Angus McDon­ald is Senior Lec­turer in Law at Stafford­shire University

Tags: Law, Punk, Resistance

This entry was posted on 7 March 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Critical Legal Theory, Previously, Radical Politics, Series: Punk, Law, Resistance. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.