Punk is … the transgressive politics of boredom. Being nothing other than a pawn in their game – who has not sometimes woken up in the middle of the night imagining this. The Big Other that pulls the strings has various figures: national and transnational law and order apparatuses, global capital and the alleged economic necessities, bureaucratic and administrative regulations, the demands of social security, educational standards, images, ideas and idols constantly produced and re-produced by the mass-media, and so on and so forth. Things go from bad to worse when one starts to wonder who really is in charge, since today sovereignty is fragmented, which does not make it less pervasive and omnipotent. Then again, you may find some comfort from the fact that this is not your paranoid delusion but reality, “the only things we got today” as The Clash already told us in “Hate and War”, which you’ll find from their first LP, The Clash, released in 1977: “An’ if I close my eyes / They will not go away / You have to deal with it / It is the currency”.
Ari Hirvonen
Refugee Struggles: From Helsinki to Paris
Even if refugees have lost their political community, their “society of equals” comprising “reciprocity and commonness” and “mutual agreements and promises,” as Hannah Arendt says, they are able to become and act as political subjects.Hannah Arendt (2005), The...
Punk, Law, Resistance … No Future: Punk against the Boredom of the Law (3 of 3)
Boring life What a boring life /How could anyone surviveBoring life.(The Slits, "A Boring Life") Punk spoke not of ideals and dreams but of boredom. For punks, the 1960s hippie dream was dead and the socialist utopias were as boring as the ideologies of the law and...
Punk, Law, Resistance … No Future: Punk against the Boredom of the Law (2 of 3)
My new rose, lets go Hey ho, let's go Hey ho, let's go [...] They're piling in the back seat They're generating steam heat Pulsating to the back beat The Blitzkrieg Bop. (Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop”) Even if the lyrics of punk did not always address political issues or...
Punk, Law, Resistance … No Future: Punk against the Boredom of the Law (1 of 3)
Pawn in their game And that's the way they try and run this land How they hold you down and keep you in hand You're just a pawn in their game. (Stiff Little Fingers, "Law and Order") Being nothing other than a pawn in their game – who has not sometimes woken up...