CRANKED UP REALLY HIGH: GENRE THEORY & PUNK ROCK by Stewart Home

APPENDIX: A COSMETIC UNDERGROUND
Lipstick Traces: a secret history of the twentieth century by Greil Marcus (Harvard University Press $29.95)

Now that the prospect of economic unification within the European Community has become a rapidly approaching reality, many of the conglomerate's leading figures feel that the nations they control are going to achieve a position of dominance within the world. As a consequence, a number of previously obscure European cultural movements are being promoted in an attempt to challenge America's position of hegemony within the arts. Working backwards from PUNK ROCK, journalist Greil Marcus has set out to historify two of these rehabilitated groups by situating them in the context of a tradition which he traces back through Dada to the beliefs of twelfth-century Christian heretics. Since Marcus is chiefly concerned with the recent past, he begins by telling us that:

"This book is about a single, serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called Anarchy In The UK was issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. Made by a four-man rock 'n' roll band called the Sex Pistols, and written by singer Johnny Rotten, the song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris-based intellectuals."

The group of Paris-based intellectuals to whom Marcus refers were the Lettriste International, who he claims were 'refounded in 1957 at a conference of European avant-garde artists as the Situationist International.'

A very crude form of reductionism is at work here, since to suggest that the Sex Pistols simply took up a critique elaborated by earlier avant-garde groups is to ignore historical, geographical and class difference. Likewise, the Situationist International (SI) was far more than a simple refounding of the Lettriste International (LI); it brought together a number of individuals who'd been involved with splinter groups from revolutionary Surrealism and who wished to re-launch the Surrealist project on a new footing. Particularly significant among the latter were Asger Jorn and Constant who'd previously held membership of the COBRA movement. While the LI had been a tiny Parisian grouplet, the SI (although few in number) counted among its members Algerian, Belgian, British, Danish, Dutch, French and Italian nationals. As a result, both the theory and practice of the SI were broader (and less coherent) than that of the LI. Thus while the LI emphasised the necessity of living the cultural revolution, the SI – in its early years – produced works of art in far greater quantity (and many would say of a far higher quality) than the only group Marcus acknowledges as its precursor.

To return to the Sex Pistols, Anarchy In The UK was not written by Johnny Rotten but by all four members of the band. This is one of many trivial misrepresentations which illustrate the author's refusal to come to terms with collective or collaborative projects. He reduces the Sex Pistols to their singer and the post-war avant-garde to a single member of the Situationist International, Guy Debord; two celebrities whose fame depersonalises them to such a degree that they've become representations of individuality rather than autonomous subjects consciously striking out in a direction of their own choice.

By transforming Rotten and Debord into figureheads of PUNK and Situationism, by treating them as archetypes, Marcus simultaneously cancels out any sense of the specificity of the movements to which they belonged. Rather than seeing PUNK as a reaction on the part of a specific sub-strata of English society to rapid inflation, the growth of mass unemployment, the musical tastes of the preceding generation and the general sense of cultural devastation which ravaged Britain in the mid-seventies, Marcus treats it as little more than fall-out from left-bank bohemianism. He has no sense of the fundamental difference between a trend within popular culture and the ideological beliefs of a tiny clique of intellectuals, such as the Situationists, whose journals reached a peak circulation of a few thousand copies.

Another element missing from Lipstick Traces is an active engagement with politics; Marcus makes several rhetorical denunciations of capitalism but since these don't contain even a hint of a class based perspective, they are as abstract as his misunderstanding of PUNK. Anyone who can suggest that PUNK 'was, finally, no more than an art statement,' doesn't understand (or is deliberately mystifying) the class basis of culture. As a current within popular culture, PUNK tended to be consumed as a series of narratives with which its audience could identify; central among these were stories of conflict between the dispossessed and those in authority (cf. Anarchy In The UK, God Save The Queen and White Riot). As a discourse PUNK subordinated form to content, whereas Situationist theory which emphasises aesthetic distancing (most obviously in the concept of 'the Spectacle') – albeit as a disagreeable phenomena – reflects the concerns of bourgeois culture. Members of the PUNK community rarely considered the means by which they communicated (or the way in which they apprehended the world) to be problematic, whereas for the Situationists 'everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation' (Thesis 1 of Debord's Society Of The Spectacle). Thus in the Situationist critique, as in any bourgeois ideology, there is a tendency to liquidate meaningful content by subordinating it to form and formal innovation. The Situationist assertion that the entire world is dominated by an essentially banal set of social and economic relations represents a particularly extreme version of this trend and wilfully glosses over the differences between east and west, first and third world, popular and high culture – thereby discouraging resistance to localised oppression by clothing Power with a monolithic appearance.

Linked to the issues of class and taste is the process of historification. Marcus wants to elevate PUNK to the status of art and bring the Lettriste and Situationist movements into the accepted canon of art history. The question as to how and why this process of canonisation takes place is never directly addressed by Marcus, although it seems reasonable to assume he's reflected upon the issue – since Lipstick Traces is simply one among many recent publications which have played a role in celebrating the work and personality of Guy Debord. The tendency in much of the secondary literature on the SI to view Debord as 'a genius' shifts attention away from the issues addressed by the Situationists and onto Debord's personal achievement in allegedly confronting capitalism.

The emphasis Marcus places upon personalities ultimately nullifies any sense of individuality which his subjects might possess. The links drawn between free spirit heretics and members of the Lettriste, Situationist and PUNK movements, are forged without acknowledgement of the fact that the former lived in feudal communities while the latter were attempting to effect change within industrialised societies. Since the mental sets and social networks of individuals living under capitalism are fundamentally different to those shared by members of a feudal community, comparisons between the two are specious.

The device used to link these diverse individuals and movements is the metaphor of the medium; Johnny Rotten is a passive creator whose body is taken over by what Marcus describes as 'the voice,' but which we might just as well call the muse, or God – because it's a higher authority. In his description of the last Sex Pistols concert, Marcus portrays Johnny Rotten as a puppet whose actions are controlled by an occult force:

"As in other moments on the same stage on the same night, as in so many moments on the singles the Sex Pistols put out over the previous year, he seemed not to know what he was saying. He seemed not to be himself, whoever that was, once more he was less singing a song than being sung by it."

With the concept of 'the voice,' a hidden authority which (dis)organises the world, Marcus abandons any need for a rational explanation of the events he describes. Such a mode of discourse has more in common with the simple faith of a priest, than the considered reflections of a critic or historian; it is a creed which, with its refusal of difference, does a gross disservice both to the post-war avant-garde and the PUNK music Marcus claims to love.

Originally published in New Art Examiner March 1990, i.e. nine months after it was commissioned and written.

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Cranked Up Really High contents

More Home takes on punk rock: No Future conference lecture / chapter on Punk in "The Assault On Culture"