Making ideology material: Theory and practice in punk

Stacy Ray Thompson, Purdue University

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to theorize how punk, as a cultural field, renders its ideological assumptions material. First, I schematize “punk history” and map the formative impulses of punk in terms of desire. Drawing from Sigmund Freud, from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of non-individuated desire, and from Fredric Jameson's concept of a “political unconscious,” I imagine late capitalism as allowing for the expression and realization of certain desires and the concomitant repression of others, which then return, as Freud claims that repressed desires must. Most importantly for punk, capitalism both creates and exacerbates a friction between culture and economics, from which flows the most formative desires of punk. I name the core desires of each of the six major punk scenes and map each scene as a nexus of intersecting desires that can be derived from the material artifacts—the social formations and commodities—that the scene produces and in which it finds expression. Second, I situate punk in terms of a logic of capital and culture derived from the work of Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Guy Debord, and Ernst Bloch. With the work of these theorists in mind, I investigate punk as a cultural movement that emerges from the break that they posit between modernism and postmodernism, in order to assess whether, in refusing to abandon certain modern practices, punk manages to recuperate and redeem them within a postmodern context. Third, drawing on Marx's description of the commodity in Capital, I examine punk's problems with capitalism and commodification in relation to the opposition within the commodity form between use-value and exchange-value. I question punks' antipathy for commodification and speculate on whether or not the commodity form is truly the target of their animosity. I conclude by inserting the punk object into the larger structure of the economy of the music industry. This study reveals that the most powerful element of the punk project is its underlying refusal to give up on imagining something other than the world as it is and punks' material efforts toward constructing a “new world.”

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Plotnitsky, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Music|American studies

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