L.A. Punk’s Sub-Urbanism

Abstract

In moving from modernism to postmodernism i am positioning Los Angeles punk subculture as an historical and philosophical bridge between the two eras. Applying the postmodern brand to punk identity is problematic but not entirely without merit since it crosses boundaries and questions metanarratives. The one narrative most punks leave securely in place is the primacy of the individual, investing in a discourse of alienation that cannot be characterized as free-floating posthumanism. So a more exact classification is Charles Jencks’s definition of “late modernism”: any philosophy or act that breaks with modernism by taking its basic tenets to an extreme level but is not fully postmodern.