Punk Poetics

Abstract

Punk never foresaw duration: it refused to look forward and the materiality of its primary evidence is particularly unstable. Thus this chapter does not prize any one phenomena or marker as the key to unlocking punk for the present. Rather, it shows how songs, paintings, and printed material deliberately fostered a system out of synch with itself, wherein all parts together fought against any unitary, ideal configuration. The ubiquitous fracturing of bands, for example, illustrates punk’s drive to vacate itself from the future; performances were dystopic fantasies that in turn crystallized definitively in punk’s various textual interventions into its present. Ultimately, I argue below, punk materiality created in its time what philosopher Walter Benjamin, while theorizing dialectical standstill in The Arcades Project, called a “constellation saturated with tensions.” An apt tool for theorizing punk, Benjamin’s oeuvre tests the possibility of solving the present’s antinomies. His focus on historical avant-gardes, on the possibility of their aesthetic and material solutions to and impetuses for the effacement of the past in the present, and on the logic of forward-marching progress are in this chapter the means to make legible punk’s inexhaustible self-criticism, aggression, and its insistence on de- and recontextualization. The following illustrates how punk’s overall anarchic project for the aesthetic contestation of the present was indebted to and simultaneously distinct from such aesthetic legacies: punk’s representation of “no future” was more than resignatory stasis.

In the fields with which we are concerned,

knowledge comes only in lightning flashes.

The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.¹