PUNK/ASKĒSIS by Robert Kenneth Richardson a Dissertation

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PUNK/ASKĒSIS

Robert Kenneth Richardson

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Program in American Studies

MAY 2014

To the Faculty of Washington State University:

The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of Robert

Richardson find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted.

______Carol Siegel, Ph.D., Chair

______Thomas Vernon Reed, Ph.D.

______Kristin Arola, Ph.D.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“Laws are like sausages,” Otto von Bismarck once famously said. “It is better not to see them being made.” To laws and sausages, I would add the dissertation. But, they do get made. I am grateful for the support and guidance I have received during this process from Carol Siegel, my chair and friend, who continues to inspire me with her deep sense of humanity, her astute insights into a broad range of academic theory and her relentless commitment through her life and work to making what can only be described as a profoundly positive contribution to the nurturing and nourishing of young talent. I would also like to thank T.V. Reed who, as the

Director of American Studies, was instrumental in my ending up in this program in the first place and Kristin Arola who, without hesitation or reservation, kindly agreed to sign on to the committee at T.V.’s request, and who very quickly put me on to a piece of theory that would became one of the analytical cornerstones of this work and my thinking about it. Thank you all for your assistance and input and for allowing me the room to do my work in my own ways.

I also want to thank the following Washington State University staff and faculty for their encouragement, help and support during this process: Jean Wiegand, Bob Eddy, Liz Siler and

George Kennedy. In each of you I found not only guidance and a ready smile, but also a soft place to fall when I needed one. This process is often characterized as being extremely isolating and, in fact, it is. But, each of your presences was a constant reminder to me that it’s people that matter first—even when you have a draft to get out and more work to do than you think that you will ever possibly survive. A very special thanks, too, to Rose Smetana, who stepped in at a critical juncture in this process and helped me cut through a swath of formidable university red tape. I am so grateful to you all. Also, thank you to Victor Villanueva for his early participation in this process.

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A very special thanks, too, to several friends and colleagues over the last several years:

Gregory Phillips, Regina McMenomy, Mary Jo Klinker, Erika Abad, Frank King, Shawn

Lamebull, Ben Bunting, David Warner and Sky Wilson. I may not have ventured out often, but when I did it was inevitably in the company of one or more of you. Thank you for sharing your insights, your irreverence, your humanity, your humor, your commiserations and your corroborations.

Finally, thank you to my family: Brett, Max, Dexter, Chibi and Maxi, who are my greatest joy and comfort in this world. Without each of you, my life is unintelligible. And to

Holly Zemsta, who, for the last eighteen years, has supported, encouraged and loved me through a variety of triumphs, challenges, pains and progressions. I am so pleased and truly proud to have you as such an integral and ongoing part of my life and work.

PUNK/ASKĒSIS

Abstract

By Robert Kenneth Richardson, Ph.D. Washington State University May 2014

Chair: Carol Siegel

This work examines the aesthetics of traditional punk culture and interprets them as a contemporary form of the ancient Greek practice of askēsis. The primary research for this work was composed of personal observations and experiences, an archive of both academic and non- academic texts and both written and video interviews. The goal of this project is to intertwine the voices and experiences of various individuals prominent within traditional punk culture within a framework of a broad range of philosophy and cultural studies scholarship (the works of Michel

Foucault figure prominently here) in order to arrive at a broader understanding of traditional punk philosophy and culture.

Given that punk communities are often inherently resistant to not only being studied but to the methods and objectives of traditional academic research inquiry, this work observes a handful of guidelines and notes: 1) Traditional punk culture can be represented by specific spokespeople, artifacts, performances and artistic output, 2) Punk culture can be read as text, 3)

Video interview sources will be used frequently in order to avoid some of the inherent problems of transcription, and 4) The language in which I’ve chosen to write the piece is intentionally

v designed to be accessible and comprehensible to both academics and a more general audience rather than being limited to a small audience of academics who all share a jargon-dependent discourse.

Utilizing these frameworks and sources, I argue that not only is traditional punk a form of askēsis, but that the purpose of traditional punk aesthetic and askēsis is the cultivation of experience in the pursuit of raw power.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii

ABSTRACT ...... v

LIST OF FIGURES ...... viii

CHAPTERS

PREFACE: Slave Day ...... 1

INTRODUCTION ...... 5

CHAPTER ONE: Thinking Feeling: Punk as Care of the Self: Patti Smith, John Lydon and Issues of Transgression, Transcendence and Critique in Traditional Punk Culture .. 44

CHAPTER TWO: Iggy Pop, the Curtain and the 50 Foot Long Erect Paper Phallus ...... 69

CHAPTER THREE: Punk/Askēsis/Parrhēsia ...... 89

CONCLUSION/CONTINUATION ...... 106

WORKS CITED ...... 110

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LIST OF FIGURES

1. Figure 1: “Save Pussy Riot” ...... 4

2. Figure 2: “Pussy Riot’s Victorious Defeat” ...... 6

3. Figure 3: “Police Arrest Punks in Indonesia—in Pictures” ...... 13

4. Figure 4: “Close Guantanamo” ...... 17

5. Figure 5: “Iggy Walking on Crowd” ...... 77

6. Figure 6: “Iggy Pop” ...... 85

7. Figure 7: “Pussy Riot Sochi” ...... 102

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“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.”

—Michel Foucault

“Art should be life.”

—John Lydon

Preface

Slave Day

She had been bought to be a slave. Whether the black garbage bag she wore for a dress or her bronze metallic flats were her idea, I still don’t know, but what I do know is that she looked bored. Sitting in a desk kitty-corner from her in the back of my 11th grade geometry class, I could clearly see that. In the slack of her back and the way she held her pale porcelain chin in her left hand, elbow resting lightly on her knee, “Soon,” she seemed to be thinking, “this will all be over,” and then she could go home.

At the time, the student council at the Midwestern public high school I attended had an annual practice of raising funds for both the council and various council-endorsed charities by holding special events. Clash Day encouraged students to dress in clothing no two items of which matched. On Lovely Legs Day, students, teachers and administrators alike could wear shorts and solicit amongst the faculty and student body collecting spare change or cash as a sign of validation that they either clearly had “lovely legs” or were so pathetic that a sympathy donation was in order. That holding a “Slave Day” might have been even the slightest bit inappropriate on any number of levels (which is to say that is was reprehensible) never, it seemed, occurred to either the student council, the administration or any of the teachers (grown- ups?) at the overwhelmingly white, clique-riddled, economically privileged school that I attended. (By “privileged” I mean that the high school boasted its own hockey rink, an Olympic- sized swimming pool, an auditorium so large and well-equipped that it was often used by the community at large for special performances, twelve tennis courts, two gymnasiums where general PE classes such as fencing and archery—amongst many others—could be taken and separate wings for Freshmen and upperclassmen students.) And so Slave Day consisted of

students volunteering to be publicly auctioned off to the highest bidder, usually another student, during the various lunch periods a few days ahead of time. Once bought, the “slave” would be responsible for shadowing his or her “master” on and off throughout the appointed school day performing menial tasks like carrying textbooks to and from classes or clearing his or her master’s (and often the master’s friends’) lunch trays from the cafeteria tables.

If I remember right, it was Slave Day in the spring of 1982 when she had shown up in that geometry class. I’m not sure now whether or not we spoke. It wasn’t until the following fall, the fall of my senior year, that I learned that her name was Karen Kibbler and that she was an artist. We had run into each other again in an art class (she taking an independent study hour to work in the kiln room, and I taking an entry-level jewelry making course), and I liked her immediately. She seemed to be absolutely clear and confident about whom she was, unique certainly by comparison to her clone-like peers, as unpretentious and intriguing as the day I’d first seen her. No trickery. No hidden agendas. What you saw was at least what you got. But just what was I seeing?

Being in Karen’s presence was like walking into a classroom at dusk, full of shadows and sketches of things cast up by the last light trickling in through its wide paned windows, things that invited careful scrutiny and detailed discernment. She wasn’t a done deal, nor did the way that she presented herself to the world suggest that she thought there was any legitimate reason for her to complete that work once and for all. And there was a stillness about her that seemed to come from all of that work-never-to-be-done—an attractive stillness that something inside of me intuitively recognized. In her presence, I breathed more easily and relaxed. “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am,” Michel Foucault once remarked. “The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when

you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end” (Martin 9).

“Are you punk?” I asked Karen as we hung out in her bedroom one summer afternoon listening to Nina Hagen and Dead Kennedys records; this was sometime in 1983. “Punk is dead,

Robert,” she said and softly giggled a little.

Right:

Fig. 1 (animalnewyork)

Introduction

On Friday, August 17th of 2012, Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda “Nadia”

Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, three members of the Russian punk band

Pussy Riot, formed in August of 2011, were each sentenced to two years in a penal colony by

Russian authorities (“Pussy Riot Sentenced”):

The three women were arrested in March after a guerrilla performance in

Moscow’s main cathedral where they high-kicked and danced while singing a

“punk prayer”1 (Fig.1) pleading with the Virgin Mary to save Russia from

Vladimir Putin, who was elected to a third term as Russia’s president two weeks

later.

Judge Marina Syrova said in her verdict that the band members

“committed hooliganism driven by religious hatred.” She rejected the women’s

arguments that they were protesting the Orthodox Church’s support for Putin and

didn’t intend to offend religious believers.

[Maria, Nadezhda, and Yekaterina] stood in handcuffs in a glass cage in

the courtroom for three hours as the judge read the verdict. They smiled sadly as

the judge recounted testimony of prosecution witnesses accusing them of

1 Although I have been unable to locate an English translation of the full text of the lyrics (sung, of course, in Russian during the protest), the lyrics of the song are reported to include the phrases “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, drive Putin out,” “Black habit, gold shoulder straps,” an apparent reference to “the fusion of KGB and the church” and “Holy shit.” “We sang part of the refrain ‘Holy shit,’” Tolokonnikova said in court today. “I am sorry if I offended anyone with this. It is an idiomatic expression, related to the previous verse—about the fusion of Moscow patriarchy and the government. ‘Holy shit’ is our evaluation of the situation in the country. This opinion is not blasphemy” (“Pussy Riot Trial”) (“We Are Not Guilty”).

sacrilege and “devilish dances” in church and said that their feminist views made

them hate the Orthodox religion.

Tolokonnikova laughed out loud when the judge read the testimony of a

psychologist who said that her “active stance on social issues” was an anomaly.

The three women remained calm and kept smiling after the judge

announced the sentence. Someone in the courtroom shouted “Shame!” They

waved at relatives from behind the glass (“Pussy Riot Members Sentenced”) (Fig.

2).

Fig. 2 (“Pussy Riot’s Victorious Defeat”)

In Mexico City, PermaCulture Punks, who are part of an environmental revolutionary group called Tierra Viva, work to create self-sustaining eco-villages. In a short documentary entitled “Eco-Punks: A Model of Sustainability, Mexico City, Mexico” produced for the 2003

PBS series GlobalTribe,2 series host Amy Eldon interviews members of the PermaCulture Punks and says: “When I think of punks, I don’t think PermaCulture. I don’t think vegetarianism. I think of angry disenfranchised youth who hang around in squares, and I think that’s a common stereotype. So, how did you all become so passionate about your cause?” To which one of the unidentified PermaCulture punks responds, “The main way I see the punk movement, I found a lot of hope, a lot of kids who think like me and how to put my anger towards something positive.”

“So, I’m trying to be responsible for myself and my environment,” Eldon says, then asks,

“Can I be a punk?” “The way you dress does not signify whether you are good or bad,” responds another of the punks. “We say the most important thing is what you do. Not even what you say— it’s what you do.” “What these punks do,” Eldon continues, “is to try to find practical solutions to the overwhelming environmental hazards they live with every day.” “What problems do you think specifically in this neighborhood,” she asks walking with the punks through a local, decaying village. “The biggest problem in this neighborhood is the water. The water that comes here is already treated —it comes from sewage water. When it comes out of the tap, you can smell that awful stench.” “So these are huge problems. Why do you think that you can change things?” “It is not possible to live in such a pigsty,” offers one of the young female punks. “If we don’t change, if it isn’t now, we are going to continue on a downward spiral. So from that

2 The piece was at some point uploaded to Permacultureplanet.com and subsequently reposted to YouTube, where I originally found it. The genealogy of the sourcing is important here as the role that the internet and social media now play in punk culture and intra-punk communication cannot be emphasized enough. The space that was once occupied in punk culture by print fanzines, for instance, has largely been replaced by fanzines in online formats.

thought came the idea that we could do something, but we had to start with ourselves and then help raise other people’s awareness” (“PermaCulture Punks of Mexico City”).

As with Pussy Riot, the PermaCulture punks’ approach to change, evidenced by their taking control of themselves, their environments and circumstances, finds a deep root in one of the basic tenets of the traditional punk’s belief system, the DIY or “do it yourself” approach.

This approach, this aesthetic, (which is evidenced so clearly in Pussy Riot’s grassroots style of protest and invoked explicitly by the Tierra Viva punk) was originally and has continued to be born out of chiefly two factors: 1) a lack of financial resources and a lack of access to financial resources amongst punks, and 2) a desire for punks to retain maximum control over their autonomy, their ethics and their creative output. So important is the DIY aesthetic to all segments of punk culture that it has come to permeate nearly every aspect of punk society from how one constructs and conducts one’s self as an object of political discourse to a broad range of artistic expression:

The punk DIY aesthetic deeply influenced the creation, production, and the

contribution of punk music, as well as the dissemination of information about

punk. Although some punk bands courted, received, and (occasionally) honored

recording contracts with major record firms, most punk bands either started or

signed with independent recording companies. DIY also flourished in textual

production. Inspired by the U.S. ‘zine Punk, London soon had its own punk ‘zine

Sniffin’ Glue. ‘Zines and advertisements for punk shows shared a cut-and-paste

homemade aesthetic that came from their designers’ lack of resources, art school

backgrounds, and access to photocopiers. ‘Zines promoted local bands by

reviewing shows and recordings and by interviewing local musicians, as well as

promoting DIY, urging readers to form their own bands. (Leblanc 38)

The aesthetic is, perhaps, a cultural hold-over from 1960s hippie culture where financial resources and access to these were frequently in short supply. (One could argue successfully that both hippie and punk cultures somewhat overlap each other historically and that many of the most important figures in punk culture were formed and informed by 1960s popular culture simply because that was the era during which they came of age) However, while DIY existed integrally within 1960s counter-culture, it never crystallized as a steadfast, basic tenet of the culture to the degree that it did in punk.

In 2008, African writer and director Keith Jones began work on a feature-length documentary on the punk scenes in Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa. The result,

Punk in Africa, is currently being screened to positive acclaim in prominent film festivals across the world. Although punk has existed in Africa for some forty years, the scene, according to

Jones, has never been documented:

Nobody has ever attempted to tell this story and to connect all the threads of the

narrative, so a lot of the main figures from different eras of the punk scene in

various countries have never really been asked for their side of things, and I think

that is hugely important and that the film plays a role in that. And in Cape Town

in particular, the punk scene is really buzzing because of it and a lot of interest is

being generated in bands and music that had been long overlooked if not

forgotten. . . . I’d say that the connection between punk rock and a certain

approach to African identity has always been there, with guys like Ivan Kadey

from National Wake, Robbie Robb from Asylum Kids, James Phillips from the

bands Corporeal Punishment and Illegal Gathering, and Warrick Sony all finding

it a bridge into exploring their African identity . . . [t]he earliest bands faced a lot

of harassment from the government including gigs being broken up by the police,

audiences tear gassed, tyres [sic] slashed at venues, etc. Certain bands and figures

such as the members of National Wake and Rubin Rose from Wild Youth (and

later the hardcore band Powerage) were singled out for police intimidation due to

their political stance and the fact that mixed-race gatherings were forbidden by

law at that time. Furthermore, the punk scene was always multi-racial and multi-

cultural at a time when much of South Africa was in denial about that, and a

chance to rally around a good cause and stand up for something you believe in is

always easier when you’re young if there is a sense of community behind it. That

combination of radical political engagement and open mindedness about

questions of identity are somehow emblematic of the African punk scenes, even

now. (Lochhead)

That community building in opposition to the fragmenting effects of hegemonic power and authority has, along with the do-it-yourself approach, long been an important element in worldwide, traditional punk culture is here underscored by Jones not only explicitly, but implicit evidence of this can also be found in other aspects of traditional punk culture that he invokes, i.e., the names chosen by punk musicians for their bands: National Wake, Illegal Gathering,

Asylum Kids, etc. In the naming of their bands, (often these names employ irony, irreverence

and satire as discursive challenges to oppressive powers and ideologies) and in their artistic productions generally punks are not infrequently challenging the powers that oppress and attempt to divide them and, at the same time, signifying to each other the oppositional unity that binds their community en masse, limns their aesthetic and links the members of their community to their common belief systems.

Additionally, in this same interview, Jones dates the origin of “punk attitude” in Africa to

1970 and a band called “Suck.” Formally, however, he notes that punk bands did not spring up in

Africa until 1978, which would have put their arrival on the world punk music scene only a few years behind America and England:

The first band to demonstrate what might be termed punk attitude was the

outrageous hard rock band Suck in 1970, who performed under anti-censorship

and anti-war banners and provoked rioting at several gigs, which led to their being

essentially banned throughout the country. Alongside them, several proto-punk

type bands were active in the mid-70s in what was then Rhodesia, among them

Fruits of Loom and Klunk. These bands played often in South Africa in the town

of Springs, a working class mining suburb of Johannesburg which later became an

epicentre [sic] of punk activity. The first ‘proper’ punk bands in South Africa all

formed in 1978—National Wake in Johannesburg, Wild Youth in Durban and an

axis of various bands around legendary character Guillaume Gap in Cape Town,

some of which also included Warrick Sony, who later founded Kalahari Surfers

(Lochhead).

Here, too, what is invoked is not only the tradition of punks’ directly challenging hegemonic power and systems of hierarchical authority, but also a healthy time line is linked to the social movement—one spanning nearly a decade from its thematic point of origin to the approximate year that is often touted globally as the death of punk, circa 1978-1979, depending on how one wants to precisely pin point its demise. Popular culture movements, including punk are, it should be noted, frequently dismissed (which is to say that a concerted attempt is made to silence, otherwise control and erase them) as being short-lived and are branded, therefore, as unimportant. But, in the case of punk in Africa, and in the case of punk globally, as I have been trying to suggest, punk’s life span has been anything but short. It should also be pointed out here that many self-identified punks have never contested the claim as to punk’s death, which often strikes me as an interesting if not calculated strategic move on their part rather than an act of capitulation. There are several reasons that can account for this, but I would offer that by examining punk as a form of resistance that is fundamentally and effectively threatening to hegemonic power (which is to say that it is socially, systemically policed by hegemonic power),

“playing possum,” as it were, can be a highly useful way to lull your opposition into a false sense of security while cultivating your own independence, resistance and longevity. The move keeps the oppressor right where you want them, and survival has always been the first order of business for punks. As the following three examples demonstrate poignantly (and as Jones alludes to in the case of censorship and institutionalized racism in Africa), the policing to which I refer is often political, frequently various and always brutally real.

On December 10, 2011, Indonesian police in the province of Aceh raided a punk concert and “detained” 65 fans. An article in the Washington Post posted four days later relates the details of the event, noting how the detainees were forced to have their heads shaved, how body

piercings were removed “because of the threat they said it caused to Islamic values,” that “dog- collar necklaces and chains were thrown into pools of water for ‘spiritual cleansing’” and how the rockers were “forced to bathe in a lake, change clothes and then pray.” Police claimed that they were “morally rehabilitating” the rockers and that they had “soiled the province’s Islamic image.” The article goes on to note that “after local police chief Iskandar Hasan replaced their

[punks] ‘disgusting’ clothes, he handed each of the punk rockers a toothbrush and yelled, ‘Use it!’” Hasan told the AP that “the rockers will spend the next 10 days getting rehabilitation, learning military-style discipline, and taking religious classes, including Quran recitation. They will then be sent home. Twenty-year-old punker, Fauzan, whose head was shaven, told the AP he was mortified. “Why? Why my hair?!” he said. “We didn’t hurt anyone. This is how we’ve chosen to express ourselves. Why are they treating us like criminals?” (Flock) (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 (Mahyuddin)

“Politics has always been a common platform in punk, and a natural arena to

promote a message and to show your disapproval,” says the Swedish organization Punk

Illegal. Founded in 2005 and currently active, the group is an autonomous member of the

“religiously—[sic] and politically independent network No One is Illegal (Ingen

människa är illegal, IMäI, in Swedish).” Run by volunteers, No One is Illegal “works to

provide practical support to people who are forced to live illegally after having their

applications for asylum refused.” Their internet site contains the following, which, for all

intents and purposes, seems to be their mission statement:

No One is Illegal demand permanent right of residence for all people who

have arrived in the EU and wish to remain. No One is Illegal believe in a world

without borders, a world where No One is Illegal.

Punk Illegals strategy is to raise money directly to IMäIs work with

helping refugees. We also distribute information to raise awareness about the

racist migration politics of the EU. (“Punk Illegal”)

And this their manifesto:

No one is illegal (Sweden)

The network No one is illegal acknowledges no national borders, except as

a political idea, in which we have no moral obligation or interest in accepting or

upholding. A person born in one place has no greater rights to it than anyone else.

This must not end as a vision, but must be practised [sic]. We do not recognize the

rights of states, orginisations [sic] or individuals to limit peoples [sic] movement across borders or label this “illegal” migration.

To us the right to free movement is inseparable from the right to take part in the social life under equal conditions. Until national borders are erased, we work towards giving all people inside a states [sic] borders the same social, political and economic rights and obligations. We oppose all political attempts to use immigration and migration as a weapon to undermine salary levels and social safety net inside a states [sic] borders, for example: recently immigrants were forced to work in the country under worse conditions than the rest of the population.

We want everyone to have the rights and responsibilities to actively participate in building a fair society. Democracy and radical change can only be built from the ground up. Therefore we organize autonomously and strive within the network to stay away from heirachy [sic], as well as making decisions and acting without representation. We see ourselves as one part in a global fight that has been and is fought for freedom, solidarity and equality—against all forms of oppression.

The network No one is illegal is, in the time being, fighting this struggle through:

Directly supporting people who are applying for residence pemits [sic], or who are forced to live hidden because of the swedish [sic] migration policy.

Working for amnesty and perminant [sic] residency for all people that live here and want to stay here.

Fighting for peoples [sic] rights to come and stay inside the EU. To

change the policies that systematically keep people out.

Spreading information about what Swedish and European migration

policies really look like. Focus on the walls that has [sic] been built on EU’s outer

borders to shut out refugees and other migrants. To tell refugees and other

migrants stories. Punch a hole in the myth of the humane migration policies.

Convey political explanations to the question why people are forced to

flee. Take the initiative to a deeper discussion about migration issues, sprouting

from a vision of global solidarity. Show that these questions cannot be separated

from discussions about world ecomony [sic], working and living conditions,

injustice, racism and oppression.

Work together with other groups that fight for refugees and other migrants

[sic] rights as well as opening borders worldwide. (“Punk Illegal”)

Additionally, in a January 7, 2012 blog post the Washington DC based group

BLOWBACK (a self-described “protest punk band”), urged its readers to participate in a public action in Washington DC protesting for the closure of Guantanamo Bay:

There is a January 11 demonstration that a coalition of human rights

groups has been organizing to mark the tenth anniversary of the detention center

at Guantanamo. Show up and bring a friend or two.

The goal is to get enough people to participate to form a human chain from the Capitol to the White House. This is an important anniversary.

Guantanamo seems more like a permanent fixture now than it ever has before.

Show up to protest its continued existence and the growing use by the U.S. of indefinite detention without charge.

The event will start at noon with a rally in Lafayette Square and end at 2 pm. (Blow Back) (Fig. 4)

Fig. 4 (“Close Guantanamo”)

In my effort to firmly establish the contemporary, significant and enduring global presence of punk, its modes and objects of resistance and its persistence over the last nearly 40 years in sub and mainstream world cultures, I would also like to offer this: On page one of the

September 13, 2012 issue of Women’s Wear Daily, arguably the most respected daily publication in the entire multi-billion dollar global fashion industry, a story entitled “The Met Goes Punk” is featured prominently. Spanning two pages, the story announces that “Next May, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute will stage ‘Punk: Chaos to Couture,’ its big spring exhibition seeking to highlight the origins of the punk movement and draw direct connections to haute couture and ready-to-wear creations that it has inspired for the past three decades.” The show is scheduled to run for over three months. “Punk broke all rules when it came to fashion, and everything became possible after punk,” said Andrew Bolton, Costume

Institute curator of the show. “Its impact on high fashion became so enormous, and continues at the same time” (Karimzadeh). That punk has been appropriated and commoditized at every retail price point imaginable for the last thirty-five plus years, is simply more overwhelming evidence of its endurance and importance as a global movement.

That punk exists as an enduring global phenomenon inextricably linked to innumerable instances of political protest, as a “wonderfully transferable response to all sorts of oppressions, direct and indirect, reactionary and neoliberal [. . .] is another reason it matters so much,” as my chair, Carol Siegel, has reminded me. “There are so few modes of resistance that persist this way” (Siegel). And this persistence of and interest in punk and its importance is reflected not only in popular culture and archived museum shows and direct political protest actions à la Pussy

Riot and BLOW BACK, but within academe as well. For example: In July of 2011 I received

from a colleague an email detailing a Call for Papers by Women and Performance for a special issue of their eponymous publication entitled, “Punk Anteriors: Genealogy, Theory,

Performance”. The CFP for the issue read, in part:

We are interested in the temporality and spatiality of punk performances through

a collective and archival process. We use the word “anteriors” in the title of this

issue to frame the articles that address these punk spaces and remnants, plotting

what comes before, anterior to, the telling of punk’s narratives in two senses: first,

in the temporal sense which interrogates punk’s resistant genealogy; and, second,

in the material and spatial sense of place, bodies, and archives. What can be

situated in front of the generic narratives of punk’s beginnings and mainstays as a

form of resistance? Where do articulations of racial formation, gender, nation, and

sexuality fit into generic notions of punk origins, temporalities, and classisms?

Can punk epistemologies be used to critique punk’s exclusions? (King)

Now almost concurrently, the November 6, 2011 issue of the Boston Globe, contained a piece from Leon Neyfakh (the paper’s Ideas reporter, whose online Globe bio describes him as a former New York Observer reporter who “[writes] about new research and thought coming out of academia”) titled “The Rise of Punkademia: How do you study a movement that doesn’t want to be studied?” The article reads in part:

The field of punk studies is currently enjoying an especially fertile moment. In the

past two years, punk studies has generated books like “Visual Vitriol: The Street

Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation” and “White Riot:

Punk Rock and the Politics of Race,” and papers with titles like “The Jersey Punk

Basement Scene: Exploring the Information Underground” and “Let the

Shillelagh Fly: Dropkick Murphys and Irish Hybridity in Punk Rock.” The

Harvard Film Archive recently screened a series of 10 films about American

punk, including a punk rock zombie movie. Next month will see the publication

of the first issue of Punk & Post-Punk, a new peer-reviewed journal devoted

entirely to the subject of punk culture. Two other academic journals are putting

together special issues on the role of gender and race in punk. And soon, a group

of punk enthusiasts at New York University, including the curator of the premier

punk archive in the United States, will put out a call for papers in anticipation of a

planned academic conference marking punk’s 40th birthday.

“There seems to be a real kind of buzz about the subject at the moment,”

said Philip Kiszely, a lecturer at the University of Leeds and the cofounder of the

new punk journal. “Ever since we put out a call for papers, we’ve been deluged

with materials.” (Neyfakh)

Given this flurry of activity, the persistent, palpable, on-going and broadly reaching presence of punk across so many of the world’s social and intellectual spaces (indeed, punk does seem to have, in at least one very real sense, outwitted Karen’s claim as to its demise), it is crucial that when we talk about punk that we be very clear about what we mean by punk.

Among the numerous possibilities of interpretation in accounting for punk’s enduring global presence and influence since its eruption onto the world stage, there are two ways of

reading punk that interest me most: 1) as a reactive response to oppressive hegemonic power and political oppression, and 2) as a form of Foucaultian askēsis. For example, in the case of the former, Pussy Riot, in their public, political protests represent a contemporary example of highly traditional punk values, philosophy and activism. Their critique of Russian politics in general and Putin specifically functions as both performance and critique of the political oppression they experience. Historically, we need look no further than The Sex Pistols’s iconic lyrics to “God

Save the Queen” for a precedent for this mode of punk resistance and critique. The lyrics, in part, go:

God save the queen

The fascist regime

They made you a moron

Potential H-bomb

God save the queen

She ain’t no human being

There is no future

In England’s dreaming

Don’t be told what you want

Don’t be told what you need

There’s no future, no future,

No future for you (Sex Pistols)

When the song was released on May 28, 1977, the same year as the Queen of England’s Silver

Jubilee, politically and economically, Britain was in turmoil. “The fabric of [British] society at that time was” as Paul Simonon, bass player for the iconic British punk/post-punk band The

Clash, has said, “like, when we first started, was in our eyes, was falling apart. We had the three day week. You had rubbish strikes. . . ” (Letts). “You know, everywhere you went it was like bad news,” Sex Pistol Glen Matlock has said “They were talkin’ about burying people at sea in the Mersey because the grave diggers were on strike. I mean it was that bad” (Letts). Given this context, the lyrics seem rather straight forward and self-explanatory: Monarchical power is corrupt and corrupting. Predatory and impersonal, in its entire system of reality it creates no space for its subjects that it does not saturate with its self-serving, controlling intentions and the mechanisms of these. “England’s dreaming,” in so far as the Monarchy is England, holds no future that has not been meticulously plotted and planned for. If at the very heart of the definition of “the future” is a necessary element of the unknown, than what the fascism of the Monarchical system is offering is simply no future at all.

Much as with Pussy Riot’s protest, the song caused a social uproar:

Never had a band questioned the royal set-up so publicly, and it didn’t go down

well with monarchy supporters. While it went to the top of the charts (a position

not acknowledged by chart officials at the time), members of the band—Johnny

Rotten, Sid Vicious and all—were set upon in the streets, it was banned by the

BBC and questions were even asked in the House, with suggestions that the

musicians be hanged at Traitors’ Gate. (Frost)

Additionally, to celebrate the release of the song, on June 7, 1977, the Pistols took a boat ride down the Thames aboard the not so coincidentally named vessel the Queen Elizabeth. Passing the Houses of Parliament, the Pistols, from a makeshift stage set up on the hired boat, performed a short but loud set beginning with their song “Anarchy (in the UK)” as a banner lining the side of the boat announced the release of their new record (Savage).

Before exploring punk as askēsis, it is crucial to draw a clear distinction here between what I call “traditional punks,” of which Pussy Riot and the Sex Pistols are prime examples, and what was referred to in 1980s American punk vernacular as “Quincy Punks” (O’Hara 45). For traditional punks, being fully aware of what one does, why one does it and what what one does does, to borrow a sentiment from Foucault,3 is of paramount importance. The value system and its philosophy require nothing less than a thorough and, at times, ruthless examination of every aspect of one’s personal and political lives, coupled with an extraordinarily high degree of responsibility and personal accountability for how one conducts one’s self as a subject within and as an object of political discourse. As Simonon put it, “Punk made me examine everything from why I got out of bed in the morning to what I wore” (Letts). Indeed, as Craig O’Hara points out in The Philosophy of Punk:

For someone to attempt individuality and become themselves ‘requires an honest,

often painful look inside yourself, asking tough questions like: Who am I? What

do I want from life? What should I want? What should I do? Ultimately, this

process will, no doubt, make you refuse to conform to many of society’s rules and

3 “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but they don’t know is what what they do does” (Dreyfus 187).

expectations . . .’ (ibid). It should be stressed that answering these questions

requires further questioning of why do you want something, what are the reasons

behind your desires. This process is aimed at making a person aware of himself

and his own identity. In this respect the person becomes different from others. . . .

The most important (and perhaps most radical) thing for the Punks to do is take

on responsibility. This goes first for themselves and how they order and live their

personal lives, then extends to include others.—What sort of responsibilities are

these exactly? . . . “To use our mind, to treat people with respect, not to judge on

outward appearances, to support others in their struggle to have the right to ‘be

themselves,’ even to help bring positive change to our world.” (O’Hara 38-40)

For “Quincy Punks,” however, there is no such intellectual imperative. The group functions more on the superficial aspects of commercialized punk appearance (spiky hair, mohawks (I’ve been told that even today there are barber shops in Portland where punks can go specifically to get the roots of their mohawks touched up), ripped clothing held together by safety pins (clothing that was often first purchased in unaltered condition), safety pins worn as piercing jewelry in the cheek, bondage pants purchased at Hot Topic, requisite rude attitudes, etc.), and stale, canned anti-social attitudes. It has been well argued elsewhere in academic literature that the pervasiveness of this kind of punk was a product of the press and the mass marketing of punks and the progenitors of punk culture by corporations cashing in on the artistic and cultural productions of the marginalized.4 In much the same way that an element of rap and

4 It should be pointed out that many of the elements of what came to be readily identifiable as stereotypical “punk fashion,” attitude and styling are traceable to the British punk scene and particularly the influence of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. And while Vivienne

hip-hop culture was appropriated by capitalistic forces, given a compulsory costume and a stance

(which is to say a predictable look and anti-social attitude) then sold back to a largely unsuspecting mainstream public as a legitimate representative of the organic cultural art form from which it stole, so too was punk appropriated and commoditized.5

For me, then, the obvious question that comes out of Simonon’s statement, which is symbolic of the very nexus of traditional punk philosophy, is: What drives this will to such a meticulous level of self-knowledge and understanding, especially in cultures where conformity and distraction are routinely valued over introspection and direct participation in that country’s political system? “Our performances,” says Pussy Riot’s Nadia, “are a kind of civic activity amidst the repressions of a corporate political system that directs its power against basic human rights and civil and political liberties. We were searching for real sincerity and simplicity, and we found these qualities in the yurodstvo [the holy foolishness] of punk” (Kelley). What’s more, as is typical within traditional punk culture, their approach to the political is multipronged:

Music is just one part of the Pussy Riot story. In the video of their action

at the church, their musical performance plays a supporting role. The main event

is a simple act of protest—people doing something they were told not to do.

and Malcolm may have to a large degree invented “the look,” encouraged the attitude and profited from the production and marketing of these, it’s generally accepted in punk culture that it was the press and major corporations that were responsible for turning their original clothes and ways of presenting themselves into a compulsory mainstream punk uniform and attitude. Through the press’ coverage of only some of the more violent and self-destructive elements of punk culture, punk became seen as less of a legitimate cultural phenomenon and almost exclusively a pathology. 5 Rap and punk cultures share some important history that most are unaware of. For a time in New York City in the early 1980’s, the distinctions between the punk and rap cultures were, in many ways, rather undefined (Letts).

Specifically, women stepping over a rail into an area of the church where only

men are supposed to go. They criticize a man they had been warned not to

criticize [Putin]. They sing a few bars of a song that can’t be found in the hymnal.

Pussy Riot use music to deliver their message and connect their fight to

other fighters. And in response to both that message and the repercussions of their

delivery of it, the spirit of punk has woken up. On Thursday night in New York,

writers, musicians and actresses read the courtroom statements of the three. On

Friday afternoon in Chicago and Brisbane, people will meet in public places, pull

balaclavas over their heads and dance. Actions are planned in Belgrade, Cologne,

Tel Aviv, Milan and Derry.

What is going on today in cities all over the world is linked to what went

down in Moscow the past few months. The actions outside Russia’s borders are

led by the inheritors of the punk and riot grrrl mantles; there are communities

around the world that recognize and see themselves in Pussy Riot’s lyrics and

style. But we are far away. The three women who were today sentenced in that

Moscow courtroom remind musicians that performance can be a dangerous form

of protest and resistance. If the protesters in New York or Belgrade are arrested,

there is little chance they will be sent to prison for two years. (Kelley)

To which I would add that not only was what was going on “in cities all over the world . . . linked to what went down in Moscow,” but that it is linked inextricably to what has consistently gone on in global punk culture for the last nearly four decades.

The personal and the political can never be completely separated. Traditional punks understand this. Although arguments that punk is a reactive response to political oppression are easily demonstrated as legitimate, it has always seemed to me that there is much more going on in traditional punk culture and philosophy than simply this, which brings me to my read of punk as a form of Foucaultian askēsis, the main thesis that this work argues.

As the synopsis to Edward F. McGushin’s Foucault’s Askēsis explains:

In his renowned courses at the College de France from 1982 to 1984, Michel

Foucault devoted his lectures to meticulous readings and interpretations of the

works of Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. In this his

aim was not [. . .] to develop a new knowledge of the history of philosophy;

rather, it was to let himself be transformed by the very activity of thinking. Thus,

this work shows us Foucault in the last phase of his life in the act of becoming a

philosopher. Here we see how his encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him

to experience the practice of philosophy as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of

becoming who one is: the work of self-formation that the Greeks called askēsis.

Through a detailed study of Foucault’s last courses, McGushin demonstrates that

this new way of practicing philosophical askēsis evokes Foucault’s ethical

resistance to modern relations of power and knowledge. In order to understand

Foucault’s later project, then, it is necessary to see it within the context of his

earlier work. If his earlier projects represented an attempt to bring to light the

relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom, then this

last project represents his effort to take back that freedom by redefining it in terms

of care of the self. Foucault always stressed that modern power functions by

producing individual subjects. This book shows how his excavation of ancient

philosophical practices gave him the tools to counter this function—with a

practice of self-formation, an askēsis. (McGushin)

Useful work already exists that argues the possible linkages between and the importance of identity and authenticity in the self-formulation of new identities amongst certain kinds of punks. For instance, as a major aspect of his seminal, punk focused book Subculture: The

Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige returns constantly to the themes of self-fashioned identity and punk authenticity in the forms of “the status and meaning of revolt, the idea of style as a form of

Refusal, [and] the elevation of crime into art (even though, in our case, the ‘crimes’ are only broken social codes)” (Hebdige 2). Too, in his piece “The Tyranny of Authenticity: Rebellion and the Question of ‘Right Life,’” Adam Arola explores within a punk context this question:

“[I]s there a kind of failed attempt at rebellion that, in recognizing the necessity of its failure simultaneously serves as an expose’ of certain ideological overdetermination and frees us up for thinking anew? And what might this thinking otherwise look like?” (Arola 291). He then goes on to “discuss the connection between authenticity and punk rock, that is, punk rock’s critique of the ‘mainstream’ [. . .] then [turns] to investigate the model of the individuality that lies as the subject of predication for the adjectives authentic or inauthentic—in doing so I hope to connect this model of the individual to a certain understanding of political sovereignty, the very model punk rock generally wants to reject. [The essay then shows] that this model of the individual is not only problematic but also untenable via a discussion of the problem with reactionary rebellion. Finally, through Adorno’s famous quote from Minima Moralia, ‘Es gibt kein richtiges

Leben im falschen,’ that is, ‘There is no right life in a false life’ (1980, 43) we will attempt to see what the limits of any critical activity based in a reductive concept of authenticity might be”

(Arola 291-2). The claim of Arola’s essay “is that insofar as punk rock reinstantiates the same pattern of life—that is, the falsehood of false life that Adorno points to in this aphorism—in its model of authenticity, its alleged subversions do nothing but reinforce what it is trying to escape.

That is to say, that insofar as subversive subcultures do nothing but replicate that which they are attempting to critique, they lack the possibility of authenticity thought robustly, because all possibility of propriety is lost. The generation of a nontyrannical model of authenticity requires a transformation of the structure, what Adorno calls the constellation of force field, itself—not swapping which position one fills within it. This whole may be false, but we must wonder if all forms of life lead to such tyranny. My conclusion, tentatively stated, is no” (Arola 292).

I quote Arola’s work here at length so that I may play it off of McGushin’s account of

Foucaultian askēsis because this question of “becoming,” of “thinking anew” and the generation of “a nontyrannical model of authenticity,” seems to me to be both an important and under- explored example of punk as political activity. (Where Foucault concerns himself with “a practice of self-transformation . . . by the very activity of thinking,” Arola’s essay concerns itself with “the generation of a nontyrannical model of authenticity” or the production of an authentic self/selves in a model that does not simply “reinforce what it is trying to escape.”) My contention is that what is sought after in those factions of punk that are able “to escape the self-negating logic and tyranny of authenticity” is not merely identity being “transformed by the very activity of thinking” through “a practice of self-formation” that results in the care of the self through

“redefining . . . the relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom,” but an experience. An experience of being, an experience of transformation, an experience of

transgression, an experience of what Foucault often called the “games of truth and power” through which authenticities may be produced, an experience of identity, of the body and the flesh and so on. And that these moves to experience form a lineage and a tradition of critique.

By casting these practices as a tradition of critique within traditional punk culture, by acknowledging yet reaching beyond the intersections of Foucault’s and Arola’s claims, something of not only the history and aesthetics of traditional punks can be tracked and made intelligible, but something of the function of power, askēsis, histories of human intellectual endeavor and corporeal experience as well. The questions, though, must now be asked: If askēsis exists as a means to experience and critique, what is an experience, and what constitutes critique? What is it in experience, for the traditional punk, that is ultimately being sought?

“Experience,” in Foucault’s later work,6 “is conceived of as dominant structure and transformative force, as existing background of practices and transcending event, as the object of theoretical inquiry and the objective of moving beyond historical limits. . . .However, this taking up of the notion of experience was also accompanied by an analysis of the ‘critical attitude’ that

Foucault explicitly started to address at about the same time” (Lemke 26). Foucault defines critique as “the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth” (Lemke 27). In the scope of this work, it is critical to read Foucault’s definitions of experience and critique particularly carefully and closely but especially in this sense: Although the personal and the political can never be separated completely, this does not mean that they exist in a singular monological state, and this

6 “It is widely known that by the end of the 1970s, Foucault had begun to refer to ‘experience’ to account for his intellectual trajectory and to redirect the work on The History of Sexuality” (Lemke 26).

is yet another reason why I’ve specifically chosen to use Arola’s essay and to quote it at length.

There are many academicians who, after reading Foucault’s books (or, at least, his words), have walked away with the notion that simply because “power is everywhere,” that is, that it is inescapable, “not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere” (History of

Sexuality, Vol. I, 121-122) and because power currently functions to produce an endless array of subjects, that within these matrices “the generation of a nontyrannical model of authenticity”

(Arola 292) is not possible. This is a gross misunderstanding of this kind of power model, an understanding critical to the clarity of this project. Via his essay, Arola agrees that there is much that this kind of inescapable power model cannot account for or control in the production and measuring of either authenticity or identities, and what is in this case true of authenticity and identity is also true of experience and critique. Foucault was not a crypto-passive nihilist in the

Nietzschean sense, and neither are traditional punks. There’s much to become and much work to be done that doesn’t simply reinscribe a tyrannical model of authenticity. Propriety is possible and real. That said, not all experience and critique are meant to be read as merely speaking back to the body politic either, but to the politics of the body and its lived experiences. “My mission,”

Patti Smith, widely regarded by many punk devotees as the Godmother of Punk, “is to communicate . . . to give people my energy and to accept theirs” (Dream of Life). It is true that

Pussy Riot’s protests function as both experience and critique of the body politic, but it is also true that by giving people her energy and accepting theirs Smith is confronting a “dominant structure and transformative force, [via an] existing background of practices and transcending event, as the object of theoretical inquiry and [with] the objective of moving beyond historical limits,” including her own (Lemke 26). In this case and, I argue, the case of askēsis, the dominant structure is sometimes corporeal and the goal is to experience through it something that

one has not yet and, in the process, become that which one is not yet—perhaps as a critique of the inevitable banality of life or even in celebration of it.

Concurrently, in the case of critique, “the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth,” the truth in question need not be Truth and Power writ large (Foucault via Lemke 27). It can be private, personal—the small “t” truths that one knows for one’s self to be true or the limitations of one’s senses and how these form and inform the ways in which one moves through the world and navigates and negotiates one’s embodied experiences.

“[T]here is an intimate link between the inquiry into critique and the interest in experience in Foucault’s later work,” Thomas Lemke writes (Lemke 27). It is this intimate link that I see reflected in McGushin’s characterization of Foucault’s askēsis and the lives of traditional punks. For example: I used to think that after all of the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs bullet items were met—air, water, food, shelter, etc.—that what we wanted most in life was a story, as Toni Morrison once pointed out (Moyers). Story allows us to violate, to control, to contain, to critique, to construct, to savor and to ruminate. But the one thing that I now believe we want even more than a story is an experience, the opportunity to explore that about which we are curious and the possibility of critique. Story may be able to produce narrative explanations of experience and identities (authentic or not), we do want story, but we stay alive and choose to get out of bed in the morning for an experience and the possibility of critique, of reflection.

For me, and Smith seems to gesture to this, punk is a vehicle for the cultivation of sensuous experience. It is a way of producing dissonance, cognitive and corporeal, which may or may not be used for intellectual production and the production of subjective selves. It is less interested in truth than it is an experience of truth. It is less interested in “self” than it is an

experience of “self” and that which is self-transformative.7 It produces alternatives. It produces a transformation of state through the pleasure of transgression. It is necessarily idiosyncratic in design. It is an acknowledgement and affirmation of the existence of life (“right” or otherwise), of life lived within the fields of time and language and within the confines of political games of

Truth and Power that many often mistake for life itself. In short, it is a vehicle for the experience of raw power.

As such, it is a counter-measure to the normatizing effects of hegemony on the senses, which, of course, inform the cerebral and the emotional. But, again, it also serves as strategic counter-measure to the all but inevitable banality of life itself. Experience is pre-verbal. Perhaps it’s as simple as that. Before we knew Dick and Jane, we knew pleasure and pain and developed alphabets without letters. But, as I’ve tried to suggest, this isn’t a case of either/or. It’s a case of this/and. Reading punk as reactive to hegemonic political structures and reading it as a vehicle for the cultivation of sensuous experience are coterminous, not mutually exclusive—even if for the moment I do seem to privilege the corporeal. In fact, they share a root in the effects of the

Enlightenment, in the privileging of reason and the rational above the experiential, a move that traditional punks categorically reject.

Among the many effects of the Enlightenment, there are two that are perhaps most relevant to this project writ large: the creation of punks as both dangerous individuals and as a

7 I write “self-transformative” rather than “self-transformation” because self-transformative indicates, for me, a kind of intentionality that the latter may not. Not all experiences of transformation are generated by the self even if they are experienced by the self, and I want the language to include those experiences that are both self-generated and those that are generated from outside of the self.

distinct and illicit group set apart from “normal” society—a corrupt and corrupting force, a threat to the “innocence” of the culture’s youth and therefore the culture’s very health and well-being.

In “The Danger of Child Sexuality,” Foucault makes the following remark:

“In the past, laws prohibited a number of acts, indeed acts so numerous one was never quite sure what they were, but, nevertheless, it was acts that the law concerned itself with. Certain forms of behavior were condemned. Now what we are defining and, therefore, what will be found by the intervention of the law, the judge, and the doctor, are dangerous individuals. We’re going to have a society of dangers, with, on the one side, those who are in danger, and on the other, those who are dangerous.” This, of course, explains nicely the hegemonic creation, characterization and subsequent oppression of punks (both as an undifferentiated stereotyped group and as individuals) as “dangerous” and “deviant”—Foucault goes on: “And sexuality will no longer be a kind of behavior hedged in by precise prohibitions, but a kind of roaming danger, a sort of omnipresent phantom, a phantom that will be played out between men and women, children and adults, and possibly between adults themselves, etc. Sexuality will become a threat in all social relations, in all relations between members of different age groups, in all relations between individuals” (Foucault Live 264-74).

There is an obvious and clear link between the creation of a dangerous child sexuality, the general presence of a dangerous sexuality in our society and the oppression that punks experience as representative of “a kind of roaming danger”—as a sliding signifier of illicit transgression and moral decay and collapse—a reminder, sometimes visual, of that generalized danger present in our society. One that, as Hebdige says of punks “On the one hand [warns] the

‘straight’ world in advance of a sinister presence—the presence of difference—and draw down upon themselves [the ‘straight’ world] vague suspicions, uneasy laughter ‘white and dumb rages’

(Hebdige 3). This experience, the experience of this kind of marginalization, I argue, necessitates for traditional punks an askēsis. “The badly behaved rock-n-roller was, before 1975, a temporary aberration; the punk was now a species.”8

The aim of this work is to examine traditional punk thought and activity as a form of askēsis. That is, as less of a collection of specific art forms (music, poetry, film, manifestos, literature, dance, etc.) or moments of public, socio-political rebellion than the cultivation of a set of personal philosophical practices for the care of the self through the cultivation of experience and critique in a society increasingly and exponentially permeated by surveillance and coercive correction. This seems quite in line with Foucault’s own take on askēsis and his aim in the writing of his project The Use of Pleasure:

As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of

some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only kind of

curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the

curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which

enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the

passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of

knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in

the knower’s straying afield of himself? . . . What is philosophy today—

8 The sentiment for this line came from an assertion Foucault made in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (History 43). The line refers to his historical account of how “Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul.”

philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to

bear on itself? . . . The essay—which should be understood as the assay or test by

which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes . . . is the living substance of

philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past,

i.e., an “ascesis,” askēsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.

(Foucault as quoted in McGushin xii)

Although Foucault invokes the essay form, it is important to understand that the crux of his take on askēsis is driven by action, that it is process-oriented with a specific thematic result, and not merely a specific object/product type: hegemony and capitalism demand a product, while art, life and askēsis demand a process. Any activity which functions as an “assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes . . . [may function as] an ‘ascesis,’ askēsis, [if it results in] an exercise of oneself [a transgression of one’s self] in the activity of thought,” in an intentional moment of experience. It is, as McGushin points out, an exercise driven for Foucault by curiosity

(and, as we’ll see, this is true for traditional punks, too).

Foucault uses the word curiosity to designate his motivation. We can hear the

echo of an interview where he says that, to him, the word evokes ‘concern’; it

evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find

strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our

familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things. . . . Foucault resists the

traditional philosophical denigration of curiosity as frivolous distraction. On the

one hand (in The Use of Pleasure), he defines curiosity as an effort and a desire to

‘get free of oneself.’ On the other hand, he describes it as a form of care—a care

for ‘what exists and could exist’—transforms the ordinary into something strange,

something worthy of attention. Foucault’s curiosity, then, is a mode of care that

transforms the familiar into something strange and wrests one free of oneself.

(McGushin xii)

I am reminded at this juncture of Paul Simonon’s witness that “The idea of [punk] from the beginning was . . . to keep challenging and pushing yourself and going forward” (Letts). And going forward in a punk sense, at least in a traditional punk sense, has always involved both thinking and feeling. In this sense the following statements from Simonon and Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones are complementary, not irreconcilably contradictory: “The punk thing, it was more to do with an attitude of self-help. You really had to . . . make your own mind up. [We] question[ed] everything that we did down to waking up, down to walking down the street, down to buying something in the shop” (Letts). “It’s a feeling that you feel, like ‘Wow, that blew me away’ or this, that or the other. . . . It’s something that you get excited about that’s inside your soul, and it’s not something that you think about in your head. It’s something that you feel. And when [The Sex Pistols] first started playing . . . I got that feeling from the first show” (Jones via

Letts). Always for the traditional punk there is this fundamental dissembling of the familiar vis-

à-vis intellectual and emotional vehicles with an arch toward the unknown and the kind of freedom that new alternatives present.

Too, McGushin points out (and my assertion that askēsis is driven by action with a specific thematic result and not merely a specific product type finds a strong echo here) that

“Foucault describes his philosophical activity not as a form of accumulating knowledge but as a

kind of exercise—an askēsis. This word askēsis can be misleading. As Foucault assures us in many places, it does not necessarily mean the practice of self-denial. Askēsis came to be almost exclusively practiced as self-renunciation in the development of Christian asceticism. However, in its original Greek context the word simply meant exercise, as in training, practice, or development. Furthermore, Foucault points out that in the Greek context it always had a positive and productive meaning—exercising meant perfecting oneself, developing one’s capacities, becoming who one is” (McGushin xiii). And, by extension, I would argue that what is perhaps most significant in this perfecting, developing and becoming is the experience of these— experience which ultimately results in transgression and which can be read as direct and/or tacit critique.

Methodology:

As the title to The Rise of Punkademia suggests, there are certain difficulties one encounters when trying to study punk culture: “In one sense, punk is just another pop culture phenomenon being placed under the academic microscope. . . . But it also presents special challenges to those who attempt to study it — in part because it has been associated with a bewildering array of ideologies, traditions, and values over the years, and also because at its core, punk is essentially hostile to what academia represents. Scholars who take on punk find themselves working amid bedeviling contradictions, as they try to methodically define a culture that refuses definition, rejects method and denies the very idea of expertise” (Neyfakh).

Therefore, the best way to frame the object of this study is to observe a handful of guidelines and notes: First, traditional punk culture can be represented by specific spokespeople, artifacts, performances and artistic output. Because there is often dissent within punk circles regarding credibility and status, the representatives of these categories that I have chosen have all reached

some position of recognition and prominence within a variety of punk circles, e.g. Patti Smith,

Iggy Pop, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, “God Save the Queen,” Patty Smith’s song “Horses,” the poetry of John Cooper Clarke, Jell-O Biafra and the Dead Kennedys, etc. Second, I’ve chosen to read punk culture as text and to use archival materials, much of it video footage which avoids some of the potential problems of text transcription, that allow the spokespeople I’ve selected to speak for themselves about punk culture, their experiences with it, their own work and their own world views. The academy, it must be admitted, is changing—albeit very slowly— the way that it does its work, along with who it allows to do that work. Given the inherent difficulties in studying punk, I do not think that this approach is either all that unorthodox or unprecedented.9 Third, I’m also mindful of the problems that anthropologists and sociologists have encountered (and created) over the years, sometimes disastrously, in their imposition of their own values and biases on other cultures in their studies of them. Fourth, the language in which I’ve chosen to write the piece is intentionally designed to be accessible and comprehensible to both academics and a more general audience rather than being limited to a small audience of academics who all share a jargon-dependent discourse. My inspiration for this particular decision was two fold: In his later writings (say, around the writing of Discipline and

Punish on), Michel Foucault made a noticeable, and what I can only believe was an intentional, shift in the language of his work. His strategy seemed to be designed to draw larger audiences into the academic discussions in which he was contributing/participating while, at the same time, using that language to open up the possibilities of new knowledges and discourses that more traditional academic models either intentionally or inadvertently don’t and haven’t allowed for.

9 Additionally, I would be very surprised if in the very near future the norm for Humanities based dissertations is that they are fully interactive experiences incorporating as much embedded video and sound as they do traditional, written analyses.

In doing so, it became more possible for Foucault’s work to have influence in larger cultural arenas outside of the academy while working to affect the academy from within. If one views his intention in this move as deliberate so as to act and have greater influence in both broader and staid circles of power, then, it would have been critical that the language of his work be accessible to more than just academics. This is hugely important, but perhaps we should let

Foucault speak for himself as to his intentions with his work:

I try to carry out the most precise and discriminative analyses I can in order to

show in what ways things change, are transformed, are displaced. When I study

the mechanisms of power, I try to study their specificity . . . I admit neither the

notion of a master nor the universality of his law. On the contrary, I set out to

grasp the mechanisms of the effective exercise of power; and I do this because

those who are inserted in these relations of power, who are implicated therein,

may, through their actions, their resistance, and their rebellion, escape them,

transform them—in short, no longer submit to them. And if I do not say what

ought to be done, it is not because I believe there is nothing to be done. Quite on

the contrary, I think there are a thousand things to be done, to be invented, to be

forged, by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are

implicated, have decided to resist or escape them. From this point of view, my

entire research rests upon the postulate of an absolute optimism. I do not

undertake my analyses to say: look how things are, you are all trapped. I do not

say such things except insofar as I consider this to permit some transformation of

things. Everything I do, I do in order that it may be of use. (Defert 911-12)

While it may be unorthodox to focus on a political movement’s philosophy rather than its specific texts, one has to ask if the study of contemporary cultures and cultural movements is contingent on the veneration of staid methodologies and specific kinds of texts—to the detriment of the pursuit, cultivation and production of new knowledges. Would it not be more credible and productive to disrupt those staid practices of power to find out what, as Toni Morrison once wrote, “moves at the margin”? (Morrison 28). In studying a culture that inherently does not want to be studied, for aims that some traditional academics might denigrate and snobbishly dismiss as

“frivolous distraction,” following something of the example of Foucault’s non-traditional approach seems both logical and sensible.

Literature Review

Ever since punk first catapulted itself onto the world stage, academic discussion of it, as I have tried to suggest, has tended to focus on either the DIY aspect of punk artistic productions and the economics of these (music, film, literature, self-publication, various modes of independent distribution, etc.) or punk as a set of practices that signify a history of various political and artistic traditions (i.e., Anarchy, Dada, Lettrism, the Situationists, etc.) designed to disrupt hegemonic power encoded most notably in hierarchical systems of compulsory social identity and economic oppression (gender, race, sexuality, class, etc.). While both of these modes of analysis are useful in understanding important aspects, both public and personal in nature, of punk culture and allude to its philosophical underpinnings, they are both primarily impersonal object- rather than personal process-driven. For example, in the case of punk record or magazine distribution, as in the case of Stacy Thompson’s Punk Productions: Unfinished Business, the focus is frequently the material production of punk aesthetics—the effort required to produce the

materials in question and then how individuals or groups sell or otherwise make these available to the public while bypassing the controlling and commoditizing intentions of large corporations.

What isn’t widely discussed either critically or with much complexity is the effect that all of this has on the individual or individuals who are producing the objects. And this assertion, I admit, needs some further unpacking as there are many notable academic texts such as Greil Marcus’

Lipstick Traces, Lauraine Leblanc’s Pretty in Punk and Craig O’Hara’s The Philosophy of Punk:

More Than Noise! that do discuss punk in its various forms as systems through which punks create lives for themselves that are inhabitable, rewarding and sustainable in both a political and personal sense. Their analyses have, however, all too often seemed to me subtextually to be in service of the hegemonic systems that they reference rather than individual punks themselves.

It’s as if, to put it very basically (and I’m well aware of the irony inherent in this characterization), when it comes to scholarly work on punks, punks are like children in a room full of adults who are speaking about them, but rarely with them or to them. But, in my personal experience, most academics have always been infinitely more comfortable talking about people rather than with them or to them. However, the analyses of some theorists, most notably for me in this work Adam Arola, have, primarily and complexly, while utilizing traditional academic frameworks and methodologies, endeavored to examine and discuss the effects of the philosophical underpinnings of punk on the actual and possible lives that punks lead. Arola’s treatment of punk comes, perhaps, closer than any other I’ve read to doing what Punk/Askēsis is attempting to do. But, Arola’s work does not go far enough; although it does exactly what it was,

I’m sure, designed to do, which is to say that no one piece of analysis can once and for all exhaust the interpretive possibilities of its objects. Too, none of the academic treatments of punk, traditional or otherwise, that I have examined have framed it within a Foucaultian framework of

askēsis. In doing so, the intent of this work is to both establish and open a new dialogue with the existing body of academic materials surrounding punk culture regarding one of the fundamental tenets of punk philosophy: that of self-creation as a mode of sensuous experience and as a form of embodied critique that will be intelligible and accessible across a wide variety of academic disciplines.

Thinking Feeling: Punk as Care of the Self: Patti Smith, John Lydon and Issues of

Transgression/Transcendence/Critique in Traditional Punk Culture

My band absolutely anticipated punk rock, but so did the Stooges. So did the

MC5. So did Mozart. So did Arthur Rimbaud. I think the idea of that . . . It’s

always, you know, this intense maverick freedom. I really think that in some ways

my band anticipated it and the actual punk rock kids came afterwards. But,

except, you know, there’s an aspect of me that’s right with them. I’m right with

the grunge kids . . . because I have that kind of energy that doesn’t come from

technology or technique. It’s just a raw . . . just a raw creative impulse and comes

(Interviewer: . . . It’s what Iggy sang about. It’s raw power.) Yeah. It comes out

when I’m playing electric guitar.

—Patti Smith (Strombo)

For many, the phrase “traditional punk” constitutes nothing less than a complete oxymoron. Punk, they might say, is—whether this is understood in a productive/generative sense or a basely wanton one—predicated upon both the destruction of the traditional that it leaves in its wake and an inherent irreverence of the iconic and institutionally sacred. Even so, there exist undeniably certain tenets of punk and punk philosophy, certain demonstrable constants, that have been around seemingly since its inception.

Origin stories regarding cultural movements are frequently tricky to pin down and are often easily contested, especially by purists. However, to argue the traditional punk approach to life and living as a form of askēsis suggests that a continuum exists within the culture, a lineage

that I would argue is most easily described as spiritual, artistically creative in nature and political

(terms that will be defined and contextualized over the course of this section) and which can be read, for the purposes of these analyses, as being quintessentially embodied by punk icons Patti

Smith, John Lydon and Iggy Pop. While Smith and Pop are widely considered by many punks and non-punks alike to be the Godmother and Godfather of Punk, respectively, no serious student of the genre would attempt to deny that much of the attitude that those in mainstream culture might identify as punk is traceable to Lydon’s highly incendiary attitudes toward and discourses on political power. Therefore, in this next section, I will attempt to identify and pair with each of these individuals something of their fundamental contribution to traditional punk as a set of philosophical practices that dovetails smoothly with some of the basic tenets that

McGushin and Foucault identify as constituting a necessary basis of askēsis.

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

—Patti Smith, “Gloria”

“Life is an adventure of our own design intersected by fate in a series of lucky and

unlucky accidents. I had it in mind to become an artist, poet, and through that

pursuit I found the root of my voice. . . . My mission is to communicate, to wake

people up. To give them my energy and accept theirs.”

—Patti Smith, Dream of Life

“These things were in my mind: The course of the artist. The course of freedom

re-defined. The re-creation of space. The emergence of new voices.”

—Patti Smith (speaking about 1975), Dream of Life

In drawing a connection between Patti Smith and what I will call “traditional punk spirituality,” it must be pointed out here that traditional punks are not interested in using askēsis as a means of being transformed or transfigured by any kind of “pure,” universal Truth. That is,

Truth writ large. Truth that exists outside of the self. When Smith wrote and then sang the opening lines cited above to her infamous song “Gloria,” “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” she was, in effect, renouncing once and for all something of that particular kind of

Truth and, by association, a very Western and Christian notion of spirituality: “For me it was a very . . . the statement of that song [Gloria] was really a declaration of existence. It was not against Jesus Christ, you know. . . . What I was saying back then was ‘I’m taking responsibility for my own actions. Taking responsibility for my own transgressions . . . because I wanted to explore. I wasn’t ready you know to . . . not make mistakes. I wasn’t ready to, you know, just to

. . . walk a straight line. . . . It was really just . . . declaring my existence. And it was joyful”

(Strombo). The declaration bears a great deal of resemblance to the actions of Pussy Riot’s protest in the cathedral in that neither Smith nor Riot are, in all actual fact, expecting some intervention from outside of themselves to occur. Smith makes it clear that she has no desire for that kind of thing to begin with, and Pussy Riot’s goal is clearly to take the matters of their own political salvation from Putin into their own hands vis-à-vis the invocation of the vehicle of salvation available in traditional Russian Orthodoxy’s belief systems. Smith is intent on exploring and creating her own truth in service of her own individualized sense of spirituality predicated on exploration and transgression regardless of the consequences. Riot, too. And it is

precisely at this intersection that Foucault’s notion of spirituality intersects with both askēsis and traditional punk methodology.

Askēsis is not, in this sense, in the Foucaultian sense, a set of traditional spiritual practices: Foucault notes in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, that spirituality is “the form of practices which postulate that, such as he is, the subject is not capable of the truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transfigure and save the subject . . .(Hermeneutics 19). “For Foucault, spirituality is a practice by which a subject alters himself in order to gain access to a truth, in marked contrast to the modern conception of subjectivity, which holds that the subject is already capable of knowledge and simply needs to look in order to see, without needing to work on the self” (Kelly, Mark 111). Truth, as Foucault also pointed out, is never something that operates outside of the human condition and the politics of the day. It is not ahistorical. It is never

“discovered” so much as it is created leaving the subject irrevocably changed. It is, in this sense, perhaps more usefully conceived of as a verb rather than a noun. It is, when used by design, an aesthetic tool highly specialized, often idiosyncratic and fundamentally useful in self- transformation, in askēsis.

Askēsis in this mode, the mode of spirituality, is a means by which to cultivate experience for personal and aesthetic reasons (Here by aesthetic I mean the “critical reflection on art, culture and nature” (Encyclopedia of Aesthetics ix).) for the purpose of transformation—to free the stuff, over and over again, of present and future possible selves. In this sense, askēsis bears a great deal of resemblance to both McGushin’s take on Foucault’s genealogical approach to history where “[The] genealogical approach . . . does not strive for ‘objectivity’ but rather critical effectiveness” and his own (McGushin’s) on the work of historical fiction: “Historical fiction is not ultimately an attempt to explain how we got to where we are. Instead, the real

purpose of this form of work is to destabilize that in our present which confines us” (McGushin xxvii). This is very different, again, from the conventional idea that what is sought in the spiritually transformative experience, certainly in the kind of transformative experience traditional punks seek out, is either “pure” universal Truths operating outside of institutional power, outside of contradiction and ideology, or such existing Truths experienced anew. This kind of Truth is really not that very important to traditional punks. What is sought out is the effect of Truth in a kind of inward transcendence.

And perhaps it is appropriate here in support of all of this to become a bit autoethnographic. I had allowed in the preface as to my own experiences in the early to mid-

1980’s punk scene of Grand Rapids, Michigan. While my participation in the scene came more via my attendance of concerts by local punk bands and some of my friends who were far more active in local punk culture than myself, what seemed to predominantly concern all of the punks that I interacted with10 was having enough money and resources to provide for themselves in the most basic sense, what they were doing creatively and how what they were doing creatively impacted their lives. For them, the creative act and what it did for them, to them and in them was always (whether they were in a band, making more tactile art or playing with some aspect of how they presented themselves to the world) somehow what was sought after.11 It was both the

10 None of whom, to the best of my recollection, ever called, were at all interested in being called or cared less if anybody did call them “punks”; although, it was clear from the way that my friends who weren’t in the scene spoke of those who were that they did indeed, due to their counter or anti-establishment points of view and, most often, their willingness to create and recreate their own images through clothing, hair or makeup styles, consider them to be punks. 11 I distinctly remember having a conversation with my friend Karen, whom I mentioned in the preface, about the fact that she was saving all of her income (which I remember as coming from various Christmas and birthday gifts, any of her artwork, jewelry or paintings that she might sell, baby-sitting jobs, etc.) for a microphone. (She had formed a group, of which she was the lead singer, that she’d called, if I remember correctly, “Female Bovine Revenge.”) I remember the seriousness and earnestness with which she’d told me this and understanding at the time that

moment of self-identification, transgression and the experience of these. It is the autonomy and primacy that Patti Smith is, again, invoking in her lyric when she declares “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” (Smith). That is the hallmark. The distinct and unmistakable act of primacy. “My sins my own/they belong to me, me,” the song continues. No other authority will be permitted sovereignty (Smith). “This script, I am writing”12 (Moyers). Which is why in punk culture, as Craig O’Hara sharply points out in Punk Philosophy: More than Noise, “the most hated thing in the world was someone who was a willing conformist” (O’Hara 27). It is a sentiment that finds an echo in Iggy Pop’s treatment of his own body on stage from even the earliest time in his now over-four-decades-long career.13 And it should be pointed out here that

“Gloria” was the first track on Smith’s album “Horses,” released on December 13, 1975—an album considered by many in traditional punk circles to be iconic . . . and it was her first studio album. “I thought Patti Smith was the Queen of the Universe,” Glenn Branca of 70s punk band

Theoretical Girls has said “I mean, a number of times I sat in front of her first album turned up all the way on my stereo. I mean, I just thought, ‘This is . . . this is it. This is rock that I’ve

what she was telling me was not merely an extension of some garden-variety adolescent rock and roll pipe dream. Fame was never, for her, a serious goal, even though by many accounts she was an extraordinarily talented visual artist. Making art that satisfied her and cultivating her voice was. 12 I first came across this quote, which I have found useful to invoke in all sorts of situations involving acts of self-identification, in an interview that once took place between Bill Moyers and author Toni Morrison. The reference is to Margaret Garner, who was the basis for Morrison’s character Sethe in her book Beloved. The comment refers, essentially, to Morrison’s characterization of Garner’s legitimation of her willingness to kill her own children and herself rather than have them, her children, live a life of slavery. 13 “Pop . . . won fame for his outrageous onstage behaviour—smearing his bare chest with hamburger meat and peanut butter, cutting himself with shards of glass, and flashing his genitalia to the audience.” Pop’s treatment of his body on stage is extremely well and widely documented. I’ve found this particular quote, however, useful for referencing what is common knowledge amongst rock and roll scholars about this aspect of his performances over the course of his career (The Stooges).

dreamed about’” (Letts). “She’s one person,” Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth fame has said,

“who . . . really predates punk as far as . . . being an artist, doing performance and doing writing

. . . but at the same time she really informed punk to such a degree and so, she’s very significant in the way that she comes in” (Letts). Historically, it should also be pointed out, 1975 is considered by many devotees to be the year that punk officially erupted onto the global music scene, at a time when, for many who would find themselves in the punk scene if not the progenitors of it, the spirit of rock and roll was languishing. “Everybody was so fed up with what was going on with rock-n-roll, which was Deep Purple,” seminal punk historian and documentarian Legs McNeil has said. “These big bloated concerts where they’d do these organ solos for twenty minutes or these guitar solos for twenty minutes” (Letts). And if Deep Purple and that ilk embodied the spiritual disease of rock-n-roll, Smith was determined to be part of the cure: “We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity” (Just Kids 245). A cultural vacuum had been created, one that, as is the case with all such vacuums, had to be destroyed for the opening up of the creation and population of new spaces with new selves—“What has America produced in the world of art?”

Smith asks, rhetorically. “We’ve produced abstract expressionism, we’ve produced jazz, we’ve produced rock ‘n’ roll. All of it is somewhat combative. All of it is filled with a certain type of energy, all of it is seeded by rebellion, or trying to open up space, create space” (Masterson).

“You give me your energy, and I’ll give you mine” (Dream of Life).

In order to talk further about why and how punk is interoperable as a form of askēsis and self-care, and why and how Smith, Lydon and Pop are appropriate figures through which to demonstrate this, a discussion of what it means to live a philosophical life (an approach to traditional punk life echoed by film director Jim Jarmusch, “It’s [Punk] really [a kind of] philosophical thing about how you look at something.”) and where this notion originated is crucial (Letts). For me, this analysis also reveals something unexpected and interesting about the origins of punk (particularly British punk, due to its intense focus on class and social politics).

McGushin characterizes Foucault’s take on the intersection of Athenian democracy and philosophy in the following:

Ultimately, for Foucault, ancient philosophy can be comprehended, if not

completely, then at least in several of its fundamental characteristics, as a vast

project of inventing, defining, elaborating, and practicing a complex “care of the

self” (epimeleia heautou). The philosophical project of care of the self was a

response to a concrete problem, the crisis of Athenian democracy. The problem

was the inability of democracy to practice an effective political discourse. That is

to say, though democratic politics is fundamentally a discursive activity, the

Athenian assembly could not practice a political discourse which articulated the

truth—in this case “truth” refers to what is good for the city as a whole. Instead of

gathering and unifying the citizens in pursuit of the common good, politics was a

contest of individual interests. Each individual used his freedom of speech—his

parrhēsia—to advance his own good rather than that of the city. . .For Socrates

and Plato, the crisis of democratic parrhēsia was fundamentally rooted not in

politics but in an inadequate experience of the subject who is called to parrhēsia.

Their solution was to offer a new experience of this subject, an experience

available to those able and willing to apply to themselves, to their lives, an

ensemble of ascetic practices which were for Socrates and Plato the essence of

philosophy. The historical-philosophical consequence of the Socratic-Platonic

project is to have isolated and defined a peculiar dimension of reality, that which

we might call, with caution, the self: a region of being which becomes intelligible

for ancient philosophy in the two forms of soul (psyche) and of existence (bios).

This reality was delineated as a field of truth, one in which truth is to be sought

and discovered, and into which truth is to be implanted and cultivated [emphasis

mine]. Philosophy appeared both as a search for self-knowledge and as an

ensemble of techniques for producing one’s life as a work of art, as the

actualization of the truth which one has learned (McGushin 4).

What interests me most about the domain of possible interpretation that this explanation sets up is: 1) how McGushin identifies that, for him at least, and possibly for Foucault, the diagnosis of the crisis of democratic parrhēsia that Socrates and Plato identify rests on “an inadequate experience.” “Of the subject who is called to parrhēsia,” certainly, but of “an inadequate experience” specifically. The critical understanding of the act of identification is that it is first experiential in nature and only then articulable as “self” or “truth” within what Foucault would call certain “games of truth and power.” Care of the self, the care of one’s experiences in the world, it then follows, is what allows one to lead both a philosophical life and the life of a

subject who is “always already” the object of political discourse14 15, and 2) How the political climate of Great Britain in the mid-1970s is easily demonstrated as having been in a state of absolute crisis. It is a long held truth by many familiar with the origins of punk that while

America was responsible for the way punk ended up sounding, Great Britain was responsible for producing the nature of punk’s political attitude and look.16

My father worked very hard and had a lot of tax taken off to support what I’d seen as a

bunch of lazy good-for-nothing inbreds. And I think time has proved me right. The

British now completely agree with me on that. So, my attitude would be, about them

now, to sell them off to Disneyland. I think that they would be wonderful next to the

Epcot Center! And that would solve a lot of Britain’s economic problems.

—John Lydon (Winharrison)

14 Here I’m reminded of Foucault’s caution in Care of the Self that although the Delphic dictum “Know thy self” has survived from Ancient Greece, that this directive was less important than the Greek cultural directive to “take care of one’s self.” Again, as with the genealogical approach to history discussed earlier, what is important here is not objectivity, but critical effectiveness (Care of the Self 43-68). 15 “There is no private domain of a person’s life that is not political,” as Charlotte Bunch has pointed out, “and there is no political issue that is not ultimately personal. The old barriers have fallen.” (Bordo 17) 16 There are two quotes from my research that address this both clearly and directly. The first is from Craig O’Hara, who in his book The Philosophy of Punk: More than Noise! states that “In general it is thought that the new Yorkers invented the musical style while the British popularized the political attitude and colorful appearances” (O’Hara 25). The second is from rock notable Chrissy Hynde, lead singer and chief songwriter for the band The Pretenders. While I’ve never found evidence that Hynde has ever claimed that either she or her band were “punk,” what’s important here is that her credibility on this subject matter derives from the well- documented fact that she lived in the area of London in the mid-1970s that’s known to have been home to many of the musicians and artists who are considered to be the founders of punk, that she was friends with them all and at one time or another played in various incarnations of several of the bands that made them famous (Letts).

Regarding the latter, it wouldn’t be too much to say that it’s impossible to discuss 1970s

British politics and the origins of traditional punk without mentioning John Lydon, who from his earliest days with The Sex Pistols has remained an outspoken critic of British politics in general

(“We [The Sex Pistols] picked our enemies rather cleverly,” Rotten once remarked in an interview. “I mean, start with the Royal Family and work downwards.” (SuperVHSAllStars)) and, most often, the intersections and effects of the British class system. And here I would offer two pieces of support. First, a revisitation and a more focused analysis of the lyrics to the Sex

Pistols’ punk classic “God Save the Queen,” mentioned earlier in this work, is warranted.

Written by Lydon, they speak directly to his views on British classism and belie the kind of poignant, insightful, biting sarcasm-laden critique that came to infuse much of punk rhetoric to the point where most in worldwide, mainstream culture would readily identify its strategies as standard punk rhetorical convention:

God save the queen

The fascist regime

They made you a moron

Potential H-bomb

God save the queen

She ain’t no human being

There is no future

In England’s dreaming

Don’t be told what you want

Don’t be told what you need

There’s no future, no future,

No future for you

(Sex Pistols)

Beginning with a general overview of the stanzas, what is readily evident is Lydon’s assertion that the goal, intended and otherwise, of British classism is to produce what Foucault called

“docile bodies”—“[bodies] that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved…achieved through strict regiment of disciplinary acts” (Discipline and Punish 136 ). To which I would add vis-a-vis “disciplinary systems,”17 of which the British class system, rife with its inherent fiscal and educational inequalities as well as its inequitable accesses to power, would certainly qualify.

More on this in a moment. Returning, however, to the lyrics, what is clearly invoked is Lydon’s disdain for the British monarchy as a “fascist regime” systemically geared toward the dangerous dumbing down of the British people, a system which not only produces a dumbed-down populace, but also, from Lydon’s point of view, despotic rulers devoid of any real and compassionate sense of humanity.18 In short, a complete and futureless dystopia—a dream from

17 The idea that docile bodies are achieved not only through disciplinary acts but disciplinary systems is, of course, Foucault’s. It is my intention here, for the purposes of my analyses, just to point this fact up clearly since the relevant quote that proceeds this doesn’t, in all actual vocabulary, include this in its scope. 18 It is safe to assume, given Lydon’s political leanings, that the “you” of the lyric is geared generally somewhat more toward the British working class, since they comprised the majority of the Sex Pistol’s audience. This isn’t, however, to suggest that those in the upper classes of the system aren’t unaffected by this as Lydon has stated publicly that the classist British education system “tend[s] to turn out little snobs. They’re taught a sense of superiority, which is the kiss of death…They’re absolutely screwed up for life” (No Blacks 19).

which the likelihood of anyone awakening is slim due in no small part to its pervasiveness. That is, how, Lydon is asking, can any real future exist within a system of power that has pre-planned, to the smallest degree, the stations and positions in every aspect of life that citizens will occupy ostensibly for their entire lives? The future is always and necessarily rather unpredictable.

Without this element, what could the phrase “the future” possibly mean? That kind of future, one that has been pre-planned down to the smallest hegemonic degree, Lydon asserts, is no future at all. It is merely a form of slavery achieved in no small part through classist indoctrination that heavy-handedly influences, which is to say that it all but completely dictates, what one is trained to both want and need and that what one is trained to want and need ultimately and in ways exclusively benefit the state. Bear in mind that, again, lending to the vitriol of the lyrics is the fact that the song was released the same year as the Queen of England’s

Silver Jubilee.

I would add too that Lydon’s ire and, really, concern is not merely for those in the

“lesser” of the British classes. Although his concern is primarily for the disenfranchised, his insight has often seemed to me to indicate a keen awareness of the broad reach of the powers that he criticizes. Elsewhere in the song after Lydon sings “God save the Queen,” he snarls “We mean it, man. We love our Queen. God saves!” Certainly one way to read the lyric is as pure sarcasm. He doesn’t, of course, mean it. He’d like to see the whole monarchy system collapse in on itself and be tossed on to the trash heap of political and human history. The sooner the better, thank you very much. However, it has always seemed to me that the focus of Lydon’s rage has been more systemically directed than necessarily at any human being themselves. What the class system has done to him, it has also done to the Queen. “God save you, Mum,” I can almost hear

him say, “you certainly need it as much as anyone, and since you’ve been made so comfortable in your willing victimization, perhaps even more.”

Too, one doesn’t have to dig very deep into the enormous number of interviews that exist with Lydon to find support as to the accuracy of my characterization of his political views:

The punk movement was a British movement defined in part as a rejection of the

mellow hipness of rock star millionaires, a good number of whom were wealthy,

tax-evading, jet set sophisticates prone to marry movie stars or fashion models.

From this perspective it was clearly a far more “class-conscious” phase in the

evolution of rock music than anything that had come before. Johnny “Rotten”

Lydon, of Irish, proletarian origins, epitomized in his songs and behavior the class

resentment generated in contemporary British society. Years after his tumultuous

eruption on the English stage, he gave vent to the same feelings of self-loathing

and hatred for his “betters” that inspired his lyrics and performance in 1976: “I

consider myself working class. We’re lazy, good-for-nothing bastards, absolute

cop-outs. We never accept responsibility for our own lives, and that’s why we’ll

always be downtrodden. We seem to enjoy it in a perverse kind of way. As

working class, we like to be told what to do, led like sheep to the slaughter. I

loathe the British public school system with a passion. How dare anybody have

the right to a better education than me just because their parents have money! I

find that vile. They talk this sense of superiority, and they have it. The upper

classes have all the right connections once they leave school, and they parasite off

the population as their friends help them along. (Portis 228)

And here, lest Lydon’s caustic take on power be read as simply nihilistic (a charge that mainstream hegemonic power has long and repeatedly leveled against punk and punks in an effort to dismiss the serious implications of the imbalances of power and access that they [owing,

I would argue, to Lydon’s example and influence] have continuously addressed), it is critical to mention that Nihilism is not simply the philosophical view that claims that life is, essentially, meaningless and without inherent value. This form of nihilism is what Nietzche termed passive nihilism, and it runs absolutely counter to the beliefs of traditional punks. Traditional punks are not pessimists, are not (existentially and as the attitude is commonly defined in mainstream parlance) nihilistic. However, what Lydon and traditional punks were and are, according to the relevant Nietzschean terminology, are active nihilists:

“Nihilism would be a good sign,” Nietzsche writes in his notebooks. It is a

necessary transitional phase, cleansing and clearing away outdated value

systems so that something new can rise in their place. He writes about two

different forms of nihilism, active nihilism and passive nihilism. Passive

nihilism is more [of] the traditional ‘belief that all is meaningless’, while

active nihilism goes beyond judgement [sic] to deed, and destroys values

where they seem apparent. Passive nihilism signifies the end of an era,

while active nihilism ushers in something new. Nietzsche considers

nihilism not as an end, but as a means ultimately to the revaluation of

values. He stresses repeatedly that nihilism is a ‘transitional stage’.

Passive nihilism is symptomatic of decreased, declined, receded power of

the spirit. One recognises [sic] that all external values are empty and have

no true authority. This renders the internal values, the conscience,

meaningless as well, resulting in the loss of personal authority. All

authority gone, the spirit in hopelessness and with a sense of fatalism

strives to rid itself of all responsibility. All trust in society is gone, and the

will is weakened. Aims, motives, and goals are gone. The spirit wants

something to depend on, but has absolutely nothing that isn’t arbitrary.

Disintegration of the structured system of values leads one to seek escape

in anything that still maintains an outward semblance of authority. These

things are hollow escapes through, what Nietzsche calls “self-

narcotization”. . . .

Active nihilism is symptomatic of an increased power of the spirit. The

will is strengthened and rebellious. This is the form of nihilism that does

not stop at judegment [sic], but goes on in action to be destructive towards

the remaining vestiges of empty value systems . . . (Arnon)

“I am an Antichrist,” Lydon sings in the infamous Sex Pistols song “Anarchy in the UK.” “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” Indeed. In this sense, in the active nihilist sense, Smith and Lydon seem to be squarely on the same page.

Let me add to this two more pieces of support for the basis of my characterization of

Lydon as an active rather than a passive nihilist: Much of the subtext of Lydon’s political commentary focuses on his disgust for conformity, willing or otherwise, and on this subject the

object of his criticism was not merely those in political power or who held privileged social status, but punks (And here the punks that Lydon means to implicate specifically are “Quincy

Punks”) themselves. “They [many Sex Pistols fans] became merely copyists, and that’s not very good at all . . . It’s such a let down . . . The punk ethic became a punk uniform, and, well, that’s awful. I mean, you’re not in the music game to join the army. The two should be quite separate. . . . People don’t respect individuality enough. Everyone should have their own personality and to hell with competition.” (SuperVHSAllStars). A sentiment that is echoed in

Lydon’s 1978 lyrics for his song “Public Image,” released with his new band Public Image

Limited within months of the demise of the Sex Pistols: “Hello, hello, hello (ha, ha, ha)/You never listened to a word that I said/You only seen me/For the clothes that I wear/Or did the interest go so much deeper/It must have been/The colour of my hair. . . . Public image/You got what you wanted/The public image belongs to me/It’s my entrance/My own creation/My grand finale/My goodbye” (Lydon). The song opens with Lydon repeating the call “Hello, hello, hello” followed by, by my account, a rather forced and ironic laugh, a stage laugh if you will in that it seems intentionally scripted—the kind of canned patter one might expect from an MC at the beginning of a dark vaudeville comedy act. “Is anybody really out there,” he seems to be asking,

“And, if there is, can you hear me? Can you? Can you?” The song then launches into a reproachful attack on both the “copyists” punks mentioned above and those who had long dismissed him based chiefly on the superficial aspects of his self-created image—an attempt at rendering him and his points of view, his critiques of hegemonic power and culture, contained and containable, dismissible and not to be taken seriously by anyone who should be taken seriously. But, the lyric continues “you got what you wanted”—the edgy clothing and the riotous hair. The surface stuff. Unaware that these elements functioned, in no small part, to

challenge people to see beyond and below appearances, unconventional or otherwise, beyond inconsequential difference, to simply see the human being moving beneath the carefully constructed artifice, in order to prompt others to ask questions about the methods, consequences and implications of the construction of normatized and normalizing ideologies—and to present an alternative possibility: self-construction in favor of drab compulsory uniformity. It is, in a very real sense, an oblique plea for others to, again, embrace their uniqueness and to construct their personalities, their images and lives, public or private, on their own terms—as he had on his: “The public image belongs to me/It’s my entrance/My own creation” (Lydon). It is an askēsis. This one, this image, is taken, thank you very much. Go make your own. Precious time’s a wastin’, but do what you will.

The manipulating of appearance as a form of challenge to the self, individuals and institutions, hegemonic authority and ideology had, very early on in the punk scene become standard practice. It allowed traditional punks a vehicle to not only create their own self-images and the new spaces they inhabited, but to do so by design not default.19

[Punks] played with the conventions of dress in unexpected ways: T-shirts were

deliberately torn in order to be held together by safety pins; businessmen’s

uniform suits were transformed into sexual bondage gear; garbage bags were

19 This is not, however, true of Quincy Punks. As was pointed out in Craig O’Hara’s The Philosophy of Punk, “Repeated media distortions, exaggeration, and stereotyping help to create a type of ‘punk’ who has no idea of the conceptions, political and social philosophies, and diversity of the punk movement” (O’Hara 44). While the time frame for this comment was originally the mid-1980s, it’s no less true now than it was at that time.

worn as dresses, and dog collars became necklaces. . . . Punk style was

characterized by its fluidity and ambiguity. . . . Punks intended their stylistic

bricolage to be subversive. In his germinal analysis of punk style, Hebidge (1979)

argued that style is the primary weapon in punks’ ‘semiotic guerilla warfare’

against the dominant culture. Punks conducted such subversions by appropriating

items from the mainstream and reversing their original meanings. For example,

combat boots, whose original meanings encompass discipline and militarism,

became part of the antiauthoritarian and anarchistic punk’s uniform, to be

juxtaposed with T-shirts bearing slogans such as ‘Disarm or Die.’ In adopting

such symbols, punks constructed parallels between themselves and the originators

of the symbols. Punk bricolage not only invested objects with new meanings, but

retained the original meaning as well, even when these were contradictory.

Imitation, in this case, was not flattery, but parody, as the relevant members of

mainstream culture did not often view such parallels as complimentary.” (Leblanc

40)

And here it is important to note and explicate not merely the obvious connections

Leblanc makes and suggests between punk style and aesthetic and the ways in which these challenge hegemonic authority and conventions (linkages which I’ve mentioned and explored earlier in this work), but to mention that much of what became readily identifiable as the “punk look” is traceable to internationally recognized clothing designer Vivienne Westwood.

Westwood, with her hair dyed bright white and eyebrows drawn on in purple cosmetic pencil, was, in the early to mid-1980s, business partners with the Sex Pistol’s manager Malcolm

McLaren in a clothing boutique called SEX, located on the Kings Road in London. (It was, by the way, at SEX that John Lydon first auditioned for the Sex Pistols and where he also received the now infamous moniker “Johnny Rotten.”) It was Westwood whom, at the time, was creating the very first strappy bondage suits the world had ever seen and garments often designed to obscure clear demarcations of gender —those things that are frequently conjured up in the mind of the public when they think “punk.” But, while Westwood may have been the originator of much of this look and Rotten one of the most visible perpetrators of aspects of it, Westwood’s creativity once loosed on the punk world manifested in two distinctly different ways. In the hands of traditional punks, her creativity resonated with the DIY approach to the aesthetic they already had. For them, the “punk” part of what Westwood did would have been the independent thought and creativity that went into her vision of clothing and its possibilities—along with her independent approach to retailing it. They could take or leave her creations as they saw fit rather than feeling that this was “the counter culture uniform that they’d been waiting for!” Too,

Westwood’s creativity also served as inspiration for how the conventions of apparel might be fair game for more direct social commentary in the worlds in which traditional punks walked around.

However, in the hands of the popular media and those who would eventually be implicated by the term “Quincy Punks,” the wearable-saleable items and their potential to disturb their parents and various other authority figures was all that mattered. I make this distinction because the issue of how punk came to look something of the way that it did is important, but also to point out that

Westwood’s intention with her clothing was, from all available evidence, never really social revolution in the sense that traditional punks typically mean it. Westwood and McLaren are not infrequently characterized (most recently to me by my chair, Carol Siegel; although, I’ve certainly heard this accusation before) either implicitly or explicitly, as Neo-Liberal Capitalists.

Westwood was being innovative, yes—but with a slouch more toward merchandising than dystopia. The accusations of her Neo-Liberal Capitalist status, I think, are well-deserved and demand to be addressed, but so too must her influence and genuine creativity.

Either in the subtext of his lyrics or, at times, stated overtly in interviews, always for

Lydon there is this sense of the sanctity of and appreciation for the fragility of life. Com- municated often very fiercely, true, but it is there driving his anger and rage at systems of hierarchical oppression and those individuals who hold positions of power within them whom he sees as interfering, if not molesting—often wantonly, frequently thoughtlessly and sometimes nefariously—others with it. This attitude was, I would argue, due at the time of the Pistols to both the dictates of Lydon’s own personality and, in no small part, to the class-driven struggles into which he was born, was raised, and lived and worked, first as a child laborer and later, in the mainstream, as an adult musician reviled by “polite” contemporary culture, as evidenced in the following interview he gave to late night American talk show host Conan O’Brien, circa 1995.

Lydon was on as a guest promoting his recently released autobiography Rotten: No Irish, No

Blacks, No Dogs:

O’Brien: In the book, you also mention, and I love this, ‘cause I’ve never even

heard the phrase, that . . . when you were a young man you were a “rat basher.”

Lydon: Well, that was my job, to kill the rats in a sewage farm. Well, (wryly) it

was enjoyable. It was the best job I ever had.

O’Brien: Now, let me get this straight. You actually . . .

Lydon: Well, they were building a sewer. The crane drivers needed protection,

and my job was to stand there with a machete and chop the rats as they jumped up

in the air. Who could ask for anything more? (sarcastically) (SuperVHSAllStars)

And, earlier in the interview, regarding the Sex Pistols, Lydon allowed as to this:

O’Brien: When you guys, when you were living at the height of the Sex Pistols’

success, you must’ve been harassed a lot. I mean, just walking around London.

Lydon: Ah, I spent large amounts of time in jail, yeah. That’s alright. It was rent

free accommodation.

O’Brien: You were singing songs about Anarchy. At the time . . . it’s hard for

people to understand now because going over the line has become an act for a lot

of people. I think people today get desensitized to it.

Lydon: No, it was deadly serious stuff at that time, yes. I mean, nobody’d even

considered having that view point.

O’Brien: And no one had said you guys put . . .

Lydon: It wasn’t enjoyable. It was very, very dangerous and very awful. But, I

kinda like that.

O’Brien: (laughs) You look back fondly on those times then?

Lydon: Mmmmm, I’d like to think so.

O’Brien: Yeah, well. I, I don’t know. It was, ah . . .

Lydon: It’s, listen, I, for seventeen years I’ve not talked about that part of my life

because I just didn’t want to remember it quite frankly. But, people have re-

written history now to such a point where I’ve just had enough of the mythology

and the lies. Hence, the book. You read it, you won’t be disappointed. The truth is

actually better than fiction. (SuperVHSAllStars)

On the surface, Lydon seems rather nonchalant . . . full of cheek and understated bluster—his requisite interview trademarks. But I’ve read and seen enough interviews with him over the years to understand that what appear to be casual or humorous dismissals or re- contextualizations of rather serious issues are typically strategies designed to, as the British say,

“take the piss”—to mock or belittle someone, an idea or a thing either playfully or seriously in such a way so as to deflate its importance while often issuing a challenge—“Hello, hello, hello.”

In Lydon’s case, the tactics are frequently used as a way to underscore the seriousness of something by seeming to make light of it. Chopping rats in half for employment as a child or being harassed and, at times, attacked savagely, sometimes physically, by the public do not, for most, an ideal life make. But, these things, or things un-coincidentally like them, often happen when one successfully disturbs and challenges the social status quo (in Britain or anywhere hegemonic power operates), claims the right to invent one’s own life and, in the process, suggests to others that they should do the same while providing the reasons for doing it. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Rotten famously asked his audience at the last ever 70’s

Sex Pistols concert before walking off of the stage and into history (SexPistolsChannel). Indeed.

And perhaps no greater supporting evidence for the claims of Lydon’s regard for the sanctity and fragility of life, as well as the importance of inventing a life for one’s self that is not only inhabitable but complexly meaningful, can be found in his views on death, and here I’m thinking of two deaths in particular. Those of Sid Vicious and Margaret Thatcher—two figures

of paramount importance in Lydon’s life as a Sex Pistol, but for very different reasons. Vicious, because he was “one of my best mates,” Lydon once remarked, and Thatcher because she epitomized (and this point is so well documented in punk chronicles that it hardly needs support at all) everything he loathed about 1970’s British politics and classist Great Britain (Super

VHSAllStars).

I feel nothing but grief, sorrow and sadness for Sid. To the point like, if I’ve

really, like, talk about it, I just fucking burst out in tears. He’s someone I really

cared for, you see . . . I can’t be more honest than that . . . I’ve lost my friend. I

couldn’t have changed it. I was too young. God, I wish I was smarter. You can

look back on it and go (laughs nervously) ‘I could’ve done something.’ (cries) He

died, for fuck’s sake. They just turned it into making money. (laughs

sarcastically) Ha-ha-ha-ha. How hi-larious for them. Fucking cheek. I’ll hate them

forever for doing that. You can’t get more evil than that can you . . . really? You

know? No respect. Vicious, poor sod. (The Filth)

Well aware that in life his friend was a serious drug addict, Vicious died of an overdose just months after being charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, who was found stabbed to death in the bathroom of a room they shared at New York’s Hotel Chelsea.

“The thing I hated most about that movie,” Lydon once remarked regarding the mainstream movie Sid and Nancy that took the couple as its subject matter, “was I thought it glorified drug addiction, really. And I can’t tolerate that kind of nonsense at all. . . . These [Sid and Nancy]

were miserable junkies. There’s nothing good in that” (SuperVHSAllStars). Hardly the sentiments of a passive nihilist for whom life held no value.

“People celebrating Thatcher’s death are loathsome,” reads the headline of an April 11,

2013 article in the online edition of the venerated British music tabloid NME (“Sex Pistol John

Lydon”). “I’m not happy about the boo boo parties. . . . Her politics were really dreadful and derisive and caused a great many issues for me when I was young, for all of us trying to go through that. But that don’t mean [sic] I am gonna dance on her grave, as they say. I’m not that kind of person . . . I was her enemy in her life but I will not be her enemy in her death. I am not a coward. . . . My entire life, socially, was all around the Maggie era. That was the great challenge as a Sex Pistol was how to deal with Margaret Thatcher. I think we did rather good.” Lydon did, however, say he might have something better to do than watch Thatcher’s funeral on Wednesday

(April 17) (“Sex Pistol John Lydon”).

I seem to have spent a great deal of space establishing Lydon as an active nihilist and thereby limning his influence as perhaps punk’s most famous and politically important provocateur, but Lydon is a complex figure, to be sure, and his influence on traditional punk culture and punk as a form of askēsis can in no way be overstated. “Life’s precious, and not a thing to be destroyed,” Lydon once remarked regarding the suicide of Nirvana front man Kurt

Cobain, “There’s nothing good in death at all. And don’t be fobbed off with that dirty, druggie rock-n-roll culture. It’s not good for you [italics mine]” (SuperVHSAllStars).

Iggy Pop, the Curtain and the 50 Foot Long Erect Paper Phallus

“There is a curtain, and there is a curtain in society placed between the individual

and everything that is good and real and worth living for, and you are not allowed

. . . you must not cross that curtain. There are judges, customs, the church . . . and

Little Richard’s voice could rip right through the curtain. And people heard that

and they knew what that meant, you know, and early Elvis went through too.

They scared people. . . . The process of being a musician gave me a format, gave

me a theater, gave me a place and a way to do things I would not have dared to do

. . . I would say “normally” in real life, but let me put it a different way. Real life

isn’t real. Real life sucks. It’s shit. And it has no theme, it has no structure, it has

no purpose. But, with a structure, with something to do, then you have

possibilities”

—Iggy Pop (Sofar)

If Lydon’s approach to challenging hegemonic power has served as a set of steel rods fused to the backbone of punk (his influence has been that fundamentally pervasive and persistent across a wide variety of punk demographics), as a model for askēsis, then as the widely acknowledged Godfather of Punk, Iggy Pop’s experiential approach to music and art has surely been a good chunk of the backbone itself. For Pop, it is the twin realities of the banality of life and the controlling effects of hegemonic power in the form of the kind of disciplinary society that Foucault wrote about, and which Iggy articulates as a “curtain,” that really necessitate and drive his askēsis, his “structure,” his “something to do” that creates possibilities.

What perhaps interests me most here is the breadth of the range of analyses that is suggested by

Pop when these are situated as either polar opposites or parallel experiential truths. That is, for

Iggy (and, I would argue, for traditional punks in general), askēsis is clearly driven by not only the politics of the day, but also by the sheer fact of being alive. And it is an awareness of this in- between ground and the falseness of a civilized hegemonic life presented as inevitable and made compulsory versus life in all of its savage brutality dichotomy that, when violated, typically frightens people and certainly which “polite society,” the hegemon, work so hard to deny and keep hidden. One really must be, at the core of this persistent line of reasoning, either “civilized” or “savage,” “sane” or “insane,” “sophisticated” or “base,” etc., and as citizens of the New(ish)

World we are endlessly and continuously compelled to “know our place” . . . or else. On the one hand there are the systems of management, impersonal, invented in order to profitably arrange bodies and magnify in people a kind of terror induced by transgressing their (the system’s and those who run them) predatory power. On the other hand, there is life, tentative, unstructured, and ultimately uncontainable, chaotic and random. The systems operate from particular points of view that shape and channel human potential and experience. This is, in no small part, Foucault argued, accomplished through the production of subjectivities that, toward certain ends, are profitable chiefly to those who both seem to be (for the appearance of authority is often much more important than the actual exercise of it) and often are in charge of creating and enforcing order (moral order, fiscal order, the order inherent in law, medicine, etc.). The absolute stability and ahistoriocity of which one can only fool one’s self into believing. But, of course, the banality of life can only, once and for all, be managed. It can never be cured, and the knowledge of this coupled with an inability to create order for one’s self (frequently the result of social conditioning) results in a kind of perpetually recurring state of trained incompetence—a series of

systemically and systematically generated ineptitudes and double binds. But not all who find themselves caught between “the devil that they know and the devil that they don’t” react with alarm and censure. For some, this represents a continuous and invaluable opportunity that is coterminous with the polar opposites in this construct, not in opposition to them, an opportunity to create and violate their own methods of order. For Iggy, these methods are linked in his askēsis to a particular form of art and the experience(s) and possibilities that it generates, the

Dionysian:

It’s [Iggy’s music] Dyanisic [sic]. If you know the difference between Dyanisic

and Apollonean art? Dyanisic art in Greek times was . . . like, a bunch of people

would get together and they’d . . . erect a paper phallus 50 feet long and carry it

around and chant to some God they believed in, right? . . . [It’s the] creation of an

event. It’s “eventful” art. Apollonian is when you just make a statue and it’s there

forever, and it’s set out very clearly. There’s a Dyanisic element to my art that

does . . . I suppose . . . a lot of people might be frightened to be me, but I’m quite

happy to be. . . . If you played music like the way I do, ok, obviously already if I

put as much into a song as I possibly can . . . automatically for five, ten minutes

it’s very hard for me to speak articulately, or to talk to you . . . because I’ve quite

totally given myself to that.” (Shakeshouttwister)

An ancient Greek artistic tradition, the Dionysian is a form of art content to admire neither product nor artifact but process and a kind of “whole self” investment. Unlike the Apollonian, its goal is a celebration of the interconnectedness of all things on a very fundamental level, where

the Apollonian functions, as the below quote makes clear, on a kind of “separateness” that is regarded, by Dionysians, as too emphatic. (It’s ironic to note that although the Dionysian artist would not contest and even celebrate that a kind of distinction exists between all things in life, the Apollonian artist would have a much more difficult time acknowledging and celebrating to the same degree the interconnectedness of all things. In this sense, and at the risk of oversimplifying here, the Dionysian operates from the visceral with a nod to the intellectual, whereas the Apollonian operates from the intellectual and often pretentiously averts its eyes dismissingly from the visceral.) The Dionysian is art as a verb, not as a noun, and it comes as no surprise to me in these analyses to discover that the experiential element of Foucault’s askēsis and the “eventfulness” of Pop’s Dionysian art share ancient roots—partly because so much of the origins of the western style of political governance and social organization, which is to say the ways in which the west imagines and apprehends the body and structures political power, are traceable to Greece. But, since words and ideas, and this is especially clear in binary constructs, achieve definition reciprocally, it’s not enough to simply acknowledge the Dionysian in Pop’s art and askēsis without a better understanding of the Apollonian:

[T]he Greeks expressed this joyful necessity of the dream experience in

their Apollo; Apollo, as god of all the plastic arts, is at the same time the god of

prophecy. In accordance with the root meaning of his association with

“brightness,” he is the god of light; he also rules over the beautiful appearance of

the inner fantasy world. The higher truth, the perfection of this condition in

contrast to the sketchy understanding of our daily reality, as well as the deep

consciousness of a healing and helping nature in sleep and dreaming, is at the

same time the symbolic analogy to the capacity to prophesy the truth, as well as to

art in general, through which life is made possible and worth living. But also that

delicate line which the dream image may not cross so that it does not work its

effect pathologically—otherwise the illusion would deceive us as crude reality—

that line [curtain?] must not be absent from the image of Apollo, that boundary of

moderation, that freedom from more ecstatic excitement, that fully wise calm

wisdom of the god of images. His eye must be “sun-like,” in keeping with his

origin; even when he is angry and gazes with displeasure, the consecration of the

beautiful illusion rests on him.

And so concerning Apollo one could endorse, in an eccentric way, what

Schopenhauer says of the man trapped in the veil of Mājā20: “As on the stormy

sea which extends without limit on all sides, howling mountainous waves rise up

and sink and a sailor sits in a row boat, trusting the weak craft, so, in the midst of

a world of torments, the solitary man sits peacefully, supported by and trusting in

the principium individuationis [the principle of individuality]” (World as Will and

20 “Already by late 1818 and the first edition of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer had drawn an equivalence between his idea of the principium individuationis, space and time, and the idea of the veil of māyā found in Hinduism. Space and time are the necessary conditions for the possibility of plurality and, as such, are features of the world as representation and ordinary experience, and not the world as will. Schopenhauer understood the Hindu idea of māyā as illusion and the idea of the veil of māyā to refer to our ordinary perception and behavior in the world of Illusion. Schopenhauer argued that the source of virtuous conduct and nobility of character, as well as the denial of the will, is a cognition that sees through the principium individuationis and abolishes the distractions between a person’s own individuality and that of others. This cognition, he said, reveals the identity of the will in all appearances and the illusory status of individuation. Schopenhauer wrote that for a person who has had this cognition, the veil of māyā has become transparent and he or she recognizes his or her self in all things” (Cartwright 109).

Idea, I.1.3). In fact, we could say of Apollo that the imperturbable trust in that

principle and the calm sitting still of the man caught up in it attained its loftiest

expression in him, and we may even designate Apollo himself as the marvelous

divine image of the principium individuationis, from whose gestures and gaze all

the joy and wisdom of “illusion,” together with its beauty, speak to us.

In the same place Schopenhauer also described for us the tremendous awe

which seizes a man when he suddenly doubts his ways of comprehending illusion,

when the principle of reason, in any one of its forms, appears to suffer from an

exception [When the curtain is ripped.]. If we add to this awe the ecstatic rapture,

which rises up out of the same collapse of the principium individuationis from the

innermost depths of a human being, indeed, from the innermost depths of nature,

then we have a glimpse into the essence of the Dionysian, which is presented to us

most closely through the analogy to intoxication (Nietzsche 12-13).

Not only is the connection between Iggy’s “curtain,” the Apollonian and the Dionysian clear and unmistakable, but the explanation of the interconnectedness of these elements finds a similar corollary in an anecdote from punk historian McNeil regarding Iggy and his [Iggy’s] on-stage behavior: “Iggy walked on people’s hands. Iggy grabbed people out of the audience. Suffice it to say that Iggy was a lot more dangerous than Jim Morrison who might be waving his penis around on stage in Miami . . . Iggy, you know, you thought that he might take the whole crowd with him” (TravisRoberts). In a Dionysian context, this certainly would have been part of the whole point of Iggy’s intentionally intoxicating performances. But, to continue:

Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak in their hymns, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises; as it intensifies, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. Even in the

German Middle Ages, under the same power of Dionysus, constantly growing hordes thronged from place to place, singing and dancing; in that St. John’s and

St. Vitus’s dances we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, with its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea

[a riotous Babylonian festival].

There are people who, from a lack of experience or out of apathy, turn mockingly or pityingly away from such phenomena as from a “sickness of the people,”[!] with a sense of their own health. These poor people naturally do not have any sense of how deathly and ghost-like this very “health” of theirs sounds, when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars past them.

Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the bond between man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, no matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth freely offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and the desert approach in peace. The wagon of Dionysus is covered with flowers and wreaths. Under his yolk stride panthers and tigers.

If someone were to transform Beethoven’s Ode to Joy into a painting and not restrain his imagination when millions of people sink dramatically into the dust, then we could come close to the Dionysian. Now the slave a free man; now

all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and

arbitrary power or “saucy fashion” have established between men. [italics mine]

Now, with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united

with his neighbour, reconciled and fused together, but also as one with him, as if

the veil of Mājā has been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around in the

face of the mysterious primordial unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses

himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and

talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances. The enchantment

speaks out in his gestures. Just as the animals now speak and the earth gives milk

and honey, so something supernatural also echoes out of him: he feels himself a

god; he himself now moves in as lofty and ecstatic a way as he saw the gods

move in his dream. The man is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art:

[italics mine] the artistic power of all of nature, to the highest rhapsodic

satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals itself here in the transports of

intoxication. The finest clay, the most expensive marble — man — is here

worked and chiselled, and the cry of the Eleusianian mysteries rings out to the

chisel blows of the Dionysian world artist: “Do you fall down, you millions?

World, do you have a sense of your creator?” (Nietzsche 13-14)

“Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher unity. He has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances” (Nietzsche 13).

Or, perhaps he is merely busy moving roughly through the frenetic energy of the mosh pit at a

Stooges concert or smearing peanut butter on his chest and walking over the heads and on the

hands of his audience, those swept up in the transcendent energy of his lead (fig. 5). I’m reminded here of the moment in Craig O’Hara’s The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise! wherein he recounts as to how present at talk shows in the 1980’s taking punk as their subject matter there was frequently “a member of the mainstream brainwashing groups ‘Parents of

Punkers’ or ‘Back in Control’ [who were] often . . . present to convince watching parents that their children could be ‘cured from Punk insanity’ with enough money and psychotherapy”

(O’Hara 44). The possibility that they might merely be expressing themselves through a

Dionysian art form had never occurred to them . . . and why, necessarily, would it have?

Fig. 5 (“Iggy Walking on Crowd”)

Here again, it is relevant to this project, lest the picture I’m attempting to sketch of Pop and his art be taken as more hyperbole than actual fact, to become a bit autoethnographic as I’ve actually experienced firsthand what it’s like to be a member of one of his audiences. I first saw

Iggy play Cobo Arena in Detroit on March 27, 1987 on his “Blah Blah Blah Tour.” Admittedly, at the time, I had no idea who he was and had gone to the show to see the night’s featured main act, The Pretenders, on their “Learning to Crawl Tour.” As the house lights dimmed and Iggy’s band kicked into the opening notes of his song “I Got a Right,”21 the crowd went crazy.

Moments later, Iggy entered stage right dressed in blue jeans and wearing a black t-shirt and a black leather motorcycle jacket (neither of which, if memory serves, stayed on him for very long). Iggy is as much a contortionist as he is a musician, and from the moment he took the stage his body began gyrating and bouncing. To say that he gave a spirited physical performance would be a pathetic understatement. Indeed, he spent a not insignificant portion of his performance writhing on the stage and dry humping his band’s amplifiers. That is, when he was not repeatedly pounding his right fist, wrapped tightly around his microphone, directly and forcefully into his crotch. Having no prior knowledge of who he was, I had no idea what to make of him as I stood in the front row and watched as the audience, song after song, moved around me like water and electricity. (There was a moment, too, when Iggy, in what seemed to me to be both an absolute disregard for my presence and a primal challenge, locked eyes with me as I tried

21 Anytime I want I got a right to move/No matter what they say/Said anytime I want I got a right to move/No matter what they say . . . ‘Cause I got a right, a right to move/Anytime I want any old time/Said I got a right a right to move/Anytime I want . . . Anytime I want I got a right to say/No matter what they say/Said anytime I want I got a right to say/No matter what they say (Osterberg)

to make sense of him. It was, perhaps, the longest three seconds of my life. Having achieved whatever he may have wanted from the encounter, he moved on quickly.) Once his ten-song set had come to an end and he had thoroughly scorched the stage, Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer for The Pretenders, walked on to the stage with a towel. After reaching the center of the stage, she knelt down, wiped then kissed the boards, stood up and declared, “This is the stage that Iggy

Pop played on.” Then, she walked off to prepare for her own set. Her band was, arguably, at the height of its global fame at the time, and I remember being moved by her gesture to someone for whom she clearly held a great deal of genuine awe and respect. Although I didn’t have the words to describe it as such at the time, remembering back on the experience, the word that I would choose to describe Pop’s performance that night is without question “transcendent.”

In a political sense, the Apollonian and the Dionysian are a play of opposites that reference the political/ideological systems that have produced them. In the sense of the world, of the body and the flesh, which are neither moral nor idealistic, there are simply sensual impulses that demand expression and satisfaction. The Apollonian and the Dionysian are born out of the hard necessity to at once bend the world to one’s will in the pursuit of “order,” to forgo order, at times with abandon, or, more commonly, to do both of these simultaneously:

Up to this point, we have considered the Apollonian and its opposite, the Dionysian, as

artistic forces which break forth out of nature itself, without the mediation of the human

artist and in which the human artistic drive is for the time being satisfied directly—on the

one hand, as a world of dream images, whose perfection has no connection with an

individual’s high level of intellect or artistic education, on the other hand, as the

intoxicating reality, which once again does not respect the individual, but even seeks to

abolish the individual and to redeem him through a mystic feeling of collective unity. In

comparison to these unmediated artistic states of nature, every artist is an “imitator,” and,

in fact, is an artist either of Apollonian dream or Dionysian intoxication or, finally – as in

Greek tragedy, for example -- simultaneously an artist of intoxication and dreams. As the

last, it is possible for us to imagine how he sinks down in the Dionysian drunkenness and

mystical obliteration of the self, alone and apart from the rapturous choruses, and how,

through the Apollonian effects of dream, his own state now reveals itself to him, that is,

his unity with the innermost basis of the world, in a metaphorical dream picture.

(Nietzsche 14)

I have discussed the necessary role of experience in askēsis and when Iggy speaks of his art as being “eventful,” clearly one of the things he means is that it is experiential in nature and certainly what the above passages make clear is that the element of experience inherent in

Dionysian art is indispensable,22 especially when juxtaposed with the Apollonian. Iggy is “an artist of intoxication and dreams,” and it bears repeating here that in regard to askēsis, it was

“curiosity” that Foucault identified as his primary motivation—and here “curiosity” is necessarily linked with “concern.”23 Much of the curiosity and concern for Iggy, his art and the

Dionysian is finding out what’s behind (and ripping down) that curtain “placed between the

22 I’m again reminded of Iggy’s witness that “If you played music like the way I do, ok, obviously already if I put as much into a song as I possibly can . . . automatically for five, ten minutes it’s very hard for me to speak articulately, or to talk to you . . . because I’ve quite totally given myself to that” (Shakeshouttwister). 23 “Foucault uses the word curiosity to designate his motivation. We can hear the echo of an interview where he says that, to him, the word evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things . . .” (McGushin xii).

individual and everything that is good and real and worth living for.” That curtain which, in the words of 20th century philosopher Charles Taylor, has resulted “In a mechanical and depersonalized world [where] man has an indefinable sense of loss; a sense that life has become impoverished . . . above all that men have been separated from whatever might give meaning to their work and their lives” (O’Hara 21). On its surface, Pop’s art may seem to some to be nothing more than outrageously bold-faced foolishness, completely dismissible, but such assessments are easily proven fallacious and overly simplistic hegemonic assaults when his methodology, the lineage of his art, the wild and unselfconscious abandon of his stage presence, his rolling around on shards of glass and lit cigarette butts on stage, the use of his body in his art, is factored into a thorough analysis. These are absolutely in keeping with the goals of Foucaultian askēsis: they break up his and his audience’s familiarities, if not boredoms, offensive in their routineness and their dominating intentions. In challenging the oppressiveness of rational society and reason, he is able to “regard otherwise” the worlds in which he walks around, including the world of his body, and able to provoke and encourage his audience to do so, too. His ability to be articulate about his intentions with his art, as the block quote that heads this chapter evidences so clearly, belies the fact that his curiosity and concern are, in no small part, born out of an astute awareness of exactly what it is that he’s doing and “what what he’s doing does.”

When Pussy Riot reference “the holy foolishness of punk” it is Iggy’s example to which they are either consciously or unconsciously referring, his ability to disturb and expose the limitations of political ideology and the predictability of life in order to free up the possibilities of things . . . to become that which, in body and spirit, he is not yet. And while Pop identifies in his art an element of the Dionysian, it’s important to point out that, for him, the Dionysian is never merely an exercise in wanton spiritual abandon disguising a disdain for the flesh. When

Pop says “I’m quite happy to be me,” not only do I take him at his word, but in the live and recorded performances of his that I’ve attended or seen, never did it strike me that the paces through which he was putting himself or his body were intended to merely punish himself or his body. This hasn’t, however, always been everyones’ take. I recall many years ago running across this account from famed rock and roll photographer Bob Gruen regarding his first impressions of

Iggy, “I remember the first time I saw Iggy Pop. He was covered with oil and glitter, and everybody was kinda starin’ at him goin’ ‘What the hell is this?’, you know. It was kind of a really strange, different kind of attitude, and he was kinda jumpin’ around like a spastic . . .”

(Letts). While Gruen may have been taken aback, Pop’s persona and onstage treatments of his body have long struck me as vehicles or tools for experience rather than whipping posts or

“albatrosses”:

Not all historical conceptions view the body as equally “inescapable.” The Greeks

viewed soul and body as inseparable except through death. Descartes, however,

believed that with the right philosophical method we can transcend the

epistemological limitations of the body. And contemporary culture,

technologically armed, seems bent on defying aging, our various biological

“clocks,” and even death itself. But what remains the constant element throughout

historical variation is the construction of body as something apart from the true

self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom.) and as

undermining the best efforts of that self. That which is not-body is the highest, the

best, the noblest, the closest to God; that which is body is the albatross, the heavy

drag on self-realization. (Bordo 3)

Not so, I argue, for Iggy, whose use of his body in his art has always struck me as an important mode of resistance to hegemonic normatization and normalization, as a “focal point for struggles over the shape of power”—an asset, not a liability (Bordo 10). While the possibilities for analyses and linkages between Pop, punk, Foucaultian askēsis, the Dionysian and the

Apollonian, the personal and the political (indeed, the personal as political) are obviously numerous and, for me, fascinating, chief among them is Iggy’s use of his body as a means of addressing the mind/body split.

Another major deconstruction [of the old notion of “the body”] is in the area of

sociopolitical thought. Although Karl Marx initiated this movement in the middle

of the 19th century, it did not gain momentum until the last 20 years due to the

work of the late Michel Foucault. Marx argued that a person’s economic class

affected his or her experience and definition of “the body.” . . . Foucault carried

on these seminal arguments in his analysis of the body as the focal point for

struggles over the shape of power. Population size, gender formation, the control

of children and of those thought to be deviant from the society’s ethics are major

concerns of political organization and all concentrate on the definition and

shaping of the body. Moreover, the cultivation of the body is essential to the

establishment of one’s social role. (Bordo 10)

I first came across this passage in Susan Bordo’s brilliant essay “Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.” In the piece, Bordo argues, and very successfully, that this idea of “the body as

the focal point for struggles over the shape of power” was born out of feminism and actually predates poststructualist thought. It is not my intention here to attempt to bypass Bordo’s assertion and overlook the importance of the idea’s origins. What concerns me most in these analyses is merely establishing the pre-existence in academic literature of the idea itself and that, as Bordo also points out, “Almost everyone who does the ‘new scholarship’ on the body claims

Foucault as its founding father and guiding light. And certainly . . . Foucault did articulate and delineate some of the central theoretical categories that influenced that scholarship as it developed in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. ‘Docile bodies,’ ‘biopower,’ ‘micropractices’ these are useful concepts, and Foucault’s analyses, which employ them in exploring historical changes in the organization and deployment of power, are brilliant” (Bordo 10).

As I alluded to earlier in this work, Iggy’s stage behaviors have long been so well- documented and characterized as being “over the top,” “outrageous,” “disturbing” or “deviant” that establishing this as objective fact is here unnecessary. But where many have dismissed this aspect of his art as perhaps mere attention getting theatrics (or, they have simply chosen not to address it at all), the purpose of these behaviors and the use of his body in them has always seemed to me to be much more a form of resistance, a set of micropractices designed to accomplish at least these two things: 1) in a political context to violate what Foucault called the construction of the Docile Body (“. . . our bodies are necessarily cultural forms,” Bordo reminds us, “. . . and the material body [has always been] a site of political struggle”) in favor of the mobilization of “the resisting body”24 “in the process of deterritorialization” (Rajagopal), and 2)

24 Interestingly enough, I first came across this term via a 2012 online slide show presentation entitled “Foucault & Deleuze: The Docile Body Becoming a Protester in the Arab Spring: The Role of Social Media,” by York University Professor Indhu Rajagopal, PhD. The possible connections between Pop, his audiences and the use of his body as a site of deterritorialization and micropractices of resistance and the processes through which ordinary citizens became

to use the body and its senses as a vehicle for smashing through the narcotic effects of the banality of life (Fig 6).

For Foucault, a Docile Body is “[one] that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved” (Discipline and Punish 136). It is “the body as object and target of power . . the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skilful and increases its forces.” (Discipline and Punish 136)25 It is a subjugated body that may be distributed across political and economic spaces for the purposes of the production of both economic profit and the attitudes and behaviors that lead, (economically, socially, ideologically, etc.) to profitability in the production and reinforcement of a variety of hegemonic powers. “When you started your

Fig. 6 (Behr)

participants in the Arab Spring immediately fascinated and struck me as not only self-evident but profound on a number of levels. 25 In this section of Discipline and Punish, Foucault is discussing the discovery in the classical age of “the body and object of power.” He expands on this and eventually arrives at his theory of the Docile Body, but this discussion and definition of the body is inherent in his characterization of the Docile Body.

music, there was no word like ‘Punk’,” says talk show host Stephen Colbert to Iggy in a 2013 interview. “You weren’t trying to be a Punk band, you . . . just had a band. What were you trying to do?” (Colbert) To which Pop responds, “Trying to be free . . . you know, high school was like college was like [the] military was like vaudeville, was like being locked up was like . . . everything was just going to be more of the endless same, and we didn’t want to obey” (Colbert).

And here, not obeying requires not just psychological resistance but also physical resistance.

“Foucault’s ‘Power’ . . . oppresses and manipulates human bodies to become subjected and practiced bodies; the exercise of power is through a calculated policy and action of coercions and surveillance of the body” (Rajagopal). It is through, in part, the production of not only the

“normal” body, but also the restrictive and constrictive behavioral norms of the normal body that

Foucaultian power is practiced. To “free” oneself and one’s body in this context means to reposition one’s self and one’s body in relation to forces of domination via what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their work Anti-Oedipus, refer to as “deterritorialization” or “[The] process of becoming free from an imposed rigid organization of hierarchic units of discrete categories with singular coded meaning or identities. The process releases one from the relations that constrain individuals/groups from the actualization of their potential. It unfolds the bodies’ virtual dimensions leading to a dynamic set of interconnected identities with permeable individual boundaries” (Rajagopal). It must be mentioned here, too, that it is not, according to

Foucault, possible to escape, once and for all, the effects of power. This has long been one of the chief tenets of Foucault’s very definition of power. The best that one can endeavor to do is to reposition themselves in relation to certain powers and their intentions (through, in part, the resistant body) which, as mentioned earlier in this work, does indeed open up truly new spaces and possibilities for being in the world. Such acts of resistance belie the pervasive notion that

hegemonic scripts regarding social and cultural norms are inviolable, all-encompassing and simply “true” when in fact they contain massive gaps that underscore the existence of viable alternatives. This point is one that first occurred to me in the writing of my MA thesis, and which

I certainly never thought I’d address again, let alone in the context of Iggy Pop, the body and punk. Yet, it underscores the very effects of domination on the body and psyche that are in question in this analysis of Pop. When the same mechanisms of control keep appearing in a variety of contexts in social analyses, it is perhaps at that point that you know that you’re really on to something. At that time, I was analyzing James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room, one of the very first novels by an American author to deal openly with the subject of homosexuality. I had become interested in the following passage of the book because of the relationships between power and the body that it signifies, wherein Baldwin’s character David, the novel’s chief protagonist, is recounting his reaction as a teenager to the reality of having just made love to his friend Joey:

[My] own body suddenly seemed gross and crushing and the desire which was

rising in me seemed monstrous. But, above all, I was suddenly afraid. It was

borne in on me: But Joey is a boy. I saw suddenly the power in his thighs, in his

arms, and in his loosely curled fists. The power and the promise and the mystery

of that body made me suddenly afraid. That body suddenly seemed the black

opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I

would lose my manhood. Precisely, I wanted to know that mystery and feel that

power and have that promise fulfilled through me. The sweat on my back grew

cold. I was ashamed. . . . A cavern opened in my mind, black, full of rumor,

suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half understood stories, full of dirty

words. I thought I saw my future in that cavern. I was afraid. (Giovanni’s 15)

Whether it’s Iggy recounting his disdain for “more of the endless same” via the establishment of norms through institutions of power or Baldwin’s David reacting with self-censure and debilitating fear to the positive, sexualized narrative gaps he confronts regarding his attractions, the constant is the body as “the focal point for struggles over the shape of power” and the role that the body can play in the disruption of power. Iggy’s body gyrating on a stage, dry humping his amps, David’s having been instrumental in the narrative gap his love-making with Joey has opened up in his mind: It is possible to get at the mind and what affects it through the body, and, as Bordo has alluded to, the body has its own ways of experiencing and making sense of the world and, as Baldwin has also said, strong human emotions (the original emotional context for his comment was rage, but it is still thoroughly applicable here) “can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever” (“Stranger in the Village” 149). They may not be susceptible to rational arguments, but that does not put them beyond the reach of alteration and redirection. Since pointed emotional conundrums are not solved with reason, it follows that strong embodied experiences can never be “solved” with reason either, but alternate embodied experiences may provide new arenas wherein (dis)solutions may occur.

Punk/Askēsis/Parrhēsia

At the core of my exploration into Punk/Askēsis has been a fundamental belief that traditional punk practices and philosophy are constructed as a means for the cultivation of experience in the ongoing process of the care and shaping of the self (or, more accurately, selves), and the underlying assertion that not only is this critical to the life of the mindbodyspirit of traditional punks, but that this mode of care and shaping also makes vital cultural contributions. Indeed, as Foucault has argued, it has been doing so for eons:

“Tradition assures us that in the West it was the Greeks who first made truth into

a problem. Foucault’s interpretation of philosophy in ancient Greece—as well as

in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds—shows that the problematization of truth

resulted in making a problem of the being who speaks the truth. . . . [Socratic-

Platonic philosophy, to which askēsis owes its roots, contains] a horizon Foucault

articulated in terms of a particular experience of politics (power), of truth

(knowledge, discourse) and of subjectivity (ethics). In his 1981 and 1982 lecture

courses at the Collège de France, Foucault interrogated ancient philosophy,

exploring the concept of “care of the self,” the mutations it went through, the

practices it gathered together, the forms of knowledge it elaborated, and the

experience of truth which permeated it—an experience Foucault called

“spirituality.” (McGushin 5)

Now, it may be extraordinarily difficult for people in the main to view and understand

Iggy Pop’s on-stage treatment of his body as a non-verbal form of speaking truth to power (to

say nothing of the potential Foucaultian spirituality inherent in John Lydon’s petulant challenges of political authority or Patti Smith’s practice of what many would certainly only see as blasphemy) or as a form of spirituality in its own right that makes important cultural contributions, but, in both a personal and a public sense, it is my claim that it does just that because it is a positive form of parrhēsia. Through his behavior and words (or that of any number of figures whose presence is historically vital to traditional punk culture) Iggy can “rip right through” his own curtain and, possibly, the curtains of others and deliver both new truths and new experiences of truth. And it may very well be to the good health of the body politic that he does this and in his own ways. It is important to remember as we take a more formal look at parrhēsia, that Foucault argued that “The philosophical project of care of the self was a response to a concrete problem, the crisis of Athenian democracy. The problem was the inability of democracy to practice an effective political discourse. That is to say, though democratic politics is fundamentally a discursive activity, the Athenian assembly could not practice a political discourse which articulated the truth—in this case “truth” refers to what is good for the city as a whole” (McGushin 3). It’s, care of the self, speaking the truth as a means of vitalizing society and its members that makes Iggy’s treatment of his body, as well as the actions and articulations of a wide variety of traditional punks, intelligible as a form of parrhēsia.

Foucault refers to the etymology of the word [parrhēsia], ‘to say everything.’ He

tells us that parrhēsia is usually rendered as ‘frankness,’ ‘free speech, or ‘license.’

The word is used in both a negative and a positive sense. In its negative aspect

‘saying anything’ is a lack of restraint, as in the case of someone who cannot hold

his tongue. Even worse, in its negative register, it can take on the dubious

connotation of ‘saying whatever it takes.’ In other words, parrhēsia can mean to

say ‘whatever is able to serve the passion or interest which motivates the one who

speaks.’ In the first, rather benignly negative aspect, one says whatever one feels

like saying with no sense of shame or limit. In the second and more sinister form

of negative parrhēsia, one says whatever one thinks will serve oneself well.

Opposed to this negative sense there is a positive aspect of parrhēsia, to ‘speak

the truth’. To say everything has the sense of not holding anything back through

fear or humiliation, not hiding anything through the use of style, rhetoric, or

dissimulation. In its positive register, parrhēsia means ‘to say everything guided

by the truth’ . . . Parrhēsia is therefore ‘frankness.’ One freely, courageously, or

impetuously speaks one’s mind. (McGushin 6)

In the context of punk culture, both traditional and Quincy included, a couple of points must be clarified: While traditional punks would encourage anyone to say whatever they like, the understood caveat has always been that this comes with great responsibility. It should make a nurturing contribution to certainly the life of the individual, but very potentially to others and the world at large. Not taking responsibility for what one says, and this would include “[saying] whatever one feels like saying with no sense of shame or limit” and saying “whatever one thinks will serve oneself well,” would be viewed by traditional punks as the equivalent of adopting a cliché punk uniform in an effort to declare one’s uniqueness—as pathetic and uninteresting. This contextualizes and characterizes one of the key problems that traditional punks have always had with Quincy punks, whose chief motivation for being involved in punk culture is, to put it very simply, primarily for the sake of belonging to punk culture. (Or, rather, to purchase an image,

actual or ideological, for the mere purpose of being in opposition to main-stream culture and authority as a self-serving, attention-getting device, rather than to find oneself in opposition to one’s own culture through differences in actual and hard-won convictions). In the context of parrhēsia, Quincy punks would definitely constitute for traditional punks a foolish and negative example. There is a difference between what Pussy Riot refers to as “the holy foolishness of punk” and mere foolishness. Where a “holy foolishness” would promote a deep commitment to positive growth of some form, mere foolishness promotes and concerns itself with a commitment to nothing more than the ongoing range of its own narcissism. Too, when one does exercise one’s parrhēsia, one is compelled to tell the truth as one knows it, and not necessarily truths that are regarded as merely objective, and this for two reasons: 1) One can only ever tell the truth as they know it, lest they be lying, and 2) Whether something is objective or subjective is, in the final analysis, a matter of perspective and consensus.

To say that there is a great deal of responsibility in the ethic of traditional punk askēsis is to echo McGushin’s take on Foucault’s work on parrhēsia when he writes:

[P]ositive parrhēsia entails commitment. The parrhēsiast not only says the whole

truth, but says the truth to which she is committed. In the act of speaking the truth

the parrhēsiast concretizes her commitment to that truth. She gives her opinion in

such a way that the fact that it is her opinion is clear: In other words, ‘the

parrhēsiast in a way attaches his signature to the truth that he speaks, he binds

himself to it.’ The truth spoken in parrhēsia is one to which she is personally

committed and with which she identifies herself. In frankness, one exposes

oneself or reveals one’s self. Insofar as one takes a position in the world with

respect to a problem, one posits one’s self.” (McGushin 7)

And to this I would add that in the continual process of attaching, identifying and exposing oneself to one’s truth(s), one also shapes and (re)creates one’s self. We have no further to look than Patti Smith for a clear example of and precedent for parrhēsia in action within the core of traditional punk values. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” Yours? That’s for you to decide. Hers? Not at all. “What I was saying back then,” as Smith has noted, “was ‘I’m taking responsibility for my own actions. Taking responsibility for my own transgressions. . . . It was really just . . . declaring my existence”—and declaring her own truth (Strombo). Too, this sentiment as to the function in and benefit to society of parrhēsia in the context of traditional punk underpinnings was echoed strongly by John Cale, a member of the legendary and seminal proto-punk band The Velvet Underground, when he said that “Opening people’s minds up to other possibilities can only be done sometimes with rabid ideas. You’re really trying to be polite about it in a way and say ‘Hey, you know, don’t you get it?’ Mmmm, generally they don’t and you have to, like, push the boundaries” (Letts). There is a definite sense in Cale’s words of not only conviction, but this idea that speaking the truth is nothing less than a public service meant to vitalize and generate the possibility of new perspectives amongst a resistant if not hostile citizenry. Coincidentally, there is a precedent for this, my chair reminds me, that very much resembles not only the ways in which Existentialism inspired the Beats, but in the reception that they, too, often received from the public. I remember reading somewhere once where Truman

Capote, very much acclaimed as a writer during the time of the Beats, had said of Jack Kerouac’s work that it wasn’t writing, but typing. Misunderstanding, if that’s what we’re to call it, it seems,

is not limited to the artistically uninitiated. This, too, correlates with McGushin where he notes that,

In parrhēsia, furthermore, one speaks one’s mind in a situation where the stakes

are high. This is because one speaks a truth to someone who does not want to hear

that truth—one’s opinion is critical or offensive. The listener is in a position to

retaliate if he is inclined to do so. The speaker, therefore, leaves himself open to

the reaction of the listener. Speaking one’s mind and giving one’s opinion, when

doing so runs a risk for the speaker, is constitutive of parrhēsia. ‘It is, therefore,

truth in the risk of violence’ . . . Because of this fact parrhēsia requires courage:

the courage to speak the truth.” (McGushin 7)

In the case of the underpinnings of traditional punk, the truth is not necessarily a critique of governmental or oppressive authoritative powers, as one might be tempted to infer from Cale’s comments. What is vital to parrhēsia is that its function, modes of expression and the scope of its critique run the gamut of human experience. Sometimes parrhēsia is characterized by speaking truth to hegemonic power writ large; however, sometimes it is nothing more than a willingness “To actually say, ‘I’m bored and unhappy, and there’s nothing going on,’” in a society saturated with feel-good marketing campaigns and commercialized versions of false societal unities:

[W]hen you think of voice in the broadest sense of the word—a person

communicating an idea with an audience—then Iggy Pop more than holds his

own. He’s proved that a voice doesn’t have to charm or seduce someone; it can provoke. A song can be a weapon.

The best example of Iggy at war isn’t from anything he ever did in a studio. It’s from the live album Metallic K.O. It’s The Stooges’ last performance, recorded at an old crumbling theater in Detroit in 1974. As the album plays, you can hear the band falling apart musically, and then you hear an actual crash.

Bottles and cups are being thrown at the stage, and Iggy Pop starts to taunt the audience.

“You pricks can throw everything in the world, and your girlfriend will still love me,” he purrs into the microphone.

Today, relaxing at his modest bungalow in Miami, Iggy Pop doesn’t remember a lot from the show. It was during one of his heavy drug phases.

“I have a little movie that I play back in my head,” he says. “I remember things flying in from the audience. It was a big, heavy night. It was the Wild

West.”

The night before, Iggy Pop had been beaten up by bikers, and on this night, he had challenged them to come back. On the album, you can hear glass breaking, and Iggy encouraging the crowd to throw more. Light bulbs, ice cubes, eggs and coins all came through the air.

. . . [Paul] Trynka, Iggy’s biographer, says the band’s brilliance was that its members were willing to sound dumb.

“To actually say, ‘I’m bored and unhappy, and there’s nothing going on,’

nobody had done that before. That was the real signpost of what was going to

happen over the next 20 or 30 years.” (“Iggy Pop: The Voice As Weapon”)

That Iggy set a precedent for this is often hard for many to imagine when today so many rock and roll songs exist whose lyrics reference some of the most cloyingly mundane and harder truths of their authors’ lived experiences. (To be sure, rock and roll songs have always addressed angst in one form or another; however, it has typically been white, straight, middle class teen angst.) The first stanza and chorus to Nirvana’s enormous hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a prime example of this:

Load up on guns, bring your friends

It’s fun to lose and to pretend

She’s over bored and self -assured

Oh no, I know a dirty word

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous

Here we are now, entertain us

I feel stupid and contagious

Here we are now, entertain us (Nirvana)

But the truth-telling in this kind of lyric, if we take Kurt Cobain’s work as an archetype, represented a radical break from either the forlorn content of many 1950s popular rock and roll

songs and the political protest numbers of the 1960s whose tension was chiefly directed at the government and its institutions. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is not “Peggy Sue” or “For What it’s

Worth.” Now, it is not my intention to disparage the importance of the sources of tension in the lyrics of these songs [“Peggy Sue” or “For What it’s Worth”] or the right of their authors to express them. It is to suggest that there is a world of difference to be observed between writing a song that expresses some sort of dissatisfaction and performing that song to a mostly approving crowd of likeminded and, typically, unarmed individuals (Then flying off to your next gig in a chartered plane.), and having someone slice your knee with a machete outside of a pub one night because in your music you’ve effectively called for the death of all of the structures that were designed to give their lives meaning ever since they’d been in the world. That is, the protest artists of the 60s were often commenting on and variously trying to provoke governmental authority so that authority might change. Punks were attacking not just governments and their exercise of political power, but every day people and the ways in which they allowed themselves to be subsumed by any number of ideologies at extremely fundamental levels. The risk and personal sacrifice on the part of the performers from these different eras strike me as tangible and important as they indicate a shift in parrhēsic strategy born out of an ongoing awareness and frustration of incomplete at best or failed attempts at worse to speak truth to power. Again, because of his seminal importance to punk, Iggy represents both the presence of and a fundamental shift in the practice of parrhēsia in rock and roll—a shift that would be thematically subsumed into the practice of parrhēsia in traditional punk askēsis while broadening the range of its expression.

As McGushin indicates, there is a certain amount of risk to the speaker that goes along with parrhēsia. Perhaps this risk as it relates to traditional punk is no more poignantly exemplified than in the experiences of the Sex Pistols at the height of their mid-1970s fame:

The Jamie Reid posters that put a safety pin through the Queen’s lip and

obliterated her portrait with “blackmail lettering” were themselves acts worthy of

trial for sedition in some eyes [remember that there was at the time also a

suggestion by some members of the British Parliament that the Sex Pistols be

hung from Traitors’ Gate], while in the previous Elizabethan era a character

called Johnny Rotten jeering that Queen Bess was “no human being” would

surely have been locked in the Tower. Instead, Lydon and the Pistols were merely

banned from the airwaves, though the group would pay a high price, being

hassled by police and attacked by nationalist thugs. The ban, and the Pistols’

dismissal by their record company, A&M, threatened to scupper “God Save the

Queen,” but they signed with Richard Branson’s Virgin and the song soared up

the charts. (Spencer)

While the quote allows as to how the Pistols were derided, hassled and attacked because of the views inherent in their lyrics, views which were bolstered by their interviews and public personas, this merits some more concrete unpacking. In 1977, in reaction to the release of “God

Save the Queen,” “Lydon was attacked by a gang in mid-June, outside the Pegasus pub in

Islington, the knife wounds causing tendon damage in his left arm. And three days later he was attacked again. In an interview Lydon said, ‘I don’t understand it. All we’re trying to do is

destroy everything’” (Frazer). Lydon’s own recounting of the attack years later provided a bit more gruesomely clarifying detail, “I got a machete blade ripped down this leg, and, uh, the blade stuck in my knee cap—and they couldn’t pull it out. So I had to, like, walk off with that. I got a stiletto blade from my wrist here [indicates the path the blade traveled up his arm]. Lucky not to have had one of my eyes gouged out ‘cause a bottle was shoved in here. . . . Got to the hospital, first thing they do is call the Police, and I get arrested for suspicion of causing an affray” (Filth). But Lydon has long maintained that the intent of his lyrics for “God Save the

Queen” were mischaracterized by many and understood by few. That although the Sex Pistols were trying to destroy everything, they were not doing so out of spite for the British people, but out of service to them, “You don’t write ‘God Save the Queen’ because you hate the English race. You write a song like that because you love them, and you’re fed up with them being mistreated” (Filth). On the other hand, that love went, evidently, largely unrequited. “If they’d’ve hung us at Traitors’ Gate,” Lydon said years later, “it would’ve been applauded by 56 million. . . . We declared war on England without meaning to. . . .Whatever we were saying and doing really hit a nerve, a raw nerve. It was fucked up. . . . Completely from there on in walking around the streets of London on my own was impossible. I would be attacked on sight. . . .

Constantly in fear of your life, really” (Filth).

Fundamental to the analytical scope of this work has been setting up a global arena for an historical trajectory between traditional punks of the past and those of the present in order to explore traditional punk askēsis. Regarding the element of parrhēsia, there exists no better contemporary example in traditional punk culture and its askēsis than the beliefs and actions of

Pussy Riot. Earlier in this work Pussy Riot were introduced via their public protest performance in a Russian Orthodox Cathedral of their song “Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away”—the lyrics of

which had them “pleading with the Virgin Mary to save Russia from Vladimir Putin, who was elected to a third term as Russia’s president two weeks later” (Vasilyeva). For this offense, you’ll remember, three of the band’s members were tried and sent to prison. At the time of this writing, all three women have, however, been released. (They were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”) The first, Yekaterina Samutsevich, in October of 2012 on a suspended sentence, and the other two, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, in December of

2013 after spending nearly two years in prison—an apparent humanitarian publicity stunt on the part of Putin to coincide with the 2014 Winter Olympic games in Sochi, Russia. Recently, CNN reporter Diana Mangay interviewed Maria and Nadezhda:

Diana: This [the women’s imprisonment] all came about as a protest against the

Russian president. What future do you see for Putin’s Russia, and what future do

you see for yourselves within that Russia?

Nadezhda: Of course we’d like to live in a future where there is no Putin system.

Where we’d have a democratic, transparent system with no corruption, with no

hatred inside a society that is always provoked against a particular group, like, for

example, gays or the west. There’s too much hatred in this country. We’d like to

help it become more humane, but I’m afraid it’s impossible with Putin in power.

Diana: You know what happens to critics of the Russian president. You’ve been

through the hell of what you’ve just described. Are you not scared of what may

happen?

Maria: No way. We’re not afraid of them. They’re the ones who should be afraid

of us.

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Diana: And now, two years after your performance in the cathedral, what is your

message to President Putin?

Maria: We’re making him go away.

Nadezhda: We were not defeated because we had our own victories over the

system. You can’t make us silent. . . . We managed to keep our personal freedom

inside, even when we were imprisoned. We always wanted to change things

around for us for the better. So, now we’re free. Our work just continues.

Maria: . . . Prison is the place where you feel freedom the most. The freedom is

inside you. (“Pussy Riot Wants”)

I was struck immediately when listening to Nadezhda’s and Maria’s witness of

McGushin’s assertion that the function of Foucaultian parrhēsia is “To say everything,” and that

“To say everything has the sense of not holding anything back through fear or humiliation, not hiding anything through the use of style, rhetoric, or dissimulation. In its positive register, parrhēsia means ‘to say everything guided by the truth’. . . Parrhēsia is therefore ‘frankness.’

One freely, courageously, or impetuously speaks one’s mind” (McGushin 6). Nadezhda’s and

Maria’s candor in the interview is direct. The intention of their speech, noble. And inherent in both their testimony and McGushin’s explanation is a fundamental and abiding sense of commitment and honesty. In the case of the former, this sense of deep commitment was recently put into further action by Nadezhda and Maria and other members of Pussy Riot (the exact number of members of Pussy Riot has intentionally never been disclosed by the group to the public) when, on February 19th of this year, less than two months after having been released from prison, they were brutally attacked in Sochi by Russian Cossacks who beat them, flogged them

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with whips and sprayed some sort of chemical spray, most likely mace or pepper, in their faces while the band performed and attempted to film a video for their protest song “Putin Will Teach

You to Love the Homeland.” The women had gone to Sochi to protest what has widely been characterized in the media as Putin’s Winter Olympics and, according to Maria, “to show what it’s like to be a political activist in Olympic Sochi” (Watson). In “Putin Will Teach You . . .” the women “[sing] about the ‘constitution being lynched,’ government pressure against Russia’s lone independent TV station and of last week’s sentencing of environmentalist Evgeny Vitishko to a penal colony for three years” (Watson).

Fig. 7 (Gash)

As with the Sex Pistols, there is a definite sense that the goal of the song is designed to serve a public interest beyond the scope of either the band or its members. And to say that they are speaking the truth at a high, personal risk of retaliation is, here, a pale understatement.

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Regarding honesty, McGushin writes:

Foucault also draws out the uniqueness of parrhēsia by way of contrast. For

example, parrhēsia is not rhetoric. In fact, the two are diametrically opposed.

Rhetoric is a technique of speaking which allows one to persuade others to

believe in statements that may or may not be true, that the speaker herself may or

may not believe. Therefore, while parrhēsia requires commitment on the part of

the speaker, rhetoric implies no identification of the speaker with what is said. On

the contrary, the rhetorician strives to bind the listener to what is said, ‘strives to

establish a constraining bond, a bond of force [un lien de pouvoir] between what

is said and the one who is addressed.’ In other words, there is a difference

between the speaker and what is said, but an identity between the listener and

what is said. This identity is the desired effect of rhetoric because through the

identity the listener is placed under the power of the speaker. In parrhēsia, on the

other hand, there is an identity between the one who speaks and what is said.

(McGushin 7-8)

And the difference here both maps and makes all of the difference between earlier traditional punks and Pussy Riot and Putin and governmentality both in character and function. Where

Pussy Riot are their message, the message of Putin and his government, of which the Cossacks are an extension, exists as a vehicle for the exercise of power. The identification with the message is, in the case of the latter, both unnecessary and secondary to the desired effect of its controlling intentions. “Precisely because of this,” writes McGushin, “the particular opinion, the

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particular content, that the parrhēsiast speaks reveals a difference and the ‘possibility of a rupture’ in the relationship between the speaker and listener, through the ‘sting of the truth’ spoken. In doing so it makes the speaker and the listener appear in their differentiation by throwing them back upon themselves” (McGushin, 7-8). It is this same rupture that in a non- totalitarian Foucaultian power model allows for “The generation of a nontyrannical model of authenticity [requiring] a transformation of the structure, what Adorno calls the constellation of force field, itself—not swapping which position one fills within it” (Arola 292).

There is always a sense in Foucault’s model of rhetoric that the speaker is, in action, subordinate to the function of the technique and the message. In the case of the parrhēsiast, the power model Arola invokes and that which I’ve elaborated in this work, no such subordination exists—but rather a continuum, an undifferentiated whole, a viable model of and for primacy.

“Furthermore,” McGushin also notes:

[R]hetoric is essentially a techne, a savoir faire. It is what Foucault called a

technology of governmentality—and often it is employed as a technology of

domination. It is a systematic, deliberate technique for ‘conducting’ individuals.

Rhetorical discourse unfolds in a relationship of power. Parrhēsia, on the other

hand, is not a techne, it is not a craft; ‘it is an attitude, it is a manner of being,

which is allied to virtue.’ Rhetoric is an art one learns and uses as one wishes.

Parrhēsia is a way of being in which one speaks one’s mind. Rather than being a

techne, such as rhetoric, indifferent to the truth of what is said or the commitment

of the speaker, parrhēsia is essentially a ‘modality of veridiction.’ Parrhēsia has

to do with who one is. (McGushin 8)

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All of this is certainly corroborated for me in my personal experiences with traditional punk culture. It was, perhaps, although at the time I didn’t have the ideological framework to identify it as such, the element of parrhēsia, its honesty and forthrightness, that first drew me to

Karen all those years ago. I must say that never once, either in her presence or the presence of her friends, in public or private, whether we were engaged in political debate or pedestrian conversation, did I feel that there was ever any difference at all to be observed between who they were as people and their stated convictions, between who they were and what they said. And this element was corroborated by longtime notable Washington D.C. punk historian and activist

Mark Andersen when he wrote “[Punk] isn’t a fashion, a certain style of dress, a passing ‘phase’ of knee-jerk rebellion against your parents, the latest ‘cool’ trend or even a particular form of style or music, really—it is an idea that guides and motivates your life. The Punk community that exists, exists to support and realize that idea through music, art, fanzines and other expressions of personal creativity” (O’Hara 36). Clearly, in the world of traditional punks, it is the self that is the message—and its transcendence.

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Conclusion/Continuation

“When you feel an overwhelming influence, you try to open a window.”

—Michel Foucault

As was mentioned early in this work, there are certain limitations and frustrations inherent in attempting to study any group, its members and the cultural/philosophical underpinnings of these when they do not necessarily want to be studied or give access to those who would study them. In the case of traditional punks, their misgivings along these lines are not only understandable, but extremely sensible. So much of the way that traditional punks lead their lives is decidedly counter, by design, to the kind of reductive investigative practices that currently are and historically have been used to produce, frame and legitimize modes of academic inquiry, domains of predatory knowledges and hegemonic systems of power. The influence of these is so pervasive, persistent and intrusive that to not succumb to them often takes, to my way of thinking, an act of the will, enormous amounts of courage, deft intellectual agility and a considerable degree of acumen and ongoing strategizing. As Foucault alludes to in the above quote, resistance, if one is going to live a life of one’s own design rather than default to the designs of others, takes effort—but this is the good news. Since traditional punks do not believe in static systems of being and identification, certainly as evidenced by the political actions of Pussy Riot, who continue their fight against political oppression and the forces of these that would silence them, there is always work to be done. One must simply choose to do it.

Resistance, they would say, and certainly John Lydon and Patti Smith would agree with this, comes in many unexpected packages, and the work is both continual and enriching—not only personally, but, as it turns out, for societies in general.

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The choices that traditional punks sometimes make in an effort to do this work are what I have tried to explore here. My goal has not been to provide a definitive blueprint or to claim that here is the way to do this work once and for all. It would be inaccurate to say, however, that the approach of traditional punks to dealing with oppressive powers and the tools they have fashioned for themselves in order to do their work, their askēses, do not constitute some sort of precedent that arches toward example. As I discussed in chapter two, Iggy Pop’s use of his body in his art not only informed punk to an enormous degree, but also stands as a prime example of the diversity that micro-resistances to power can take. One has to wonder how, as was also mentioned in the chapter, when Bob Gruen first witnessed Iggy “covered with oil and glitter . . . jumpin’ around like a spastic,” why he and “everybody was kinda starin’ at him goin’ ‘What the hell is this?’” (Letts). That is, how did they come to regard that which was unfamiliar to them as strange and perverse? How was Iggy’s challenge to their normatized frames of reference not immediately embraced as an opportunity by which they might examine their own sets of assumptions about the means through which bodies and behavioral norms (those privileged spaces which, by implication of their situation, they seem to imagine that they occupy) are constructed and enforced? Perhaps we have to look no further than the dictates of Gruen’s and his fellow witnesses’ personalities for possible answers to these questions. But, the situation doesn’t seem either that simple or convenient. “The object of one’s hatred [and emotional and intellectual discomfort],” James Baldwin once observed, “is never, alas, conveniently outside but is seated in one’s lap, stirring in one’s bowels and dictating the beat of one’s heart. And if one does not know this, one risks becoming an imitation—and, therefore, a continuation—of principles one imagines oneself to despise” (“Here Be Dragons” 686). Traditional punks make it their life’s work to know this and to find ways to use the information furnished by these objects

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and moments to not only construct lives and communities that are more inhabitable for them, but to make of their lives extraordinary works of art.

Consideration for Continued Research

As new hegemonic systems arise within societies, so do new modes of resistance. A continuation of this work might not take punk as its object of inquiry at all, but the work of those involved in direct action political protests such as Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring. These movements strike me as requiring not merely actual physical participation, but, for those committed to the causes, an ongoing examination of themselves as objects of political discourse in an effort to, again, find some way to use their lives and their actions as a means by which to alter their environments and to make their lives and societies more inhabitable. I began this work with a question in mind: “What does it mean, to ‘come to one’s senses?’” The possible answers to this seemed both broad and appealing to me, and many of them suggested that a vital link exists between the ways through which one orients themselves intellectually in the world and their sensuous experiences of their worlds. As many of the figures fundamental to traditional punk culture have seemed to suggest to me, the socio-political filters through which we come to

“know” ourselves—and by which we construct ideological frameworks through which we might

“say” ourselves—all too often, and not by default but rather by design, become replacements for our embodied experiences of the world. Any number of books have and will be written on love and its various forms and meanings, for instance, but no one has yet been able to explain exactly why anyone actually falls in love. My point here is not to wax romantic about that which is unknowable. Rather, it is to call into question how interpretations and meanings are created and turned into norms that are transcribed onto bodies and minds, in an effort to construct market economies of goods, services and ideologies that bolster and legitimize compulsory points of

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view and subjectivities. Askēsis, in all of its forms, actual and anticipated, seems to me to provide endless opportunities for doing continual research into a broad range of modes of socio- political resistance.

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