Muggleton Weinzierl the Post-Subcultures Reader

‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’ – 4– ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’ Or Here’s Three Chords, Now Form a Band: Punk, Masochism, Skin, Anaclisis, Defacement David Bloustien One night I wandered into a rock-n-roll club named CBGB’s . Boomp boomp boomp entered my feet. Boomp boomp boomp entered my head. My body split into two bodies. I was the new world. I was pounding. Then there was these worms of bodies, white, covered by second-hand stinking guttered-up rags and knife-torn leather bands, moving sideways HORIZONTAL wriggling like worms who never made it to the snake-evolution stage, we only reproduce, we say, if you cut us apart with a knife. (Acker 1984: 120) Torn clothes and bondage pants, pierced skin and leather clothing continue to be ubiquitous symbols of punk in the popular imagination, and there is certainly no lack of empirical evidence to locate the paraphernalia of masochism in punk design and cultural production. Musical genealogies of American punk performance often begin with the Velvet Underground (Henry 1989), a band whose name is taken from a masochistic text, and whose song ‘Venus in Furs’ invokes Sacher-Masoch’s (1991) novel of the same title. In London, a decade later, it is Adam and the Ants who bring punk’s masochistic imagery to the fore. Having abandoned his art- college thesis in rubber and leather fetishism, Adam introduced S/M into his stage performances with songs such as ‘Whip my Valise’ and ‘Rubber People’ (Home 1988; Sabin 1999). But what do bondage pants have to do with punk ‘identity’? Is the correspondence between masochism and punk merely an accident of history? Punk discourse is saturated with the language of both liberal humanism and dialectical materialism, the radically autonomous individual who resists uniformity and seizes the means of production. Described in this way, punk is merely the logical extension of a (Western) metaphysics of selfhood. Masochism, on the other hand, is first and foremost a psychoanalytic term, although Gilles Deleuze (1991) returns this to its original literary context. Essentially a fetish of the skin, masochism places physical sensation (the coldness of marble, the interdependence of pleasure and pain) above the metaphysical self. Through association, this extends – 51 – Post-subcultures Reader to a fixation in both the literature and in practice of ‘feelings’ (self-fulfilling anxieties of abandonment), hair and clothing (leather and fur specifically), and the apparent negation of the self through slavery and contractional obligation. This means that psychoanalytic readings of masochism are not only determinist (in their most simplistic and least satisfying interpretation) but also ‘superficial’ and ‘of the surface’. Masochism and punk may meet in punk performance but they appear to be philosophically incompatible. It is important to note that the perceived rift between masochistic fashion and punk identity is therefore a problem of method- ology and epistemology. For many, the question is not simply ‘why did/do some punks wear bondage pants?’ but ‘is punk even quantifiable in this way?’ The purpose of this chapter is to reconcile the semiology of punk fashion, specifically the use of sado/masochistic imagery and fetish wear, with the anti- essentialist, anti-materialist arguments that have made themselves felt in normative (post-)subcultural theory. I would argue that subcultural studies needs to reclaim the superficial, or at least the epidermal, as its discursive domain. It is my contention that punk and masochism are two expressions of the same phenomenon, the defacement of the skin in its biological, psychological and sociological manifest- ations. Epistemological Considerations: Interior and Exterior There is a fundamental disparity between the ‘true’ inner self – the mind, soul or spirit – and one’s physical body, which remains more or less constant throughout the history of Western thought (Grosz 1995). Appearances are deemed deceiving; the true self is concealed, rather than revealed, by the bodily self, and the skin in particular. This is especially germane when considered alongside the racist pseudo- sciences of the turn of the last century, such as phrenology or social Darwinism, which make simple correlations between a person’s appearance and his or her biological or cultural essence. Indeed, the social hierarchies maintained by biological racism inevitably valorize the ‘higher races’ as spiritually and intellectually superior, while at the same time condemning the ‘lower races’ for their extreme physicality (Gilman 1991). The historical consequences of such discourses add a moral imperative to the metaphysical separation of ‘true self’ from ‘bodily self’. Moreover, it is the apparently superficial nature of masochism’s presence in punk that frustrates a study such as this one. In the case of punk, identity is increasingly located anywhere but the eye of the beholder (Sabin 1999), for once you accept the fact that Sid and Siouxie wore swastikas because they weren’t Nazis, the dresscode for the truly punk was clearly anything but pink hair, safety-pins and bondage gear. The only acceptable function of fashion was the overthrow (for all time) of the very metaphysics of ‘fashion’. (Sinker 1999: 125, emphasis added) – 52 – ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’ This argument is phrased more strongly than most, but it marks out the sites of conflict between different approaches to punk. On the one hand, it is ridiculous to equate punk with ‘the overthrow . of the very metaphysics of fashion’. Punk is most immediately identified as a set of stylistic and performative practices, not least by those who may wish to be a part of it. On the other, it is just as problematic to assert the presence of any one element in punk style, ‘pink hair, safety-pins and bondage gear’, as correlative with punk identity, and any attempt to grasp punk identity by its ‘uniformity’ is doomed to failure. This is particularly true in light of current research that seeks to drive a wedge between the more visible elements of subcultural identity and the values or pleasures that might be said to inform it (see Andes 1998). Removed from the domain of appearances, punk ceases to be a style and instead becomes a group identity that, ironically, orients itself around radical individualism (Muggleton 2000). In its extreme form, this radicalism sometimes manifests as a social programme against corporate power, specifically those economic forces that are believed to compromise individualism (Traber 2001). In this sense, triage aesthetics and hastily photocopied fanzines are not the codified language of a clandestine community, nor are they an historically determined cross-fertilization of class and youth that seeks to reclaim the means of production, but the by- product of a do-it-yourself philosophy of cultural manufacture. The problem with this approach to subculture is that it is counter-intuitive and disingenuous; it risks lapsing into Platonic idealism, which is just as removed from the punk experience as that which it seeks to rectify. Although for many self-professed punks, the visible element may be less important than the values ascribed to it, such an approach can not explain subcultural affiliation except as a kind of spontaneous ‘punk-nature’ that wells up within the disenfranchized. There is no room for, as Andes (1998) puts it, ‘growing up punk’, whereby a subculturalist finds the conventions of punk useful as a framework for self-expression and self-becoming. So we cannot do away with punk fashion in a study of punk identity, although we must recognize the awkward logic that sutures the two. This discord stems in part from what Elizabeth Grosz describes as a fundamental incompatibility between two species of bodily knowledge: The first conceives the body as a surface on which social law, morality and values are inscribed; The second refers largely to the lived experience of the body, the body’s internal or psychic inscription. Where the first analyses a social, public body, the second takes the body-schema or imaginary anatomy as its object(s) . Where psychoanalysis and phenomenology focus on the body as it is experienced and rendered meaningful, the inscriptive model is more concerned with the processes by which the subject is marked, scarred, transformed, and written upon or constructed by the various regimes of instit- utional, discursive, and nondiscursive power as a particular kind of body. (Grosz 1995: 33) – 53 – Post-subcultures Reader It seems obvious that style and collectivizing, material practices exist in the social realm, whereas identity is a discourse of the interior. Of course, internally and externally inscribed knowledges of the body are rhetorical extremes, and Grosz’s article is as much about shifting disciplinary walls as the lacunae between interior and exterior. Nonetheless, anthropological ethnography does not accord with Grosz’s internally inscriptive model in the same manner that, say, ethological studies or clinical psychoanalysis might. Rather, a closer analysis reveals that in practice these orientations are reversed. ‘Identity’, as a mutable process by which one navigates and mediates the external world, is the subject of ethnographic research. Culture is therefore identity on a collective level. The subject of classical psychoanalysis is also ‘identity’, but identity as ego-formation (or ‘ego-main- tenance’) and how this manifests in (aberrant) social behaviour. Culture is the collective manifestation of identity. The difference between the two is subtle but significant. Ethnographic testimony provides data for the analysis of the individual as part of a social network. By contrast, psychoanalytic case studies provide the researcher with information regarding the individual case and his or her self-inscription through the material base of the body, which is a given biological fact and informs all subsequent psychological development. The materiality of the body produces, rather than receives, knowledges of the social. The ethnographer looks for correspondence within and between communities, the practising psychoanalyst attempts to correct aberrations of psychological development on an individual basis.

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