Do it yourself: existentialism as punk philosophy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Shot by both sides: Punk Attitude and Existentialism
Existential Analysis, 2020
The 'punk attitude' that is basic to punk music and culture is hard to define. I argue that it can be more fully appreciated through a comparison with features of, and motivations behind, existentialist philosophy and literature: anti-institutionalism, nihilism, creative outputs and processes that are constantly challenging, and authentic belonging.
Proceedings of the Punk Scholars Network First International Postgraduate Conference
‘Post-punk’ has been defined in a variety of ways. Some commentators view it primarily as a reaction to punk, with distinct musical features. Others debate whether its organizing principle can even be found in a stylistic unity. Ryan Moore has described how punk responded to a ‘condition of postmodernity.’ In his view, post-modernism represented an ‘exhaustion of totalizing metanarratives.’ Within this context punk used bricolage to ‘turn signs and spectacles against themselves, as a means of waging war on society.’ For the purposes of this piece post-punk is considered a response to punk’s response to postmodernism. This article addresses how manifestos came to be used in post-punk. Using as a starting point Julia Downes’ description of musical manifestos in riot grrl as a ‘key way to define…ideological, aesthetic and political goals.’ A series of chronological case studies investigate the key components and aesthetics of the post-punk manifesto, which include the use of lists, itemisation and direct, second-person address.
'Roman Ingarden and Our Times' International Philosophical Congress 2021, 2021
As has been noted by Richard Shusterman, “[p]opular art has not been popular with aestheticians and theorists of culture […]. When not altogether ignored as beneath contempt, it is typically vilified as mindless, tasteless trash”. Now, the domain of popular culture and popular art is very broad, complex and articulated, including a lot of different aesthetic practices and experience that range from photography and film to commercial fiction novels and comic books, from fashion and design to videogames and popular music. In turn, also this latter field is not narrow and simple but vice-versa broad, complex and articulated, as simply testified by the well-known existence of a great variety of different genres and subgenres that form the ‘constellation’ of contemporary popular music. These genres and subgenres are quite often connected also to so-called ‘oppositional’ or ‘subcultural’ styles, as clearly showed by the examples of the mod, teddy boy, hippy, punk, reggae, hip-hop or grunge styles in music and culture. Now, in the realm of contemporary popular music, what we may generally call ‘pop-rock music’ has surely represented since many decades one of the leading trends and traditions, and can be understood indeed as one of the most important and influential products of 20th-century culture and music. However, as the abovementioned quotation from Shusterman clearly shows, inasmuch as it is part of popular culture, also pop-rock music has been typically ignored or vilified by several aestheticians and philosophers of art, from Theodor W. Adorno to Roger Scruton up to Alva Noë nowadays. Notwithstanding all this, I believe that popular art, in general, deserves serious aesthetic attention, and I agree with Shusterman that pop-rock music, in particular, is often able to suggest “a radically revised aesthetic with a joyous return of the somatic dimension which philosophy has long repressed”. For this reason, following the invaluable suggestions and insights provided by authors such as Shusterman and Theodore Gracyk, and also relying on what I have defined an ‘unorthodox’ Adornian perspective in some of my previous contributions in this field, in the first part of my talk I will offer some observations on the significance of pop-rock music for a philosophical aesthetics that is not limited anymore to a mere philosophy of the fine arts only grounded on the paradigm of disinterested contemplation but is rather broad enough to also include aesthetic experiences belonging to popular culture and everyday life. Then, in the second part of my talk, I will try to exemplify some of my general ideas on philosophy and pop-rock music by referring to the particular example of Pearl Jam, undoubtedly one of the greatest rock bands of the last 30 years, whose ‘philosophy’ of making sense of the present tense, according to my interpretation, is capable to disclose very interesting horizons and perspectives for what I would like to define a post-metaphysical reevaluation of the contingency and (in)significance of the ‘all-encompassing trip’ that, after all, the human existence consists of. Unpublished presentation at the International Philosophical Congress 'Roman Ingarden and Our Times', Jagiellonian University of Krakow, April 2021. Link: https://ingarden2020.confer.uj.edu.pl/program Short version, for oral presentation at the conference, of an essay to be published in November 2021 with the title 'Contingency, (In)significance, and the All-Encompassing Trip: Pearl Jam and the Question of the Meaning of Life' in the book 'Pearl Jam and Philosophy', ed. by Stefano Marino and Andrea Schembari, Bloomsbury Academic, London 2021. Link: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/pearl-jam-and-philosophy-9781501362798/
2023
The emergence of punk rock and its evolution draw a parallel with the height of “the era of nihilism”, another name for post-modernism, and the beginning of “the era of melancholy” where we live now (Iwauchi Shotaro 2019). While the “nihilist” not only observes and experiences losing higher values, meaning, and meta-narrative, but also annihilates and negates them, the “melancholist”, who cannot even come up with a ‘great’ meaning or goal itself that has already collapsed, takes on a different sense of existence: “It’s not that I want to do something, but neither is it that I don’t want to do anything.” On the other hand, in the late 70’s, Christopher Lasch observed a new individualism of people “living for the moment” and “losing the sense of historical continuity”, due to disillusion with what had been presented in the political and social turmoil of the ‘60s and the economic crisis of the ‘70s, which I call “double break”, i.e., with the past and with the future. The music of the early American punk and hardcore embodies, I believe, such a consciousness that pervaded the whole society into the very short length of musical time with its unique vertical and horizontal structure, which is illustrated in this paper with some examples and their graphic presentations. Finally, if there is a recurring but hidden theme in the musical evolution of punk rock, would it be its allusion to the possibility that one can live beyond traditional, historical, and teleological time?
sub·re·al·ism noun \ˈsəb-ˌrē-ə-ˌli-zəm\ — sub·re·al·ist noun or adjective Origin of SUBREALISM French subréalisme, from sub- [beneath, below]+ réalisme [realism] First Known Use: “Subrealism is rooted in a euphoria of despair.” *Hugo Kuyper Leitche, Learning and Hatred for Meaning, 1984 Definition of SUBREALISM 1: a late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century art form that embraces philosophical materialism, yet strives to evoke (subconscious) realities in some way beneath and beyond visible, nameable (conscious) reality—esp. assembling the power of rhythm amassing and animating, even at a subatomic level, among and across all things, human and non-. Akin to: “One of the few fundamental things we know about our universe is that everything in it is vibrating, is in motion, has a rhythm. Every molecule, every atom is dancing its own unique dance, singing its signature song. What we call sight is just the limited spectrum of vibrations that our eyes can perceive; what we call sound is just the limited spectrum of pulsations that our ears can hear. And this noise begat rhythm and rhythm begat everything else.” *Mickey Hart and Fredric Lieberman, with D. S. Sonneborn, Planet Drum, 1991 2: philosophical principles espoused—embodied—in works or performances of subrealism that acknowledge the nontranscendence of materiality, yet still feel the need of some imperishable bliss (implacable, if inexplicable), like the Tooth / That nibbles at the soul—. Akin to: “Hell’s boiling over, and Heaven is full / We’re chained to the world, and we all gotta pull.” *Tom Waits, “Dirt in the Ground” from Bone Machine, 1992 Akin to: “It was bigger than me / And I felt like a sick child / Dragged by a donkey / Through the myrtle.” *Vic Chesnutt, “Myrtle” from About to Choke, 1996 3: the effect of such art forms: namely, a euphoria of despair; an affect of sublime fullness hollow at its core, at once ecstatic, heartsick, insistent. Akin to: “I read [a copy of Wallace Stevens’ collected poems] obsessively, not understanding a word, and yet I was transfixed by something I could not name: it was like reading prayers written in incomprehensible Sanskrit and being unable to stop. But I found I possessed one doorway to Stevens: there was a music there, and I could hear it quite clearly, though I could not comprehend or emulate it.” *T. R. Hummer, “Call and Response,” 2013 Akin to: “[The riffs in ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash are] almost Arabic or very old, archaic, classical, the chord setups you could only hear in Gregorian chants or something like that. And it’s that weird mixture of your actual rock and roll and at the same time this weird echo of very, very ancient music that you don’t even know. It’s much older than I am, and that’s unbelievable! It’s like a recall of something, and I don’t know where it came from.” *Keith Richards, Life, 2010 4: relation to rhythm—esp. in music and poetry: evoking emotional intensities via the aural jouissance of musical-poetic sounds locked in tension with words unveiling nothing that is not there and the nothing that is; rhythm’s firing of the body, its call to the involuntary muscle memories of subconsciousness to offset overwrought consciousness. Akin to: “Much of the neurolinguistic programming (NLP) children and teenagers receive comes through the lyrics they hear in music and its repetition. NLP is one of the easiest and most widespread methods of persuasion, especially for those not conscious to its effect on the mind. Familiar things require less effort to process and that feeling of ease unconsciously signals a truth, also called cognitive fluency. Fluency allows effortless thinking…. What some of the new generation of lyrics do is hit that part of the brain that operates below the level of conscious awareness, which is quick, effortless and automatic.” *PreventDisease.com, 2014 Akin to: “In music, meaning enters the body through the bloodstream, traveling—in the case of Merry Clayton’s vocals—like a clot to the heart.” *Michael Parker, “Ode to Merry Clayton’s Solo on ‘Gimme Shelter,’” 2014 Akin to: “There’s something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it. We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute. The train, apart from getting from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross onto another track, the beat moves. It echoes something in the human body. So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us. The human body will feel rhythms even when there’s not one.” *Richards, Life See also: negative sublime John Keats (English poet; 1795-1821) “negative capability” + William Wordsworth (English poet; 1770-1850) “egotistical sublime” = Charles Wright (U.S. poet; 1935- ) “negative sublime” ********** *ACHTUNG, BABY: Despite lyrics’ deep connections with poetry, and poetry’s long kinship with lyrics (“lyric” poetry, we know, derives etymologically from “lyre”), BE ADVISED! When entering shady borderland between poetry and song: “Riddled with breaches, blind spots, and tunnels, it is a promised land, a minefield, and a boneyard for the unwary; this is the territory where Lefty shot Pancho” (Hummer and Cioffi). While we trust you will find the promised land as beautiful as promised, watch out for mines, bones, Lefty. Tread lightly on that thin edge between poems and lyrics, or turn back quick. Even Robbie Robertson declared: “I hate having [lyrics on albums] now. I say “Is my diction so bad?” When I read other people’s lyrics on their sleeves I think they look stupid. If I read the lyrics to some of my favourite songs, they don’t mean shit to me.” Nevertheless…if you agree to travel on in this direction, it bids fair, as duly asserted by Mike Mattison and Ernest Suarez, to watch for pivot points where the two arts entwine “in a dynamic relationship that has energized new forms of verse composition,” including “poetry’s turn toward more accessible, conversational styles” and “rock’s ability to absorb poetic techniques” (Mattison and Suarez).
The Punk Discourse: From Subculture To Lifestyle
As a visible entity punk was galvanized into being under its own name in New York and London in the middle seventies during the Cold War. On the one hand it is seen as a manifestation of postmodernism, on the other hand it is about an underground youth culture that expressed its revolutionary attitude mainly through music (the punk rock genre) and an outrageous, collage-like clothing style rebelling against conformity, authority, the establishment, class hierarchy and celebrating the collapse of traditional forms of meaning. However, Birmingham scholars argued that culture industries destroyed the authenticity of the subculture without adequately considering either the ideological underpinnings of the subcultures in question (i.e. punk), nor the concept of authentic identity. Hence, this paper attempts to unmask these ideological underpinnings and their authenticity in relation to punk, its signifying practices and intractably subversive features that can also be linked to its predecessor counterculture movements. This will shed new light on punk as a complex historical and cultural phenomenon and on the evolution and refashioning of the " anarchic " discourse. Besides tracing the punk ideology and aesthetics back to the movers and shakers of the art and literary world of the 20 th century (Dada, Situationists, Beat movement, Andy Warhol), I will also consider how the original punk movement, short-lived and nihilistic, marked the beginning of a phase of ideological struggle within popular music itself. Its broad cultural influence started with the postpunk (1979-1984) trying to built an authentic alternative culture with its own independent infrastructure of labels, distribution and records stores and releasing small magazines and fanzines taking on the role of an alternative media. This do-it-yourself concept i.e. punk ethos proliferated like a virus with the global expansion of electronic music nevertheless finding always new ways to remain detached from the dominant culture. In conclusion, the paper discusses that the punk´s appeal doesn´t lie in Hebdige´s semiotic flux but rather the punk´s formal stability with its clear ideological and formal elements. Perhaps only fragmented, these ideological and formal elements of punk resonate unchanged in current alternative lifestyles permeating the music, theory and art either produced or consumed. These discourses form part of the unconstrained self-expression of punk and it´s oppositional point of view in the world.