rimbaud and punk

8/9/2019 rimbaud and punk

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I Wanna DestroyTowards an Aesthetic of Violence

by Erica Weitzman

POSTMODERNISMS NOT DEAD

Im not talking about / a Beatles song / written 100 years / before I was born /Theyre all talking about / the round and round / but whos got the real / anti-

parent-culture sound / I know nothings / gonna be all right againThe Nation of Ulysses, N-Sub Ulysses (1992)

N

ational Gallery, Washington D.C., 1990: I turn into thenext room and its there in front of me, impossible to avoid or

even turn away from; it seems to suck the room itself into avanishing point that never coalesces, into its infinite depths of ash anddevastation. I feel suddenly frightened, as if the scene is not merely apainting on a wall, but all reality. On the floor beside me, by the sameartist, is a quarter-sized replica of a charred fighter plane, laden withbundles of books in what turns out to be lead leaf. There is nothingwritten in the books. It takes me a moment to pull myself away.

Cherry Hill, NJ, 1993: Times have changed a little: at one point dur-ing the show in this suburban basement (the walls are faux-grain ply-wood panel), the massive, green-haired front-man starts talking abouthow difficult it is to be a fat man in American society. When he breaks


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The Violence Issue | 5

down in actual tears, a girl from the audience comes up to him; they hugfor a good half-minute. But the song the band subsequently launchesinto is no less desperate for all that: Im an android! Im an android!the singer screams into the microphone; during the breaks he picks up a

trombone and works it like a bicycle pump over the speeded-up guitars.It is at once totally incoherent and surprisingly beautiful. During the lastsong, the drummer jumps up on his drums and, banging the cymbals thewhole way down, smashes the set into pieces.

FIFTEENYEARSEARLIER

Gonna finish up what / Goering Goebbels started

The Deadbeats, Lets Shoot Maria (1978)

It goes without saying that violence is not a new phenomenon. In fact,there are good arguments suggesting that violence is the determining fac-tor of human society, if not the human psyche itself. A total understand-ing of the origins of violence is without a doubt beyond the scope of thispaper. This paper, therefore, limits itself to discussing what I will call theaesthetic of violence: violence as it manifests itself in cultural produc-

tions, in art, and especially violence as art in itselfviolence, as it were,as self-conscious art form. There are an innumerable number of works ofart which portray violence, and their history goes from the Iliad toKingLear to The Death of Marat to Badlands, but this is not what I mean.Such works, to greater or lesser extents, treat violence as somethingexternal: violent acts are portrayed because these things exist; to portraythem objectively is to be true to life or realistic. Works based on anaesthetic of violence also portray violence. But they, as opposed to theseother works, take part in the violence they portray: they assault the spec-tator, they turn against their own media and foundations and mimeticprinciples, and they glorify violence as a creative, regenerative force, oreven as a kind of beauty in itself. In Guy Debords formulation: Not a


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negation of style, but the style of negation.1

These principles, too, are not new by the time anything called post-modernism rolls around. In one sense, the style of negation is theprinciple of all avant garde movements and certainly with the advent

of modernism and Dada it is well in play. But for all that Dadaism wasa reflection of its historical time, its aims seem limited to the art world,taking a hammereven if sometimes a literal oneto outdated notionsof truth and beauty. The aesthetic of violence in the postmodern age, onthe other hand, is comprehensive: it aims to smash everything. Theseare violent times! the cry goes up, in some cases with alarm, in others,with a kind of bitter glee. In the 1960s and, especially, the seventies, theideas of aesthetic negation, nihilism, violence, etc.this time combined,as a matter of principle, with the more ordinary kind of violenceper-form the very crises of these decades on the stage, in the galleries, in thelibraries, and in the streets. Thus I would like to make a claim in thesepages for the aesthetic of violencein which the fractured nature ofperception in an alienated, media-saturated society2 plays itself out astragi-comedy and grotesqueas nothing less than the artistic representa-tion of postmodernism itself.

VILE MEANS

This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The onlyproblem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or hadtold myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: Iwas supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues,and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what Isaw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no meaning beyondtheir temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)

In June of this year [1968] reads the medical reporther ownwhichDidion includes in her essay, patient experienced an attack of vertigo,


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nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out. A thorough medicalevaluation elicited no positive findings and she was placed on Elavil, Mg20, tidThe Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personalityin process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses and

increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality.3

On June 10, 1968, the National Commission on the Causes andPrevention of Violence was formed.4 In this case, legal and academicevaluation elicited several volumes of findings. Signs of failing defenses,however, continued.

The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social re-lationship between people that is mediated by images5: the image of amillion suburban families, each clustered around the television in theirindividual houses, is a familiar one from the thirties onwardso familiar,in fact, that we can easily forget how much this signifies. (The infinitemise en abyme potential of mass media, certainly, is evident in the re-currence of this very image whenever the news media or a film wantsto show public reaction to an event: mediation mediated.) One cause ofthis is technologicalever-cheaper gadgets and the money with whichto buy them, not to mention the increase in leisure time with which toenjoy them. Part of this is sociological: population growth, migration tocities, and increased communication across national and ethnic borders

require, at once for adequate control, profit, and simple convenience,a greater homogenization and standardization. The world itself getsbigger: In recent decades the ability of one society to change the envi-ronment of another has been geographically expanded, thus extendingthe boundaries of our critical environment. As this has taken place, wehave become increasingly dependent upon others, particularly the massmedia, to provide us with a survey of a larger proportion of the environ-ment relative to what we can personally observe.6 In other words, our

technological advances and increasing cosmopolitanism have made usprecisely into a society of spectators. Perhaps no social critic or philoso-pher has expressed the situation more completelyand more sinister-lythan this Warner Communications bulletin from 1977:


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Having allowed technology to create the problem, man has begun using tech-nology to redress it. With the exponentially increased availability of all formsof communication, the media of entertainment have been pressed into serviceto provide the individual with models of experience, opportunities for self-rec-

ognition, and the ingredients of identitya marriage of culture and technologyunprecedented in history, and a commensurate revolutionin the human senseof self.7

This heaven / gives me migraineGang of Four, Naturals Not In It (1979)

Not all revolutions are necessarily for the better, however. Debordunderstands this when he writes, Behind the glitter of the spectacles

distractions, modern society lies in thrall to the global domination ofa banalizing trend that also dominates it at each point where the mostadvanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly broadenedthe panoply of roles and objects available to choose frompower andleisurethe power to decide and the leisure to consumeare the alphaand the omega of a process that is never questioned.8 The promise ofa new life summed up in a few pennies less for eggs and cheese, 9 writesGreil Marcus of Gang of Fours acidly satirical Damaged Goods. And

on their song Return the Gift: Its a little tale about how an individu-al shrinkshow one becomes not a subject but merely an object of his-torywhen he or she wins a radio give-away contest. Its a song aboutthe way the winner exchanges the multitudes of a unique personality forcapitals reductive prize: fearthe fear that, having accepted a symbol ofa good lifeyou will cease to exist.

I [had] the illusion that I could any minute order from room servicea revisionist theory of my own history, garnished with a vanda orchid. Iwatched Robert Kennedys funeral on a verandah at the Royal HawaiianHotel in Honolulu, and also the first reports from My Lai.10 Elsewhere:We grow accustomed to the weirdest of juxtapositions: the serious andthe trivial, the comic and the tragica fantasia of effects that resembles


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the debris left by a storm.11 The essay in which this latter quotation oc-curs presents a stunningand all-too-familiarillustration of this in theHuntley-Brinkley report of the Robert Kennedy assassination; I quotethe transcription in full:

Chet Huntley: Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the head and gravelywounded early today before hundreds of people in his political headquarters ina Los Angeles hotel, a month and a day after the assassination of Dr. MartinLuther King in Memphis, seconds after he had made a speech celebrating hisvictory over Senator Eugene McCarthy in the California Democratic presiden-tial primary

Continuing the reporting of this event, the scene was shifted to the hospital:

Jack Perkins: The latest medical bulletinsays Senator Robert Kennedy re-mains in extremely critical condition

Frank Mankiewicz, the Senators press secretary was then shown reading the medi-cal bulletin. Perkins had some more to say, and then the camera returned to ChetHuntley for further reporting of certain aspects of the situation. He was followed bythe face and clipped voice of David Brinkley.

David Brinkley: we have assembled some of the film from last night, begin-ning with the Senators victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel, after he won

the California primary.

The film, lasting several minutes, showed the speech, the cheers from the crowd, themoment of the shooting and the ensuing pandemonium and near-panic, the franticand repeated requests for a doctor, the wounded Senator on the floor, police carstaking the suspect away to jail with crowd reactions as he is brought out and sirens

fading into the distance, and then the grief-stricken crowd in the hall again. Thenthis:

Announcer: The Huntley-Brinkley report is produced by NBC News and

brought to you in color by Newport, the smoothest tasting menthol cigaretteNewport king size, and the new extra long Newport Deluxe 100s.

Then a filmed commercial showing a frivolous barbershop scene:


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Said a patron whose name was McNair,As the barber was trimming his hair;This new cigarette has the roughest taste yet!Whos got a smooth one to spare?Then up spoke a fellow named Dave

Who had just finished having a shave:Newport, youll find, is a much smoother kind,With a taste about which you will rave.Chorus: Ooooooh, Smother Newport, Fresher NewportSmoother, more refreshing cigarette!12

Once human sensibility is thus sacrificed to the demands of expediencyand capital, all narrative was sentimental. In this light all connectionswere equally meaningful, and equally senseless.13

Go to college / Go to war / Get a job in Daddys storeRhino 39, Xerox 12 (1979)

We got the neutron bomb! / Drop it! / We dont want it / anyway!The Weirdos, We Got the Neutron Bomb (1978)

American students have historically succumbed to the annual springthroes of the panty-raid syndrome, but the current wave of campus con-

frontations is essentially an unprecedented phenomenon.14

A control-lable youthful exuberancethe panty-raid syndromehas become,by 1968, something actively threatening. It is a commonplace that theseventies were a decade of disillusionment. Much of that disillusion-ment, of course, was economic with the slowing or even reversal of thepost-war boom in America, and the ripples of it as felt by the rest of theworld. As Jon Savage points out in his book on the early British punkscene, this recession was particularly felt by young people; less cashmeant less kids buying less stuff. The youth market was no longer as in-finitely tappable a resource as in the glorious bobby-soxer days. Hordesof idle teenagers with empty pockets bred not celebration but suspicion.Hence discipline, frustration, and violence.15 And now that the glow of


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winning the war had officially faded, The whole idea of consensus thathad dominated postwar politics and social life was disintegrating. It wasas though the whole postwar ideal of mass consumer enfranchisementwas being proved a sham.16 Rebellion has a long history, but there is a

qualitative difference in rebellion after World War II. The nineteenth-century artists were faced with the collapse of Christianity and the endof Hellenism. We are faced with the end of man.17 After Hiroshima,18the paradox, not to say the myth, of technological and ethical progress isexposed: the square world had now made utterly clear its suicidal inten-tions.19 As well, eventually, as its murderous ones. After that ultimatein alienated labor, the draft, how could established authority claim toserve the interests of the people? After My Lai, how could it even makethe claim to honor? Two decades later, Baudrillard goes even furtherthan Nuttall to imply that America could not be anything but violent;its fundamental attribute is not only indulgence, but violence, a self-publicizing, self-justifying violencethe triumphalist violence of thesuccessful revolution.20 Its no accident that Penelope Spheeriss clas-sic documentary on the Los Angeles punk scene is entitled The Declineof Western Civilization. In Baudrillards formula, the American idea ofutopia achieved has violence as inevitable by-product.

In light of all these phenomena, square shock at long or spiky hair,

loud music, sex and scatology becomes more than a little absurd. Noth-ing any counterculture has ever done has been more violent than the be-havior of so-called respectable society. In 1968, The Task Force on MassMedia and Violence concluded that the claim that the television worldof entertainment and violence is an accurate reflection of the real worldclearly is refuted21 by the findings of their survey. This survey, however,limits itself to examining the frequency of peoples being slapped orkicked, punched or beaten, knifed, choked, or shot at.22 The

sociologists conducting this study cannot even imagine the possibility ofa generalized, latent, or vicarious violence, for which the above actions(as well as their television portrayals) are merely metaphors. By the endof the seventies,


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We are more aware of the ugly because human hopes for its reduction, in allof its forms, were so raised by technical advances, because those very advanceshave, along with the gains, created ugliness (affluence = effluence?), becausethe incredible ugliness of war continues to pollute the earth, and becauseage-old problems have rapidly become more visible and more overwhelm-

ing, as the dump-dwellers of the world, living in a sea of trash, expand intomega-populations.23

Meanwhile, the only thing we could do was sit in humiliation and waitfor extinction.24 This state of affairs can only go on so long withoutrepercussions.

I got no use for drugs / I never get high / I wanna shoot a cop / I wanna watchhim die / Running through the sixties / Was a whole lotta fun / But a lotta these

pigs / Forgot how to runBlack Randy and the Metrosquad, Trouble at the Cup (1978)

By the early, and certainly the late seventies, it was impossible to ignorethe failure of earlier counterculture movements. Either they had failednobly (like Western communist movements, effectively crushed by thesame tanks that rolled into Hungary and Czechoslovakia), or ignobly,by selling out to the mainstream and rendering itself impotent bydrugs and an egotism almost bourgeois. Despite the apparent socialprogress of the free and easy hippie culture that was all around, allevidence proclaimed that society wasnt free and easy: it was repressedand horrible.25 Thus the counterculture movements of the seventies andthe aesthetic of violence are perhaps unique; they are a countercultureagainst not just the mainstream, but also against the reigning countercul-tures of the day. The mere existence of retro as trendin 1976, HappyDays was the most popular television show in America26negates theoppositional value of earlier underground movements. By the late seven-

ties, hippie and beatnik culture had degenerated into lip-service pacifism,acid trips, a watered-down Zen and a tedious free love.27 Jeff Nuttall,writing in 1968 on an article by Allen Ginsburg, effectively nails the cof-fin shut on hippie culture: the quick and only way to that peace beyond


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desire, anger, grasping, craving is to cut your throatanyone who hasno appetite for stress has no appetite for life on human terms, desiresmerely life on cosmic terms, desires death.28 The earlier counterculture,in other words, has finally absorbed the latent nihilism of the main-

stream. Punk culture thus aims, among other things, at being everythinghippie culture is not. This is carried even to the point of their respectivedrugs of choice: not the passive daydreaminess of marijuana and halluci-nogens, but the strident hyper-realism of heroin and speed.

In her descriptions of Huey Newtons arrest and the riots at SanFrancisco State College, Didion narrates what might be the final break-down of sixties promise: in the former, revolution cynically adoptingattributes of mass media to secure its own influence; in the latter, revolu-tion itself becoming entertainment. The incarcerated Black Panther is amere platitude machine for the cameras, one of those autodidacts forwhom all things specific and personal present themselves as mine fieldsto be avoided at even at the cost of coherence, for whom safety lies ingeneralization.29 And the university demonstration seems increasinglyoff-key, an instance of the enfants terribles and the Board of Trustees un-consciously collaborating on a wishful fantasy (Revolution on Campus)and playing it out in time for the six o clock news.30 The movementsthus empty themselves of all content, all truly revolutionary force what-

soever: Get your M / 31 / Cause baby we gonna / Have some fun.31The sixties could perhaps be characterized as widespread (or, at least,white) recognition of the inadequacy of existing systems. The seventiesembody the despair of the possibility of an alternative.

There are some facts here / which refuse to escape / I could say it stronger / butits too much troubleX, The Worlds a Mess; Its in My Kiss (1978)

Didions essay on the end of the sixties does not demonstrate the aes-thetic of violence but its immediate precedent: the aesthetic of boredom,in which everything is flat, fleeting, and utterly banal. At a recording


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session for the Doorssupposedly the musical equivalent of an orgasm,a blinking-out in a transcendent rock ecstasy of sex and deathDidionobserves, My leg had gone to sleep, but I did not stand up. The pro-ducer played back the rhythm track. The engineer said that he wanted

to do his deep-breathing exercises. Manzarek ate a hard-boiled egg.32

This boredom is nothing so much as a narcotized schizophrenia. (Dis-regarding even Didions own history of mental illness, her infamousstylejump-cut organization paired with affectlessness of toneis ademonstration of just this malady). Leisure (What do I want to do to-day?), writes Marcus, was replaced by entertainment (What is there tosee today?). The potential fact of all possible freedoms was replaced bya fiction of false freedom. 33 By 1969, even a member of a conservativegovernment commission on violence can propose that

those youths who denounce or ignore all authority, who refuse to defergratification, who seek to obtain speciously altruistic ends by violent or otherantisocial means, who impose on the rights of others by interrupting and byshouting down opposition, and especially those who drop out and declare bybehavior, appearances and words that nothing is relevant or admirable, haveperhaps shown an inordinate capacity for observational learning.34

Violence is a way to shock oneself into feeling: to prove, by inflicting

and experiencing pain, that one is still a human being. (Schematic as itmay be, Burgesss 1962A Clockwork Orange demonstrates precisely thistension between a natural ultraviolence and a manufactured civility;it is telling that Kubriks film adaptation cuts out Burgesss last chapter,in which the protagonist matureswithout brainwashingbeyond hisviolent impulses.) Without doubt, the aesthetic of violence has its sadis-tic, aggressive aspect; buteven more so, perhaps (and this is one of thethings that, I believe, differentiates it from other avant garde and coun-

terculture movements)it has a masochistic aspect as well. Its violenceis as much that of Alex inA Clockwork Orange as that of Niko in TheDeer Hunter, whose reaction to a reality too horrible to bear takes theform of a drugged and objectless self-destruction, suicide as joyless


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game. The self-mutilation of Iggy Pop, of (in imitation and homage asmuch as anything) G.G. Allin, Sid Vicious and Darby Crash, the self-ironizing of postmodern literature, and the burning, layering, and inten-tional erasure of much contemporary art, all have something in common.

John Lydon says: I saw the Sex Pistols as something completely guilt-ridden,35 and Marcus writes on Gang of Four, It was not about theresistance of the rebel against the ruler. It was about the resistance of therebel against him or herself.36 Such statements do not seem possible forthe Dadaists or the Situationists or the Woodstock crowd. But by 1975,things had come to this pass.

VILE ENDS

One evening, I sat Beauty on my lap. And I found her bitter. And I raped her.Arthur Rimbaud,A Season in Hell

If religion becomes non-religion, corrupt, writes Nuttall (and byreligion I think we can take this as any kind of faith or value), then art,in order to remain art, must divide itself off from society.37 I believein / Workers Evolution / and I believe in / the Final Solution, sang the

Buzzcocks in 1979. Faced with the (arguable) apogee of societys corrup-tion, what else to oppose it with but the apogee of the anti-social: gratu-itous violence. Long live the Incredible Hulk! proclaims an anarchistmanifesto of 1966, wildcat strikers, the Nat Turner Insurrection, high-school drop-outs, draft-dodgers, deserters, delinquents, saboteurs andall those soul-brothers, wild-eyed dreamers, real and imaginary heroesof defiance and rebellion who pool their collective resources in theexquisite, material transformation of the world according to desire!!!38But even this does not quite go far enough. The Surrealist Group of theRebel Worker Group of the Chicago Anarchist Horde can still exaltpoetry as breathing like a machine gun, exterminating the blind flags ofimmediate reality. Violence is still the means to an end, a weapon of the


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revolution. Though obvious traces of this thinking remain even today,by the late seventies, violence will have also become an end in itself.

Everybodys gotten in control but me / Medication takes you in at half pastthree / Everybodys doing the Prolixin Stomp!Rhino 39, Prolixin Stomp (1979)

The utopia achieved of American culture denotes a culture of massmedia and spectacle, of latent violence and advertised tranquillitymore, of science and rationality and consensus and everydayness. Dis-neyland, which opened in 1955, is perhaps the ideal symbol of a culturein which violence itself is gagged, and an eternal pleasantness substitutesfor the sublime.39 This country, rants Baudrillard, is beyond hope.

Even the trash is clean here, the traffic greased, the movement pacified[everything here] makes the European dream of death and murder, ofmotels for suicides, of orgy and cannibalism, just to bring down thisperfection of ocean and light, this insane ease of living, the hyperreal-ity of it all.40 It would be easy to dismiss such statements as neurotic;however, Baudrillard is really only making explicit what artistic andcultural movements have already implicitly enacted. A beauty withoutconflict is not really beauty, but disease. Thus Ren Girard notes how

the tendency to erase the sacred, to eliminate it entirely, prepares theground for the surreptitious return of the sacred, no longer in transcen-dent, but in imminent form, in the form of violence and knowledge ofviolence.41 This is why there is a vast difference between art that por-trays violencewhile keeping its safe distanceand art that in one wayor another enacts its violence, either upon others or upon itself. Tragedyis a response to the passive and antiseptic Society of the Spectacle; it isthe one thing that both responds to and underlies the insipidity of thefestival transformed into eternal holidaythe blatantly utopic promisesof a universe of leisure.42

Pastiche and schizophrenia writes Fredric Jameson in Postmod-ernism and Consumer Society, are the primary ways in which the new


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postmodernism expresses the inner truth of that newly emergent socialorder of late capitalism.43 The aesthetic of violence attempts to reclaimauthenticity, but this time it is in the terms of late capitalism itself, us-ing (or attempting to use) its own techniques and assumptions against it.

Revolution will no longer be entertainment: now, entertainment will be-come revolution. The Mediaand all mediabecome both weapon andtarget, at once counteracting and reflecting the schizophrenia endemicto society. One of the most salient features of punk fashion as conceivedby McLaren and Westwood is its emphasis on textnot text as message,but text as text, so layered and contradictory as to void it of all mean-ing: the intention was that [the Sex Pistols] should not be politicallyexplicit, but instead should be an explosion of contradictory, highlycharged signs. Punk fashion expresses the wish to offer up the body asa jumble of meanings.44 Gang of Four, one of the most politically astutebands of the early punk era, composed their lyrics in the same way asthe Pistols created their outfits, as a dryly ironic collage of commercialclichs: I do love a new purchase / A market of the senses // Our greatexpectations / A future for the good / Fornication makes you happy/ No escape from society // We all have good intentions / but all withstrings attached (Naturals Not in It). In view of the disappearanceof the prerequisites of communication, notes Debord, there is no art

that suffers any longer from the disappearance of its ownparticularability to communicate.45 As we have seen, when art becomes merelyartand from there, capitaleverything communicates, all at once, inan undifferentiated babble in which Dubuffet is as viable as Delacroix,and selling cigarettes is as important as reporting an assassination. Incertain obvious aspects, punk conceived itself as everything society wasnot. However, it, like so many postmodern phenomena, also set itselfagainst society by becoming everything society is. To societys latent

sickness, it matched its blatant one; it saw societys fragmentation andraised it to the level of psychosis.They no longer quote, Jameson writes of postmodern artists.

They incorporate.46 The last desperate method of fighting the en-


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emy is to become the enemy. Furthermore, with all things being equal,even the artist cannot separate him or herself from that which is reactedagainst: simply by creatingsimply by existingone is swallowed bythe cultural Blob. The relentless self-questioning and self-ironizing of

postmodern theory, the way in which it insists on deconstructing itselfas well as those things external to it, may be a reflection of this. With-out a doubt it is a presence in the aesthetics of the time: punks rejectedthe Academy and drew instead from low sources: graffiti, undergroundcomics, advertising, car culture, the tarot, blaxploitation, bondage andpornography, surf culture, fifties industrial films, Mad magazine, andthe universe of American detritus that winds up in thrift stores. It all gottossed in the blender.47 The loss of aesthetic norms means that there isno longer a 1 : 1 relationship between parodist and parodied; now, theratio is 1 :

.

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearingof a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of suchmimicrywithout laughter, without that still latent feeling that there existssomething normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic.Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor.48

If a centered, delimited identitybe it personal, cultural, or artisticisno longer possible, the only option left is to become a patchwork ofall identities. The gamble is on whether one will, in self-sacrifice to thechaos, gain some sort of mastery over itor whether one will simplylose ones identity entirely.

Im Darby Crash / A social blast / Chaotic masterIm Darby Crash / Your Meccas gash / Prophetic statureIm Darby Crash / A one way match / Demonic flasherThe Germs, Circle One (1978)

Despite his being born a good century before Sid Vicious, Rimbaudmay be the firstand greatestdisciple of the aesthetics of violence. Af-


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ter the failed high-modernism of his verse works and his Illuminations,49A Season in Hellunleashes Rimbauds disgust with the modern worldWe eat fever with our watery vegetables. And drunkenness! and to-bacco! and ignorance! and worship!50not just at the world, but on

the work itself. Even disregarding Rimbauds legendary career suicide,the distorted, aggressively anti-classical language, the appropriation ofall dictions from high liturgy to gutter slang, the fragmentation of narra-tive, the relentless self-ironizing make up an almost textbook example ofperformative artistic violence. Rimbaud consigns himself to hell. And hisart is the hell he consigns himself to. He himself makes sure of it.

In one way, the aesthetic of violence has as its true predecessor notthe exuberance of Dada, but the gravity of ancient tragedy and further,the ritual of the sacrifice. When evangelists passed out flyers at the finalSex Pistols show that read Theres a Johnny Rotten in each of us, andhe doesnt need to be liberatedhe needs to be crucified!51 they musthave seemed merely part of the act. The violence of the punk aestheticgoes almost without saying. But again, their violence differs both from,say, the violence of the Watts riots or that of Goyas paintings in that it isboth self-conscious (unlike the former) and performative (unlike the lat-ter). It is almost violence camp.52 Marcus describes Sid Vicious in concertas a representation of a representation, even streaked with his own gore,

his arm bandaged from a self-inflicted gouging; in fact the show, the en-tire punk project is an act: a collective attempt to prove that the physi-cal representation of an aesthetic representation could produce reality, orat least real blood.53 The aesthetic of violence is the sacrifice ceremony,played out not in the temple but in the mass media, with not a scapegoat,but culture itselfas the sacrificial victim. The Situationists aimed at therevolution of everyday life; the vanguard of culture as a separate,commodified, spectacular entity was no less than its own disappear-

ance.54

Thus there are no longer any lines between performance andreality, an image of an image and the Truth. Both the artifice of art andthe realness of reality dissolve. The fourth wall crumbles; ancient tragedyis dragged back into reality and time in the act of its performance.


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A thousand kids / Bury their parentsX, The Unheard Music (1978)

The festival leading up to the sacrifice, as Girard notes, is always afestival in which values are not simply discarded, but specifically invert-ed. In other words, it isparodic: the modern observer notes above allthe transgression of taboos. Sexual promiscuity is tolerated, sometimeseven required[there is] a general erasing of differences: social andfamilial hierarchies are temporarily suppressed or inverteda mixture ofdiscordant colorsthe use of costume [travesti: drag]unnatural com-ings-together, the most unexpected encounters.55 Compare this to Mar-cuss account of the British punk scene: What had been goodlove,money, and healthwas now bad; what had been badhate, mendicity,

and diseasewas now good. The equations ran on, replacing work withsloth, status with reprobation, fame with infamy, celebrity with obscu-rity, professionalism with ignorance, civility with insult, nimble fingerswith club feet.56 The Germs. The Weirdos. Dottie Danger. Johnny Rot-ten. Publik Enema. Richard Hell. The Deadbeats. The Subhumans. PatSmear. The Zeros. The Dishrags. Chuck Biscuits. Gerry Useless. DinahCancer. Donna Rhia. Punk pseudonyms and band names were partly ameans to reinvent oneselfinitiation into the cult, partly the defense

mechanism of the nerdy kid on the playground, pointing out his ownflaws before anyone else gets the chance. But they were also Debordsdtournement taken to the extreme. Punk names not only turned theinsult on its head, but meant that the owners of these pseudonyms wereoften required to act out the pejorative definitions of others. Identitywas thus created and reinforced by hostility.57 The cultivated uglinessof punk is an estranging device in which the goal is not just to offend anoffensive society as much as possible, but also to construct a selfoutside

and above society. The sacrificial victim has, therefore, a monstrousaspect; one can no longer see in him what one sees in the other membersof the community58: if one is to be sacrificed anyway (as many peoplemust have felt then, whether instinctively or objectively), one must make


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oneself worthy of the privilege.The forms dtournement can take are several. Like punks emphasis

on filth and aggression, Anselm Kiefers use of nature and myth evokesviolence to both oppose and act out the failed project of rationalism.

Civilization vs. Nature is an old, essentially Romantic viewpoint, even ifKiefer plays it for higher stakes. (It should be noted that, however muchAmerica implicitly threatens mass murder in the name of reason, KiefersGermany has already delivered it.) But Kiefers nature is anything butthe seat of divine wisdom and grace. His landscapes are the landscapesof the post-apocalypse, the post-Holocaust (in both senses of the word).More importantly to the aesthetic of violence, he himself has done thedestroying; in the act of creating he does violence, like Rimbaud, bothto the outside world and to his own art. In his Scorched Earth series(begun in 1974), for example, Kiefer frames the charred landscapes witha lens-like painters palette; in one,Nero Paints, the paint brushes are ac-tually setting fire to the village at the horizon.59 In a 1982 painting whosecomposition eerily echoes that ofNero Paints,Waylands Song (WithWing), Kiefer alludes to the myth that could serve as ur-metaphor forboth Kiefers art and the aesthetic of violence itself:

Wayland [a blacksmith] was captured by men serving a wicked king, who had

gained control over him by robbing him of a magic ring. Subsequently, Way-lands art was put to the service of the king until the queen, suspicious of thedangerous powers possessed by this worker with fire, convinced the king toimprison Wayland on an island, after severing the tendons of his legs. The songof Wayland relates the tale of how he liberated himself, taking revenge againstthe king by killing his three sons, burying their bodies under his bellows, andfashioning silver ornaments for the king, into which he worked their skulls. Inaddition, Wayland presented jewelry to the queen, composed of stones madefrom the eyes of her sons, and broaches to the princess made from their teeth.Finally, before escaping by wings fashioned for that purpose from lead, Way-

land seduced the princess, who became pregnant with his child.60

In later paintings, Kiefers technique (which owes as much to GermanExpressionism as the Situationists style owes to Dada) takes the idea


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of the artist/destroyer/(pro)creator still further, in a way that brings hiswork more completely within the aesthetic of violence. Using lead, ash,sand, fabric, photographs and organic material in addition to paint, nowKiefer destroys the self-containment of the work itself. He also uses text

in his work: usually, though not always, the title, painted somewhereprominently on the canvas. These textual superimpositions are most of-ten allusive, whether to myths (Wayland, Parsifal) or theology (Kabbalain particular) or works of literature. If modernist demands for purityin art require that the unique and proper area of competence of each artcoincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium61 Kief-ers use of mixed media and collage says that there is nothing pure, thereis nothing inviolate or whole unto itself.62 The very concept of purity,like that of utopia, is utterly suspect.

Kiefer is obviously a technically skilled artist (in the classical as wellas the postmodern sense); nonetheless, this rawness of technique is in away the same thing as the punk musicians proud ignorance of his instru-ment, his off-key wailing, the near-unlistenable covers of rocks goldenoldies and the haphazard production of the recordings constantly point-ing out the man behind the curtain. In a 1977 recording of Forming,Germs singer Darby Crash finishes out the song by ranting, Anyone,anytime, anyhowWhoevers buying this shitFucking jerk, hes play-

ing it all wrong; the drums are too slow, the base is too fast, the chordsare all wrong Its true, of course (in a genre filled with unskilled mu-sicians, the Germs make the Sex Pistols look like Mozart), but its alsoa pose. In a similar way, Rather than demonstrating any virtuoso skill,[Kiefers] pictures openly exhibit the processes of their manufactureand the presence of their maker. As it creates the impression of oftenmakeshift handiwork this (feigned) honesty and (intentional) mal-adroitness replace the traditional illusionary skills of academic painting

with the physically felt impact of a material presence.63

The destruction of the mimetic illusion is decisive to the aestheticof violence. Seductive as it is, Kiefers art does not permit a spectator toenjoy the complacency of realism. It isstrange as it may seem for an


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artist of such gravitasironic. Not merely do his paintings subvert thescientific consistency (c.f. Greenberg) of their genre; they also an-nounce themselves as performances: every bit as much as the Sex Pistolswere riot as ritual and music as inside joke, Kiefers work is painting as

theatre. His canvases are not so much representations (classicism) orobjects in themselves (modernism), but theatrical setting[s] for elemen-tal forces,64 vast proscenia in which the various myths, fantasies, andjuxtapositions Kiefer evokes play themselves out in front of the viewer.An early painting,Parsifal II, conceives the Parsifal myth as an atticroom with wooden beams and, deep towards the back wall, a bowl ofblood (but how are we sure that its blood?: ceci nest pas du sang) on atable. Above the bowl is written Hchsten Heilest Wunder! Erlsingdem Erlser! (Miracle of the highest salvation! Redemption to the Re-deemer!). The ambiguous, not to say sardonic, treatment of the myth,the silent indeterminacy of the setting (Are we, the spectators, supposedto be the redeemer? Who do the words address? Do they addressanyone? What will happen?) create rather than merely represent a dramain which that which is happening requires a response which stimulatesongoing interpretation.65

Ironic tragedy, then: one possible description of the aesthetic of vio-lence Punk rock, mixed media, glorification in blood and guts,66 popular

sado-masochism may not be new impulses, but it seems safe to say thatfrom the late sixties to the early eighties these things come into their mo-ment. Tragedy gains its force from its power to confront, to challenge,and to undermine forms of established civilized value, where hiddenagendas and unexpected outcomes distort their intended purposes.67In ancient tragedy, this is usually a case of the presumptive rationalistcoming up against darker forces (as in The Bacchae), or rationalism itselfturned against its advocate (as in Oedipus Rex orAntigone). It is all too

easy to see similarities between this and the postmodern era, in whichsocietys whole rational project proves to be at once its glory and itsruin.

But today also forbids any easy distinction between the rational


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and the irrational, the sane and the mad, truth and its fabrication. Thuswe are now compelled to set up the laws, and at the same time opposethem.68 True as this may be, it is also the perfect formula for a self-defeating philosophyfor a philosophy of self-destruction. It would

be possible to read the masochistic tendencies of postmodernism as anact of collective penance for the evil mankind hath wrought in its ownname, doomsday pronouncements on the end of history, the end ofart, the end of irony (!) not accurate pronouncements so much asself-flagellation and death-wish. Society is so radically sick that it mustburn itselfon the pyre, cast itselfinto hell, exile itselfinto the wildernesswith its sins writtenpunk styleon its hide. In this light, No futurehas an altogether different ring.

THE (SID) VICIOUSCIRCLE

John Doe: Maybe punks big contribution to mass culture, the national con-sciousness, was fucked-up hairlike hippies long hair.Exene Cervenka: Hair for both: all thats leftour legacy to future genera-tionsis hairdos. Thats all they keep.The Way We Werent: A Conversation with Exene Cervenka and John Doe

[of X]69 (1999)

Girard speaks of the scapegoat as at once poison and remedy70; in viewof the return of conservative politics and general materialistic opti-misman even bigger, even more spectacular spectacleof the eighties,it seems that the aesthetic of violence fulfilled its function all too well, ina way that neither its proponents nor its detractors predicted. In manyways, the explosions of violence in the 1970s have served to bring backto life, and to illuminate all the more glaringly, exactly those structures

which they were meant to dissolve.71

Habermas is talking specificallyabout art movements, but it is nonetheless true that even a movementas ostensibly comprehensive as punk eventually found itself done in byits own principles. The last page ofForming, headed Comrades lost in


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battle, R.I.P., is the literal sign of punks demise. At the other end of thespectrum, Dottie Danger, formerly of the Germs, changed her nameback to Belinda Carlisle, sang for the Go-Gos, and in the mid-eightiessecured a solo career with the hit song Heaven is a Place on Earth.

And soon enough, not just punk, but violence itself becomes reincor-porated into the society that it had set itself against. Early punk is nowjust as much of a museum piece as Duchamps urinals, to be studied inuniversity courses and dissected in scholarly tomes. A performance art-ist shooting himself on stage seems like just one more trendy gimmick.Happy and unhappy suburban kids get their septums pierced (with theirparents permission, of course) and pay thirty dollars for the privilege ofthrowing themselves in a mosh pit. Revolution becomes fashion.

It is not surprising that a movement so explicitly self-destructive aspunk would eventually crash and burn in its own flames. Selling out isthe clich of all counterculture movements, but it also fits strangely wellwith the cathartic function of tragedy: through the scapegoat, or throughthe art work as scapegoat, the violence of a society is concentrated,experienced, and expelled. Even the degree to which a society assimi-lates this violence is therapeutic, in the sense of a vaccine: ingesting smalloccasional doses to protect against a full-blown outbreak. And even ifthe conditions that gave rise to the aesthetics of violence have not gone

away, the sense of newness and urgency that accompanied them have.72

ANGERISAN ENERGY

Off the pigs / Darby lives!Dub Narcotic Disco Plate, FSU (1995)

St il l , viol ence as a for ce in soc iet y and in culture is not, as wehave seen, so easily diffused. Whatever power 1970s-style punkhad as a social movement may be gone, but its legacy remains in

a thousand contemporary small underground scenes.73 Anselm Kiefer


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remains a more potent artist than ever, not to even mention the manyother examples of art and culture one could cite in this context. Andas long as postindustrial society continues to effect the disappearanceof a sense of history, to embody a perpetual present andperpetual

change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier socialformations have had in one way or another to preserve,74 a response,of one kind or another, will be required. Lyotard defines a postmodernaesthetic of the sublime as that which, in the modern, puts forward theunpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solaceof good forms, the consensus of taste which would make it possible toshare collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searchesfor new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to imparta stronger sense of the unpresentable.75 What, then, constitutes theaesthetic of violence? It is the postmodern sublime, expressed in rage.In so doing, it provides a partial answer to the question Jameson posesat the end of his essay, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, ofwhether postmodernism resists the logic of consumer capitalism aswell as it replicates or reproducesreinforces it.76 The aesthetic ofviolence does both, of coursethough with a paradoxicality, a both/andquality that is, after all, wholly appropriate.

It is no coincidence that Lyotard ends his The Postmodern Condition

with a declaration of war; nor is it a coincidence that the most well-known of all postmodern theories is called Deconstructionism. Forwhatever postmodernism is, it has the aesthetic of violence as one of itsguiding principles. It lashes out; it attacks itself; it makes itself at oncesacrificer and sacrificed. Whether or not this is an effective response tothe problems and issues of late capitalism still remains to be seen. Butconsidering the era that created itit is, at least, a fitting one. r

NOTES

1 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-


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Smith, (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 144.2 Savage, Englands Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and

Beyond (New York: St. Martins Press, 1992), 230.3 Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 14.4 Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America:

Historical and Comparative Perspectives: A Report to the NationalCommission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Vol. II (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), vii.

5 Debord, 12.6 Lyle, Contemporary Functions of the Mass Media, in Mass Media

and Violence: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes andPrevention of Violence. Vol. XI, Robert K. Baker and Dr. Sandra J.Ball, eds., (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,1969), 188.

7 Greil Marcus, Essay in Gang of Four: A Brief History of the Twentieth

Century (Warner Brothers Records, 1990), 43-44. My italics.8 Debord, 38-39.9 Marcus, liner notes for Gang of Four: A Brief History of the Twentieth

Century, 7.10 Didion, 13.11 Robert Lewis Shayon, quoted in Catton, The Worldview Presented

by Mass Media, in Mass Media and Violence, 477.12 Catton, 478-9.13 Didion, 44.14 Graham and Gurr, 623-4.

15 Savage, Englands Dreaming, 77.16 Savage, Englands Dreaming, 109.17 Nuttall, Bomb Culture (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), 181.18 (andwhat will underlie my discussion of Anselm Kieferafter

Auschwitz)19 Nuttall, 41.20 Jean Baudrillard,Amrique (Paris: Grasset, 1986), 86: non plus

seulement lindulgence, mais la violence autopublicitaire, autojustificatricecette violence triomphaliste qui fait partie des rvolutionsrussies.

21 Lange, Baker, and Ball, Mass Media and Violence.22 Lange, Baker, and Ball, Chapter 16, The Actual World of Violence,

341-362.23 J. Milton Yinger, Countercultures: The Promise and the Peril of a


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World Turned Upside Down (New York: The Free Press, 1982), 148.24 Nuttall, 117.25 Savage, 9.26 John Roeker and Sherri Schotlaender, Timeline, inForming: The

Days of Early L.A. Punk, 47.

27 Compare, in light of this, John Lydons own (professed) views onsex: By the time youre twenty you just thinkyawnjust anothersquelch session. Quoted in Savage, 189.

28 Nuttall, 214.29 Didion, 30. Note too, as a measure of Newtons auto-dehumaniza

tion and subordination despite all rhetoric to corporate America,that in the following section he is revealed as a Kaiserhe belongedto Kaiser (i.e., the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan).

30 Didion, 38.31 Didion, 27-8. Despite certain similarities between this and examples

of the aesthetic of violence, I think this sloganeering is fundamentallydifferent, mostly because it still takes itself seriously, and treats violence not as its proper medium, but as an expedient method toachieve certain aims. Between By any means necessary, and Dontknow what I want but I know how to get it is a world of difference.

32 Didion, 23-4.33 Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 51.34 Catton, 485.35 Savage, 110.

36 Marcus,A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, 7.37 Nuttall, 72.38 Nuttall, 66.39 And all the more ideal as so many Disney movies are based on

Grimms fairy tales, the leitmotif of which is precisely violencessinister ubiquity.

40 Baudrillard, 117: Ce pays est sans espoir. Les ordures mmes y sontpropres, le trafic lubrifi, la circulation pacifiefont rverlEuropen de mort et de meurtre, de motels pour suicidaires, orgyand cannibalism, pour faire chec cette perfection de locan, de

la lumire, cette facilit insense de la vie, lhyperralit de touteschoses.

41 Ren Girard, La Violence et le sacr (Paris: Hachette/Pluriel, 1972), 480: La tendence effacer le sacr, lliminer entirement, prpare le retour subreptice du


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sacr, sous une forme non pas trancendente mais immanente, sous la forme de laviolence et du savoir de la violence.

42 Girard, 188: la tragdie derrire linsipidit de la fte transforme en vacances perptuit, derrire les promesses platement utopiques dun univers de loisirs .

43 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, in The Anti-Aesthetic:

Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1998),113.

44 Savage, 188.45 Debord, 135.46 Jameson, 112.47 McKenna, Remembrance of Things Fast, inForming, 31.48 Jameson, 114.49 This chronology is the subject of active debate: many adhere to the opposite view,

in which Illuminations is the triumphant finale after the torturing doubt ofA Season in Hell. This view, to me, seems wishful thinking: Merde pour la posie is not

the statement of a satisfied artist.50 Rimbaud, The Impossible, fromA Season in Hell.: Nous mangeons la

fivre avec nos lgumes aqueux. Et livrognerie! et le tabac! et lignorance! et lesdvouements!

51 Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 36.52 No pun intended: although punk certainly wasand isan insular youth colony.53 Marcus, 84.54 Debord, 135.55 Girard, 179: Lobservateur modern y voit surtout la transgression des interdits. La

promiscuit sexuelle est tolre, parfois requiseun effacement gnral des dif

frences: les hierarchies familiales et sociales sont temporairement supprimes ouinvertiesle mlange de couleurs discordantesle recours au travestyles assemblages contre nature, les rencontres les plus imprvues.

56 Marcus, 67.57 Savage, 193.58 Girard, 403: La victime missaire a donc un caractre monstreux; on a cess de

voir en elle ce quon voit dans les autres membres de la communaut.59 Daniel Arasse,Anselm Kiefer (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001), 99-100.60 Gilmour,Fire on the Earth: Anselm Kiefer and the Postmodern World (Philadel

phia: Temple Univerisity Press, 1990), 125.

61 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, 86.62 Gilmour, 62.63 Arasse, 300.64 Gilmour, 165.


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65 Gilmour, 67.66 An expanded study on this topic would do well to look at the slasher flick (and its

effective death -by-parody in the 1990s).67 Gilmour, 70.68 Gilmour, 143

69 InForming, 93.70 Girard, 431.71 Jrgen Habermas, ModernityAn Incomplete Project, in The Anti-Aesthetic, 11.72 See Nuttall on counterculture art: The masterpieces had to be immediate and

sensational in their nature, had to alter peoples minds physically and immediatelyan urgent psychological weapon to stop the slaughter (94).

73 Though a lot of these scenes nowadays take themselves awfully seriously.74 Jameson, 125.75 Jean-Franois Lyotard, What is Postmodernism? in The Postmodern Condition:

A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81.76 Jameson, 125.

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rimbaud and punk