Post-Punk, Mark Fisher & Popular Modernism

in the' 70s punk music exploded onto the British scene following partly in the footsteps of late 60s counterculture and the protest music that It produced punk music seemed to be propelled by the rebellious energy of 60s radicalism as it itself was rebellious oppositional fast and aggressive and fed up with the status quo professing a DIY philosophy it showed that a musical scene could Thrive independently of the pre-existing musical establishment and while many Punk musicians lacked formal training or technical prowess they made up for it with their energy and conviction one could say that punk was

to the music scene what Napoleon was to Europe a destructive force which raised what had been previously established to the ground clearing out the space for the birth of Something New by the late '70s however the punk scene was running out of steam declining just as political radicalism was declining and a section of the punk scene was growing tired of the standard three cord Punk formula and opening the scene up to a wider range of influences and ideas developed into what is now known as Post Punk named that way precisely because it arrived after the

Heyday of the first wave of punk music while Punk was characterized by its energy speed and aggression Post Punk came to be characterized by mood atmosphere and expression while Punk directed its anger outwardly Post Punk often turned inwards introspecting about the self and its place in society or lag thereof in addition to those that were slow and gloomy there were strains of postpunk that took inspiration from Funk reggae and even disco often taking on an ironic and satirical tone arriving on the eve of de-industrialization and the decline of British social democracy it came to define

the mood of of an entire generation of young people and despite its often pessimistic tone Post Punk constituted a period of intense experimentation and musical Innovation it opened itself up to a wide range of influences and expanded its Horizons creating something that was truly new the late theorist Mark fiser argued that the Post Punk scene constituted a level of innovation and experimentation within pop culture that had scarcely been matched since for fiser Post Punk was part of a British cultural Network that constituted a period of what he called Popular modernism a network that included quote

the music press and the more challenging parts of Public Service broadcasting as well as Post Punk brutalist architecture penguin paperbacks and the BBC radiophonic Workshop Post Punk was the soundtrack of this period of popular modernism as well as its Swan Song [Music] [Music] to understand the significance of the term popular modernism one has to First understand how modernism was viewed before it modernism as an art movement tends to refer to the first half of the 20th century and is an extremely broad term ENT identified in painting literature theater music and architecture and including a subset

of art movements as wide ranging as expressionism constructivism futurism cubism surrealism and several others but what mainly United these highly varied aesthetic movements was the attempt to overcome the past to break new ground to experiment without compromising and to create something genuinely new in their content modernist Works were often expressions of life and Human Experience in secular Urban industrialized Society reflecting its acceleration its alienation as well as its Innovation but what is typically seen as the central aspect of modernism is not necessarily the content it portrayed but its form namely its incessant formal experimentation in

which the content sometimes became secondary to form modernist artists believed that the societal changes unfolding were so drastic and transformative that they required the creation of new art forms and new ways of seeing they did not simply seek to depict new things but to create entirely new forms of depiction however modernism was also often seen as a somewhat elitist Affair the German philosopher Theodor oorno was a great proponent of modernist art and he saw it as fundamentally opposed to mass culture or popular culture at least as it existed in his time in adorno's influential view

popular culture under Advanced capitalism was merely a product of what he called the culture industry a concept I go into in my video on the Emoji Movie the products of the culture industry were commercial and profit driven and both an expression of human unfreedom and a tool of domination adoro believed that pop culture under capital ISM was incapable of producing something new and believed that its only effect was to lull and pacify the masses modernist art for him could only retain some level of aesthetic autonomy in strict opposition to popular culture even if this meant

giving up any hope of popular appeal or Commercial Success a lot of past European art had been created for religious purposes and so it was subservient to religion what made modernist Arts special for adorno was its goal of complete aesthetic autonomy in opposition to any kind of subservience it was by holding up the ideal of autonomy that modernist art was capable of exposing and resisting a world which completely lacked autonomy he wrote that artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world one opposed to the empirical world it was the incessant formal

experimentation as mentioned earlier that made possible this overcoming of immediate reality in adorno's view great modernist art opened up a contradiction between the aesthetic freedom of the artwork and the unfree World in which it was produced thereby exposing a contradiction which could only be solved by overcoming our unfree World pop culture however in his view was completely subservient to Commerce and profitability and so could not produce anything autonomous it was in opposition to this view that Mark Fischer coined the term popular modernism he believed that in certain periods and in certain cases the distinction between

modernism and popular culture was overcome producing something popular yet not populist modernist yet working class postp Punk was popular yet modernist than its formal experimentation in late '70s UK Mark fiser writes particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the present moment was taken up and [Music] [Applause] renewed making you say [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] wild it had to tonight it [Music] soon the musicians of the British postp Punk scene were absolutely steeped in modernist culture their names lyrics artworks

and aesthetic approaches were full of references to surrealism daada futurism constructivism as well as science fiction critical theory and existentialist literature the music journalist and critic Simon Reynolds wrote How The Post Punk scene from 1978 to 1984 contained quote the systematic ransacking of 20th century modernist art and literature the entire postpunk period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music and so through the postpunk scene these modernist works and artistic approaches reached a relatively broad workingclass audience quote Cabaret voler borrowed their name from Dada

per ubu took theirs from Alfred Jerry Talking Heads turned a Hugo ball sound poem into a tribal disco dance track gang of four inspired by bre and gd's alienation effects tried to deconstruct rock even as they rocked hard lyricists absorb the radical science fiction of William S buroughs JG Ballard and Philip K dick and techniques of collage and cutup were transplanted into the music with graphic designers like Malcolm Garrett and Peter savell and labels like Factory and fast product drawing from constructivism D stale bow House John Hartfield and doo graphy of course the point of

all of these influences was not just to pay homage but to use them as a stepping stone for further Innovation because the post buunk musicians saw in the modernist movement aspects that had not been explored yet new possibilities to be extracted they believe that there were yet more Futures to be created in the cultural scene and many postpunk musicians were not only well read and cultured but also politically educated and sometimes expressed radical political sympathies and social criticism through their lyrics There was gang of four for instance who had clear Marxist influences with their name

being a reference to a maoist faction within the Chinese Communist party there was the durutti column their name being a reference to the Spanish Anarchist revolutionary fighter Buenaventura durti as well Asti poti a band name which paid homage to the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio grami while their songs also involved references to French philosophers like dared alakan and Roland bar politically oriented musicians sometimes saw their own musical activity through a political lens forming art collectives in which workingclass musicians could share instruments and equipment and conceiving Independent Record distribution as being kind of an alternative form of

the cultural means of production it thereby involved the explicit attempt to produce an alternative to the culture industry it was this whole idea of somehow kind of controlling the means of production again through questioning things we were questioning contracts we were realizing that things were just being corrupted and taken away and and Polished up and made into like shy Wy Punk or children's TV Punk right and so we wanted to kind of have control over what we were doing with its openness to experimentation the postpunk scene would also lead to the development of new subg

genres one of the pioneers of goth Rock for instance was the postpunk band bow house who took their name from the influential German modernist School of Architecture and The Goth scene in general took great inspiration from the modernist art strain of expressionism the black [Music] box is death through the wall spinning you no choice it's [Music] [Applause] another factor of innovation was the growing accessibility of synthesizers before postpunk synthesizers were seen sort of as a burgeois instrument a synthesizer could be as expensive as a small house and so it was typically used by wealthy or

well-established musicians by the late '70s however the development of more affordable synthesizers For the First Time created the possibility of work in class synth music some musicians would even cut costs by building their own synthesizers and Hardware synthesizers greatly expanded the range of available sounds and led to even more formal experimentation with subgenres like minimal wave which was a more stried down and mechanical sounding form of Post Punk and minimal synth which was often entirely synthesized with the exception of vocals their approach to synthesizers was thoroughly modernist in the the way that they used rudimentary

building blocks to create interesting shapes and spaces the of least resistance this seems the only [Music] wayt scratch [Music] his such musicians often Drew from modernist science fiction and futurism with futurist influences and homemade Electronics also leading to the development of Industrial Music are you ready are you ready girl are you [Applause] [Music] ready the the power here something it is striking that all of these new forms of musical expression and Innovations in genre happened within the span of less than a decade and what made this possible in the UK Mark fiser argues was social

democracy Mark fiser agreed with adorno that cultural Innovation and the market are opposed to one another however in Fischer's view post-war social democracy with its considerable public spending created limited spaces of Refuge from Market forces and thereby facilitated the postpunk scene's extensive Innovation one of the most significant cases of this public spending for Post Punk were art schools as at this time the UK had entirely free state-funded art schools and gave out student maintenance grants as well this meant that creatively minded workingclass youth were able to attend art school without worrying about tuition and financial

expenses and spent several years simply educating themselves and experimenting it was often in the art schools that young workingclass artists steeped themselves in modernist art and culture and also became familiar with literature critical theory and contemporary philosophy the art schools were thus a breeding ground of intense musical creativity some cultural activities were also publicly funded by the Arts Council for instance it was a grant from a regional branch of the Arts Council that led to the creation of the Manchester music Collective where the legendary postpunk band Joy Division were regular participants and postpunk band The

Fall play their first gig Joy division's Ian Curtis said that this Collective gave them a place to play meet other musicians discuss and swap ideas and experiment in front of people it was these public spaces that made such intense experimentation possible because the musicians involved did not have to worry about being immediately commercially successful they could afford to take risks musicians who could not yet make a living off their music would also sometimes take on employment benefits because nothing kills artistic creativity as much as the need to constantly think about Commercial Appeal in Mark Fisher's

view it was therefore Public Funding that partially made popular modernism possible in the 7s because as a counterforce to the culture industry it allowed artists to be ahead of their time this is also why fiser mentions Public Service broadcasting which involved a lot of experimentation by filmmakers and the publicly funded BBC radiophonic Workshop which famously created the doctor Hine made incredible advances in developing electronic music this influential cultural force was closed down in the 9s precisely because it was deemed not profitable enough and the this is also why Mark Fischer mentions brutalism as part of

popular modernism brutalist architecture was itself a broadly modernist development and often being publicly funded at its best It produced incredibly forward-thinking and formly Innovative architecture brutalism was anti-n nostalgic formal shunning decorations and emphasizing its material and its visual coherence and there is a deep Affinity between Post Punk and brutalism M for these reasons Post Punk often sounds like a Sonic representation of brutalist architecture it's base heavy spacious stripped down angular lacking excessive flare and often minimalist but nevertheless formally interesting nowadays it is precisely because of a lack of Public Funding that brutalist buildings are not

wellmaintained and end up deteriorating Mark fer said in an interview quote just consider a city like London the most futuristic parts of the city are the brutalist ones you go to the barbin center and you spontaneously think about the future precisely because of the modernism of the buildings this like Post Punk is part of our condition of cultural hauntology that Mark Fischer spoke of which I have a video on if you'd like to learn more this condition is characterized by the fact that ironically we often have to go back a couple of decades into the

past to disc discover something that feels futuristic because the market has no time for the future it only looks as far as the next production cycle it's no surprise that the Affinity between Post Punk and brutalism has remained to this day one of the most popular contemporary post buunk bands that draw on this tradition the Bellar Russian group mulad DOA used the iconic brutalist Hotel Panorama building for their album art which looks futuristic even today of course many of the new commercial buildings are themselves designed in broadly modernist style and yet as products of the

free market they offer a completely lifeless tedious and banale kind of modernism a kind of Ikea modernism completely devoid of the futuristic aspects that modernism was once identified with they hardly embody the modernist ideal of constant formal Innovation and modernist Aesthetics themselves become degraded when appropriated by neoliberalism the British writer Owen Heatherly wrote that modernism might have resurged but in much the same way that a labor government is no longer a labor government it isn't quite the same modernism such buildings are commercial Investments more than they are architectural experiments of course speaking of public spending

and brutalism it's impossible not to mention the Soviet Union as well although Soviet culture was without a doubt rest restrictive in many ways and involved a lot of censorship its extensive public spending also created non-commercial spaces of intense artistic creativity notably not only in architecture but also Cinema uh you know back when uh Russia was the the Union of Soviet Socialist republics and they'd say oh but aren't you so glad that you're in America I said well I know a lot of Russian filmmakers they have a lot more freedom than I have all they have

to do is be careful about criticizing the government otherwise they can do anything they want so what do you have to do you have to adhere to a very narrow line of commercialism in the post-war period the Soviet Union created many cases of extremely forward-thinking brutalist architecture sometimes Architects were given great artistic freedom and space to experiment even in areas as mundane as that of bus stops and the Eastern block had a postpunk scene as well where the significance of Public Funding was even more direct Soviet Allied States not only of course fully funded Arts

education but also funded youth cultural centers and even entire musical festivals such as the yoin festival in the People's Republic of Poland which was of immense significance to the development of Polish Punk and Post Punk creating a unique situation in which a center of counterculture which included a lot of anti-government sentiment was fully funded by by the [Music] state but at the end of the day this is a YouTube video essay which means that one thing is inevitable neoliberalism while the British postpunk scene depended on Social Democratic conditions it was developing under a social and

economic crisis that marked the final years of post-war British social democracy and it witnessed how the very conditions that allowed it to thrive were consciously and systematically destroyed it thereby ended up being the soundtrack of the social crisis and Decay that would Mark the neoliberal 80s Mark fiser writes quote the subsequent ideological and practical attack on public services meant that one of the spaces where artists could be sheltered from the pressure to produce something that was immediately successful was severely circumscribed as public service broadcasting became marketized there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural

Productions that resembled what was already successful the social time available for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural production drastically declined if there's one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages it's no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s in the punk and post buk scenes coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities since then the decline of social housing the attacks on squatting and the

Delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished and so as the rise in the cost of living the dismantling of free education and the decline of the public sphere eradicated the conditions in which Post Punk was born many of the independent record labels at the head of the movement were either bought up or went bankr rupt the shift from social democracy to neoliberalism was also Inseparable from deindustrialization with so many factories closing down there were entire towns that had been built around industry

which now found themselves losing the social purpose and meaning that they had developed around Manchester which had been the world's first great industrial city was now one of the first cities to enter the post-industrial era and its atmosphere of decline gave birth to Legendary post bunk bands like Joy Division and the fall Richard Boon who had funded the Fall's first EP said of their song industrial estate that it is quote a very funny take on Manchester's history of having been the Cradle of capitalism and then by the 1970s its grave the modernist movement had appeared

in conditions of intense industrialization and now the end of popular modernism was signal by de-industrialization there was a steep rise in unemployment and the social stability and security that had characterized the post-war period was rapidly disappearing one could say that while the counterculture of the late 60s rebelled against its assigned place in society the countercultural Youth of the early 80s no longer had a place in society to rebel against in the beginning of the ' 80s there was a lot of unemployment and all the young people I mean we couldn't get any jobs and and

the generation before us the Hees we hated the Hees because they were talking about peace love and understanding and they had all the culture jobs they were sitting on those they could do records they could do everything and we couldn't do anything so so the the only space was left for us at that time was do a protest against all the good feelings and good things they were doing perhaps such conditions gave an even greater Allure to brutalis architecture as it now symbolized the bygone period of relative social stability and like Post Punk itself the

austere and formal nature of brutalist architecture served as a cultural opposition to the colorful and excessive consumerism of the 80s neoliberalism affected both West and East and the Post Punk scenes were reacting to quite similar social conditions on both sides of the Iron Curtain social and economic crisis the the decline of public spending and the loss of social stability union workers in the UK with the Striking miners at the Forefront were facing violent State repression at the hands of Thatcher's government and on the other side of the Iron Curtain Poland which also had a large

postpunk scene in development and which at this time was nominally socialist was actually selling coal to Thatcher th helping her resist the minor strike and at the same time this polish government was assaulting its own striking workers who at the time were organizing one of the period's largest labor unions known as solidarity in both countries the crisis was managed through State violence and austerity and privatization was massively extended ending the period of popular modernism many young artists in the Eastern block were hoping that once the government's restrictions on culture were removed there would be an

explosion of new cultural forms but in many cases they discovered that under the new neoliberal conditions the market could be more totalitarian in its grip on culture than any state many of the brutalist buildings which had previously expressed utopian social ideals were demolished or simply abandoned and left to deteriorate because their new private owners were unwilling or incapable of funding their maintenance a lot of brutalist architecture had been the result of the ambitious post War attempt to build a new world and the Demolition and abandonment of these buildings now served as the perfect symbol of

the end of that project in Mark Fisher's words it symbolized the cancellation of the future leading people to feel nostalgic for a future that never arrived and much of Post Punk reflected this prevailing atmosphere it felt cold damp Barren evoking images of closed down factories dirty streets and urban DEC one has to be careful when looking back at ' 70s popular modernism or any other period of past cultural creativity for fear of getting stuck in the past and only looking backwards after all the modernism of yesterday can sometimes become the cultural conservatism of today Mark

Fischer's intention was definitely not returning to an ideal past nor was it to idealize British social democracy or the Soviet system but both of which were not without their problems to say the least the point of such cultural study is to discover what made past cultural moments possible and the way the Post Punk scene did with modernism defined in it possibilities that have not been explored yet one could criticize the postpunk scene's sense of resignation condemn it for being defeatist and quietist see it as capitulation to the present state of things one could argue that

it should have been more agit ational and used more for propagandistic purposes but Simon Reynolds wrote that many of the politically conscious postpunk musicians quote saw the plainspoken demagoguery of overtly politicized musicians of the era as far too literal and unesthetic and found their Sook sermonizing both condescending to The Listener and most of the time a pointless exercise and preaching to the converted this is a very adornian position and so more sympathetically we could View Post Punk's approach the way adoro viewed modernist art as holding out the possibility of autonomy adoro believed that just as

the autonomy of art is violated when it is subordinated to religious purposes or commercial purposes that this likewise happens when it is subordinated to political pragmatics that when made agitational and propagandistic art becomes one with the very world that it should oppose itself to if if one accepts this perspective one could say that there's in fact something utopian about Post Punk even at its most depressive because adoro argues it is only by recognizing and exposing the absolute wretchedness of the present moment that you can hold out any possibility of a different Better World in Mark

Fischer's words quote the political significance of workingclass creativity and popular music was that it gave us Vivid glimpses and tastes of this other world a world that via these anticipations and rehearsals at least intersected with ours or became ours intermittently yet insistently a world in which the old Dandy fenor ambition for life to become a work of art would be democratized where the mass produced and the bespoke would combine in unexpected ways where no detail was too small to be attended to and fashion would be as significant as fine art this was the future that

popular modernism prefigured and made available in flashes and now I'd like to thank my patrons who provide me with the space of creative freedom in making these videos 404 error just undo it Andre Oliva archive transients Beetle scratches Ben E big hat artorius Celsius enjoyer circadia confirmatio namay and Matthew Dominic Daniel zner drain gang padania Eevee Ros Eric Owens Francois U wo harbon moths Hong Kong Aesthetics is it really possible for a Doral girl and a recuperation boy to be in a relationship joh de Pagani Katie Perry is John Benet Ramsey Clem f m Lim

Max bendick Max Murphy Nathaniel Lark Nathaniel Owen Paul Winford pdxj Morris Paul cat post Elvis Rachel Anne radical Q Sky stackner sibunit the empty set Venice Victor Redco wui yesterday's rice as well as all of these wonderful patrons if you're new to the genre of Post Punk and you're interested in listening to the classics I will post some recommendations either in the video description or the comments this video topic was selected by my patrons and if you become my Patron at any here you can also participate in video polls determining the next video if there's

any interest in it I might sometime release a kind of sequel to this video in which I would talk about the development of Industrial Music if you join my patreon you will find the video script additional reading recommendations as well as some instrumental postpunk I made for this video myself I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope you have a beautiful summer thank you