Charlie Gere
Birkbeck College, London

Punk and the Digital Aesthetic

Keywords: technoculture, punk aesthetic, cyberpunk literature, punk graphic design

The period between the late mid seventies and the late eighties saw the advent of the much-heralded information society. The inadequacies of Fordist-Keynesian ideas in relation to global competition and financial deregulation necessitated restructuring on the part of capitalism to more responsive, fluid models of organisation. This was bound up with concurrent developments in information communications technology, which presented the technical means to realise such a fluid, flexible capitalism. At the same time those developments in information communications technologies also led to a new range of commodities based on microelectronics, personal computers, and video games. Thus the vision of a society dominated by information and information technologies propounded by academics such as Daniel Bell or Futurologists such as Alvin Toffler would seem to have been realised. But, unlike Bell's vision of the move towards such a society as an evolutionary process, its realisation was an antagonistic and sometimes violent process, in which traditional industries and industrial models were either radically overhauled or, effectively, dispensed with, often at great social cost. The Seventies in particular saw industrial antagonism on an unprecedented scale throughout the industrialised world. In the eighties these antagonisms were 'resolved', in some countries at least, by the coming to power of right-wing governments, whose invocations of traditional values masked radical neo-liberal economic agendas.

These circumstances produced, among many other things, a distinctive techno-aesthetic that found expression across a number of fields. In music the possibilities of digital technology combined with the legacies of art school performance-oriented rock, disco and punk, produced 'techno' and its assorted variations. Punk was also one of the inspirations, along with 'postmodern' fiction for the science fiction genre known as 'cyberpunk'. The technological potential unleashed by desktop publishing and graphics software allied with the methodological potential offered by variously by punk and French deconstructionist philosophy produced a style of graphic design and typography known sometimes as deconstructionist graphic design, and sometimes as 'The New Typography'. Though obviously coming out of different contexts and circumstances, these developments shared a fascination with contemporary technology and in both its utopian and dystopian possibilities, as well as its glamour. They also evince similar tropes and strategies, of appropriation, juxtaposition, detournement, montage, collage, repetition, facilitated by or reflecting upon the extraordinary capabilities of that technology.

Punk was at the same time a genre of popular music, a visual style and a set of attitudes. Though much fetishised and mythologised since its brief heyday in the late nineteen seventies it has had and to some extent continues to have a great deal of influence on many areas of cultural practice. To a certain extent punk, especially in its British manifestation, can be read as a response to the painful and difficult metamorphosis begun by capitalism in the late sixties and early seventies, from the comparative stabilities of post-war Fordist-Keynesianism to a more flexible, responsive and less socially forgiving mode. Britain in the seventies was riven by industrial antagonism, most famously the miner's strike of 1973-4, which coincided with the Arab oil embargo imposed as a result of the Arab-Israeli War. Such circumstances necessitated the introduction of a three-day working week in the factories and saw a country periodically reduced to candlelight. The then Prime Minister, the Conservative Edward Heath, called an election in 1974, to force the issue of the unions' power, which he lost to socialist Harold Wilson. Wilson's government, and that of James Callaghan who took over the premiership two years later, though more conciliatory to the unions, fared little better than that of Heath. The middle period of the seventies saw increasing industrial unrest, soaring unemployment and inflation, and the seeming collapse of much of the country's social fabric. The discontent generated by this unhappy set of circumstances would lead eventually to a vote of no confidence in Callaghan's government, and the subsequent election of a Conservative government under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher.

It was in these circumstances that punk emerged in Britain in the mid seventies. This must be understood as more than simply the emergence of a musical genre or an aesthetic style. In Britain popular culture and pop music was, at the time, one of the principle means of political expression for young people. This was in the absence of any real equivalent to the student movements found, for example, in France, Italy or even the United States, which in turn reflected the particular relationship between class and higher education in Britain. Pop music had also been of great importance in enabling the projection of identity, particularly among those who felt themselves otherwise disenfranchised or without the means for political expression. The problem was that the pop and rock scene was still very much dominated by the countercultural aspirations and optimism of the late sixties and early seventies, as well as being anodyne and even middle class. As such it was increasingly irrelevant to those confronting the far less easy prospects of the middle seventies.

On the other side of the Atlantic an alternative had already started to emerge. In New York in particular a rock scene had prospered throughout the seventies that eschewed the hippy consensus. The Velvet Underground's nihilism and use of dark, largely urban, heroin-centred imagery put them at odds with the then-current psychedelic pop culture. Nevertheless they were influential on a number of other groups who were also interested in more confrontational strategies for their music. Among these were some bands and performers who would later be major influences on punk rock such as the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges and the New York Dolls. The Velvet Underground also influenced a generation of English 'Art Rock' bands and performers, such as Roxy Music and David Bowie, who had come out of the English art school system, as well as the art-oriented rock scene of seventies New York, out of which emerged The Talking Heads, Television, Patti Smith and other performers later known as 'new wave'. The theatricality, irony and comparative lack of pomposity evinced by these performers were some of the facets that led them to become influential on the punk movement of the late seventies. In the mid-seventies a young clothes designer and provocateur came from England to manage The New York Dolls, a band notable both for the frank expression of nihilism and boredom in their lyrics, and for having their drummer die of an overdose soon after the release of their debut album.

Malcolm McClaren had seen the Dolls play in London and Paris and decided that they were the ideal vehicle for exploring his ideas about the subversive possibilities of rock and pop. McClaren had been influenced by the Situationists, the French theorists of art and revolution, about whom he had written his student thesis. Following their lead he attempted to reinvent the Dolls as a Situationist intervention, by draping them in hammer and sickle motifs, and hanging banners with provocative slogans, 'Better Red than Dead', and 'What are the Politics of Boredom'. Unfortunately the band was by then disintegrating, and McClaren's tenure as manager was brief. Before returning to England he offered to manage Richard Hell, singer for the band Television, who had supported The New York Dolls at their relaunch gig at the New York Hippodrome. McClaren was much taken by Hell's idiosyncratic style, which included ripped clothes, safety pins and spiky hair. Hell declined his offer and went to form a new band, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, while Television continued under the leadership of its guitarist, the highly talented Tom Verlaine.

McClaren returned to London and to the clothing shop he ran with his partner Vivienne Westwood. Originally called 'Let it Rock', and dedicated to selling Rock 'n' Roll clothes, it had been retitled 'Sex', and now sold fetish gear. There in 1975 McClaren encountered John Lydon, who came into the shop wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words 'I hate' written in biro above the band's name. This witty antagonism towards the most pompous of the rock bands then dominating the music scene impressed McClaren enough to audition Lydon for a band he had been nurturing with his friend Bernie Rhodes, called The Sex Pistols. With the mercurial Lydon, now known as Johnny Rotten as singer, the Pistols were the perfect vehicle for McClaren's situationist-inspired ambitions. For two years through a combination of luck, manipulation and talent, the Pistols achieved national and even international fame and notoriety, before their disintegration culminating in bassist Sid Vicious's murder in New York of his American girl friend, and subsequent fatal overdose. In the wake of their success numerous punk bands were formed, including The Clash, Souixsie and the Banshees, The Damned, The Buzzcocks and many others far less well known.

As mentioned above, punk was far more than simply a musical genre, though it produced some of the best pop music ever made (as well as a lot of the worst). It was a fully articulated subculture, with a distinctive visual style involving a bricolage of elements such as fetish clothing, teddy boy gear, ripped and torn items and, unfortunately, nazi uniforms (though these were eschewed fairly early on). It also developed, partly through necessity, a distinctive graphic design style, which found expression in record sleeves, publicity and in 'zines', the xeroxed and collaged publications which were one of the most distinctive developments coming out of punk. The most famous 'zine', 'Sniffin Glue', edited by Mark Perry, was exemplary in its use of roughly put together found material and hand written/drawn graphics. Jamie Reid's graphics for the Sex Pistols' record covers and publicity material also employed similar techniques to great effect. His famous collage of the Queen with a safety pin through her nose for the cover of the Pistols' controversial single 'God Save the Queen' is now recognised as a classic piece of design. His motif for a later release, 'No Future', is an American school bus, with the word 'Boredom' where the destination should be displayed. This clearly refers, ironically, to the iconic hippy vehicle Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' Magic Bus, which had the word 'Furthur' [sic] as its destination.

Clearly Reid intended this appropriation and detournement of the mythical bus as a critique of the countercultural fantasies of self-realisation and progress towards a better society. His bus has only boredom for its destination and there is no better future to which it might travel. The negativity and even nihilism that punk expressed was in direct contrast to the optimism of the counterculture, and was far more believable for those for whom the present consisted of limited possibilities and the future possibly worse. Punk was an aesthetic response to the political and social disasters of the nineteen seventies. It reflected a world of industrial and social antagonism, urban decay and hopelessness, not just through the employment of specific imagery, but through the very methods of cut-up, montage and appropriation it employed, which visually articulated the dislocations in the coming of post-industrial society.

In practical terms punk was resolutely low-tech, eschewing the complex music technologies beloved by seventies musician. But punk also evinced a fascination with technology and machines, not so much as musical tools, but as symbols both of the passing industrial era and of the coming information age. Part of the bricolage of punk style involved industrial and utilitarian imagery and clothes, such as boiler suits and workers' boots, as well as the use of stencilled graphics and industrial-style icons. This element was drawn out in one of the first 'post-punk' developments, known later as 'Industrial Rock', whose early exponents included Throbbing Gristle, the band that emerged out of the art collective Coum Transmissions, which had gained notoriety with their 1976 show at the ICA, 'Prostitution', as well as Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division and The Human League, who all also employed electronic means for making music.

This genre of industrial electronic music was also strongly influenced by developments in Germany. Since the late sixties there had been a deliberate attempt by some German musicians to create a distinctly German pop music, as a counter to pop and rock's traditional Anglo-American hegemony. This involved performing songs in German and looking for sources of influence outside the blues and folk traditions. Among such sources were American avant-garde composers John Cage and LaMonte Young as well as their home grown equivalent Karlheinz Stockhausen, who had been experimenting with different techniques to create music since the nineteen fifties, including the use of tape and other electronic methods. Out of this emerged a distinctive genre known as Kosmische Musik in Germany (and rechristened Krautrock in the U.K. ¹), among which were found bands such as Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Can and Aamon Duul. Perhaps the most famous, commercially successful and 'new wave' of these groups was Kraftwerk, which means both 'men at work' and 'powerstation', started in 1971 by Ralph Hutter and Florian Schneider. Throughout the seventies Kraftwerk produced a number of extraordinary productions, particularly after taking control of every aspect of their music making and image after 1973, when they built their own Dusseldorf studio, Kling Klang. It was at this time they started to employ a Moog synthesizer and exploit the potential of drum machines. Out of this came 'Autobahn', a 22 minute single, which evoked a motorway journey, with machine-like precision. This was followed by a number of other singles and albums, in which electronic means were used to evoke a world dominated by technology. Though formed before the punk explosion Kraftwerk's bleak urban imagery, robotic sound and distinctive style made them a paradigmatic new wave band, and ideal for the music culture of the late seventies.

Kraftwerk's other pervasive and long-lasting influence was, surprisingly, in the area of black dance music. They influenced Giorgio Moroder's productions for Donna Summer, as well as the late 1970s productions of Sylvester. Through this and other routes Kraftwerk's machinic sound was exploited by black DJs in industrial cities such as New York, Detroit and Chicago. Its evocation of alienation through technology was ideal to express the industrial decay of such cities, Detroit in particular. The kind of music produced in these conditions became known as Detroit Techno, Chicago House and New York Garage. What distinguished these different genres from previous dance music styles, apart from their mode of production, was their deep engagement with technology. In this Techno was far more than simply a musical genre. Like punk it was a symptom of social and cultural change. If punk reflected the disjunctures and ruptures endured by a society making the painful transition from a manufacturing to a post-industrial, post-fordist economy, then Techno reflected the achievement of that transition, though not uncritically. The name 'Techno' itself was taken from Alvin Toffler's techno-libertarian screed The Third Wave (1980), in which he talked about the importance of the 'Techno Rebels' to the coming eponymous wave of technologically determined change. Toffler, along with Kraftwerk and the black futurism evinced by groups such as Parliament, all influenced Juan Atkins and Richard Davies (AKA 3070), the original Techno progenitors, to produce a music that celebrated the romance of new technology while at the same time reflecting the damage that the shift away from traditional industrial manufacturing had wrought on cities such as Detroit.

Techno and other similar genres of dance music were the start of a series of extraordinary developments which extended beyond dance music, and embraced many other aspects of culture. Coinciding with the availability of the drug MDMA otherwise known as ecstasy or E, which promoted both well-being and copious energy, a vibrant and creative dance culture emerged in the States, the United Kingdom and the Continent. Unlike most previous pop and rock music culture, in which the performer was separated from the audience and presented as an icon, this culture was far less concerned with subjectivities and more with a close relation between producer and consumer. Music was produced by DJs, often through sampling, or visually anonymous but technically competent enthusiasts, and consumed through dance rather than passive attention to somebody else's performance, with the DJ and the audience operating almost in a kind of cybernetic feedback relation. In his or her capacity to manipulate technology, and in the paradoxically solitary nature of his or her work and eschewal of the traditional theatricality of rock and pop performance, the DJ resembles another cultural figure, the hacker, who also came to prominence in the middle eighties. On the other hand the rave culture of which Techno is a part offers a promise of community and connection outside of the constraints of capitalism and state repression. Thus it is unsurprising that Techno and allied cultural phenomena are often invoked in relation to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Hakim Bey, as well as those of writers such as Alvin Toffler, ostensibly on the other side of the political divide between right and left. Techno thus becomes a kind of metonym of techno-capitalism, not just in the machine aesthetic of the music itself, but in the social and cultural arrangements and possibilities it proposes.

Meanwhile the new possibilities presented by digital technology coalesced with the cultural energies released by punk rock in the late seventies, leading not only to Techno, but also inspiring some young science fiction writers to develop new and contemporary directions within the genre. In 1977, the year in which punk entered the public consciousness, the Canadian writer William Gibson published his first short story 'Fragments of a Hologram Rose', while Bruce Sterling published his first novel Involution Ocean. Four years later in 1981 the older writer Vernor Vinge published his novella True Names, in which the characters inhabit the computer's virtual spaces. These different works began to define a way of representing the complex spaces and experiences of a new post-industrial, postmodern world. As such they were the first examples of the as yet unnamed genre of cyberpunk. At the same time French comic strip artist Möbius was producing extraordinary strips portraying dystopian visions of future urban decay.

Many of these elements came together in 1982 when Ridley Scott filmed Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Scott turned Dick's story into a future film noir set in a rain-drenched, orientalised Los Angeles. The book's main character, Deckard, a blade runner, is dedicated to searching out and liquidating androids. Manufactured by the Tyrrel Corporation, androids are apparently indistinguishable from 'natural' humans. Deckard has been turned from one of Dick's typical everyman naives into a world-weary figure closer to one of Chandler's private detective characters. It was less the plot or the typical Dickian concerns about identity and subjectivity that made Blade Runner and more the look of the film. Influenced by Möbius, Scott's vision of a near-future cityscape presented the most perfectly realised backdrop for articulating contemporary concerns and fears about a society dominated by global corporations and information technology. From the pyramidal building housing the Tyrrel Corporation, which dominates the landscape (its sides incised with patterns so as to resemble the surface of a microchip) to the street-level prosthetics laboratories, the film presents a visual allegory of a society dominated by techno-science and information technology. The pervasive dark and continuous rain obliquely suggests that such a domination comes with a price in relation at least to the environment. The presence throughout the film of floating advertisements extolling the virtues of offworld colonisation suggests a world that is no longer a desirable place to live.

Blade Runner came out at a time when new technology was becoming far more visible in mainstream culture. The early eighties saw the development of the Apple Macintosh, the machine that made computing 'friendly' and accessible, the emergence of Techno music, the paradigmatic dance noise of the post-industrial urban landscape, the beginnings of deconstructionist graphic design, more about which later. William Gibson's 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer resonated perfectly with these other elements of the Zeitgeist. Though not responsible for the term, or for originating the ideas it came to embody, Gibson's book is the paradigmatic work of 'cyberpunk'. In it he 'coalesced an eclectic range of generic protocols, contemporary idiolects, and a pervasive technological eroticism combined with a future-shocking ambivalence'. ² Stylistic sources include Chandler, Burroughs and Michael Herr, author of Vietnam reportage classic, Dispatches. This eclectic set of influences are combined to produce a dystopian vision of the near future, in which the nation state is of negligible importance and the world is dominated by high-tech corporations, or as Gibson calls them as part of an insistent orientalism, zaibatsu. Everywhere vast conurbations have spread, such as Chiba City in Japan or the Sprawl on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, though perhaps the most important space in Neuromancer is the non-space of the computer networks, in Gibson's by now famous term, 'cyberspace', Gibson's vision of a three-dimensional realisation of networked computer data.

At about the time Techno was emerging out of the clubs of Detroit, and cyberpunk was developing as a literary genre, a distinctive style of graphic design, which also reflected, criticised and celebrated the possibilities of contemporary technology and technoculture, was being developed. It also owed much to the influence of punk. As we have seen punk was influential on areas beyond music because it was much more than a musical style. It was an entire aesthetic, that, consciously or not, harked back to much of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, based many of his ideas for provoking interest and outrage on the methods of the Situations, while designer Jamie Reid developed a style for record sleeves and posters that evoked Situationist graphics, and the cut-up techniques of William Burroughs and others. Other punk graphics referred or were reminiscent of Dada, Constructivism, Bauhaus or Futurism. Punk style in clothing was also reminiscent of other movements and ideas, at least before it became a high-street cliché. Johnny Rotten, lead singer of the Sex Pistols, in an early gesture, ripped up a suit and put it back together with safety pins. As well as granting the safety pin iconic and fetishistic status within punk, this also anticipated the short-lived deconstructionist fashion movement, which attempted to co-opt the ideas of Derrida and others for clothes design.

In the late seventies Derrida's De La Grammatologie was published in the Anglophone world in the landmark translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ³ Its philosophical denseness and complexity made it inaccessible to all but a few. Nevertheless its questioning of the totalising nature of dominant forms of knowledge, and its assertion of the material basis of discourse formation resonated with other attempts to come to terms with an increasingly disorganised and complex world. This was evinced even by punk rock fanzines, such as Sniffin' Glue, with their deliberately crude appearance, usually put together on a Xerox machine with hand written and collaged graphics. At more or less the same time those involved with more mainstream graphic design were beginning to come to terms with deconstruction's message. In 1978 the influential typography journal Visible Language published an edition devoted to 'French Currents of the Letter'. ⁴ This issue looked at how French philosophy and literature were enabling new approaches to writing. Among those who were discussed were many connected with poststructuralism, including Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and Michel Serres. This issue of Visible Language was designed by students from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which, under the aegis of co-chair Katherine McCoy, was encouraging interest in the intersection between graphic design and poststructuralism. The students involved were given a seminar in literary theory by the head of Cranbrook's architecture program, Daniel Libeskind. What resulted was an examination and critique of the conventional relations between typographical elements and the concomitant belief in legibility and transparency. (This approach had already been anticipated by Derrida in his 1974 book 'Glas' ⁵ , which mixed fonts and used complex and non-linear arrangements of text.)

Derrida's use of typography for deconstructive purposes was aimde at profound philosophical investigation and expression. As Ellen Lupton points out the interest in poststructuralism shown by graphic designers such as McCoy was more celebratory than critical, invoking the poetic rather than critical aspects of the important thinkers ⁶. What began to develop at Cranbrook and continued elsewhere was less a profound examination of the conditions of design, and more an anarchic form of self-expression on the behalf of designers liberated from the ideology of transparent communication, legitimised by allusions to contemporary French philosophy. In some senses it was more closely related to the release of energies enabled by punk, than to the profound and difficult project of deconstruction. This said, poststructuralism and deconstruction offered powerful and liberating paradigms for graphic designers. In the early eighties interest in poststructuralist approaches to design was revived at Cranbrook, through the enthusiasm of students such as Jeffery Keedy, later head of graphics at CalArts. This coincided with the development of the Apple Macintosh, which offered designers unprecedented power and potential. The Macintosh had been designed with visual computing in mind, and enabled the development of much visual and graphic design software. Though the Macintosh did not determine the rise of deconstructionist graphic design, which, as we have seen, preceded it by some year, it did greatly enable it, and assured its rapid success as a style.

In 1984 publisher/editor/art director Rudy VanderLans and typographer Zuzana Licko started a graphic-design magazine called Emigré, taking advantage of the ease of production offered by the Macintosh. Emigré rapidly gained a reputation for innovative and radical design. In particular it investigated the possibilities of type design, using font design software. The experimentation exemplified by Emigré was paralleled by developments elsewhere. In the Netherlands Studio Dumbar, founded in 1977, undertook similar experimentation, which its founder, Gert Dumbar, continued as head of graphic design at the Royal College of Art in London in the nineteen eighties. Also in the United Kingdom The Face magazine and its designer Neville Brody gained reputations for innovation and playfulness in design, as did groups such as Why Not Associates, 8VO, and designers such as the Royal College of Art graduate Johnathan Barnbrook. Perhaps the most spectacular and difficult example of such design was that produced by David Carson, first for the short-lived surfing magazine Beach Culture, and then for the more mainstream (or at least more widely distributed) Raygun magazine in the early nineties. The latter took illegibility and challenging graphic design to new heights, or extremes (depending on one's point of view) and may have represented the apogee and possible end of a particular approach. Since then this style of complex, computer-aided graphic design has become part of the mainstream visual culture, used in mass market magazines, such as Wired, on CD covers and publicity for mainstream music acts, as well as influencing the non-linear multilayered graphics widely employed on music television.

Cyberpunk, techno and deconstructionist graphic design represented consonant reactions across different genres to the emergent technoculture. Cyberpunk's juxtaposed ideolects, techno's use of repetition and sampling and eschewal of the artist's presence, deconstructionist graphic design's use of layers and experimentation with typography all reflected a world of diffused and distributed communication mediated through networks of powerful information technologies. In this, as I hope this paper has shown, they are all beneficiaries of the legacy of punk, whose fragmented and iconoclastic style presented the most cogent aesthetic reaction to the coming dislocations of late capitalism. Of course the characteristic punk means of expression using montage and collage have a far older history. From Dada through to the Situationists, Pop Art and William Burroughs they have been frequently employed as artistic strategies. For some such as the rock critic Greil Marcus punk is part of a particular modernist trajectory that also encompasses Dada and the Situationists. It may be that such claims for punk are a little extravagant. But the comparison with Dada does suggest the similarities between the disclocations of the early twentieth century. Dada was a response not just, for example, to the barbarities of the First World War, but also to developments in the technologies of representation. This is the point made by Walter Benjamin in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Apropos of Dada he remarks that

"One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies." ⁷

Benjamin goes on to suggest that Dadaism was attempting to create, with their 'word salad' poems full of obscenities and their collaged and montaged paintings, 'the effects which the public today seeks in the film' ⁸, with its destruction of aura, its tactility and constant shocking of the spectator through sudden change and shifts of emphasis.

Similarly punk can be seen not just as a response to the dislocations of its period, but also an anticipation of the possibilities of technology then just emerging. Though graphical computing, multimedia, hypertext and so on were not widely available they existed and their future ubiquity was already being predicted. Furthermore the shift towards a post-industrial society was predicated on the application of 'real-time' computer systems and networks, which employed such technologies and ideas. The punk style, with its disruptions and disjunctures, its emphasis on texts and its use of iconic graphics anticipates the coming world of ubiquitous graphic computing. As shown above, the punk strategy of do-it-yourself graphics and music was later echoed in the use of desktop publishing and graphics software by graphic designers in the nineteen eighties. This is not to suggest that punk had any influence on the development of these technologies. But it did create a framework in which they could be understood and used.

Punk, despite its apparent nihilism, also invokes another of Benjamin's other key concerns, the possibility of utopian redemption in the ruins of capitalism. When Johnny Rotten sang 'No Future', he might have been singing of Benjamin's own idiosyncratic conception of utopianism. Benjamin eschewed the false promises of technological and social progress that animated both capitalism and its state socialist alternatives, and continues to have such force today in relation to new technology. Instead he developed a curious amalgam of Jewish mysticism and Marxism in which history is nothing but a catastrophe. He cleaved instead to a concept of redemption derived from the cabbala. Benjamin contrasted secular history, the sequence of catastrophic events that mark human time without fulfilling it, with revolutionary Jetztzeit or 'now-time', every moment of which is full of the real anticipation of such redemption, much as 'for the Jews [...] every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter'.⁹ For Benjamin revolution was not the end point of historical progress, as it was for more conventional Marxists, but a Messianic break from its course.

Benjamin's unique conflation of Marxism and Jewish mysticism perturbed many of his friends and colleagues and continues to bemuse to this day. Whether it bears any useful relation to the construction of viable alternatives to capitalism is a moot point. But it does offer a way of thinking about the apparently dystopian legacy of punk as actually utopian, albeit in a complex and roundabout manner. Punk celebrated urban decay and ruin and the hopelessness it engendered. The punk landscape was catastrophic in that it apparently bore no redeeming or progressive features, only the marks of empty historical time. But out of this the energy to imagine something different, revolutionary even, emerges. The Sex Pistols may not have had a coherent political philosophy (putting aside McLaren's exploitation of Situationist ideas), but they did offer some kind of utopian redemption in the very noise they made, and in the very fact of making it. In attenuated form this redemptive messianic utopianism pervades the descendents of punk described above. Perhaps most exemplary of this is the cyberpunk film The Matrix, which expresses this utopianism with particular force. It is, literally, a film about messianism, with Neo, the Keanu Reeves character being proclaimed as 'The One', for whom others have been searching. What is more to the point is the world in which this messiah is sought. It repudiates even the possibility of redemption through technology. This is a fallen world in which the machines have taken over. The appearance of normal life conceals an utterly different truth, that of humankind's enslavement to those same machines. In a most Benjaminian moment Neo awakens, literally, to the truth of his situation. Upon taking a pill proffered by a character called Morpheus he finds himself not, as he thought, in late twentieth century San Francisco, but two centuries later, in a pod, one of a seemingly infinite series, each of which contain the atrophied body of a human in the process of being farmed for its electrical energy. Putting aside the absurdity of this development its invocation of awaking recalls the immense importance of that act for Benjamin as a metaphor for awakening from the dream world of capitalism. Having awoken to the truth Neo is put on the path to the realisation of his messianic destiny. Once this is achieved he can break out of history, and even to stop time, which is demonstrated by his capacity to stop the bullets from the guns of the agents who have been pursuing him. (This reminds me of Benjamin's description of the clock towers being shot at during the first days of the French Revolution, and which indicate for him the awareness of the revolutionary classes that they are about to make the continuum of history explode.)¹⁰

The Matrix is, obviously, a piece of popular entertainment, rather than a political tract. Nevertheless it contains, I suggest, something of the utopianism that punk first rehearsed, and which militates against the relentless march of progress towards a bright future of globalised, wired neoliberal capitalism. The traces of the punk aesthetic within popular and mass culture, such as described above, are also perhaps like the 'chips of Messianic time' ¹¹ that Benjamin saw as embedded in each moment of time, and which propose the possibility of redemption from the catastrophe of progress.

September 2000

Notes

1 Cope, J. (1994), "History of Krautrock Part 1", Wire, 130, December, 1994, p. 40.

2 Bukatman, S. (1993), Terminal Identity, p. 146. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

3 Derrida, J. (1976), On Grammatology, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

4 "French Currents of the Letter" (1979), Visible Language, 12.3 (Summer).

5 Derrida, J. (1986), Glas, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

6 Lupton, E. & Abbott Miller, J. (1996), Design, Writing, Research, p. 9. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

7 Benjamin, W. (1999), "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Illuminations, p. 230. London: Pimlico. (1st Ger. ed. 1936, Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, V.1).

8 Benjamin, W. (1999), "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Illuminations, p. 230. London: Pimlico. (1st Ger. ed. 1936, Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, V.1).

9 Benjamin, W. (1999), "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Thesis XVIII.B, Illuminations, p. 255. London: Pimlico. (1st posthumous Germ ed. 1950, Neue Rundschau, 61.3).

10 Benjamin, W. (1999), "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Thesis XV, Illuminations, p. 253. London: Pimlico. (1st posthumous Germ ed. 1950, Neue Rundschau, 61.3).

11 Benjamin, W. (1999), "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Thesis XVIII.A, Illuminations, p. 255. London: Pimlico. (1st posthumous Germ ed. 1950, Neue Rundschau, 61.3).