Abstract
It may appear that punk rock has been appropriated by the profiteers rather than proffering any genuine sort of rebellion. One need look no further than MTV or even the local suburban mall to witness crowds of young women and men who, with (dis)affected sneers and neck and ‘sleeve’ tattoos, contribute to lining the pockets of the expanding corporate class – from the ‘cool hunters’ on the streets to the executives in the boardroom. It would seem that the majority of today’s self-branded punks are more likely to consume their rebellion through mass media, mainstream retail, and the entrails of contrived marketing gimmicks than through the do-it-yourself bricolage of yesteryear.
Commitment, creativity, and resourcefulness no longer serve as gatekeepers to participation in a punk identity (or many other identities for that matter). Instead, any variety of retail outlets can provide the self with the tools needed to adopt forms of personal expression. Like Barbara Kruger’s Cartesian corrective, ‘I shop therefore I am’, today’s citizen-consumer can opt to be anyone she chooses. A personal identity is easily accessed at points of purchases. In fact, with late capitalism’s form of meritocracy, you can be anyone you desire, so long as you have the cash or credit. One’s freedom is limitless insofar as one is free to spend money or incur debt – and this is no less true when it comes to rebellion, anti-conformity, and dissent (cf. Frank, 1998). To this, Kruger might add, ‘I shop, therefore I protest [even that I shop]’.
That one is able to realize such commodified ‘sedition’ is bound up with what Slavoj Zizek calls false disidentification. This concept suggests that the simple belief that one’s subjectivity can be walled off – such that there is a private, interior self that is an autonomous entity separate from an exterior reality (cf. Rimke, 2000) – undermines one’s efforts to distance oneself from capital’s reach. In fact, this belief actually bolsters the ability of capital to become more pervasive. As Fleming and Spicer (2003) write: ‘[W]hen we dis-identify with our prescribed social roles we often still perform them – sometimes better, ironically than if we did identify with them’ (p. 160). Thus, when someone acquires a consumable that articulates the desire to be rebellious, individualistic, and non-conformist, that person is given permission to believe that she has somehow transcended late capitalist imperatives and the ongoing ‘commodification of everything’ (to use Wallerstein’s famous phrase).
Further, the belief that one is not taken in, or fooled by this ideology is self-perpetuating. This is because it fosters the myth that the self is a distinct, autonomous entity rather than a process that is contingent upon and interdependent with context, interaction, and sociality more generally. Thus, one is led to act upon a presupposition that in contesting capitalism, one’s foremost priority is simply a ‘pure’ interior motivation to buck the system. As Zizek (1999) asks: ‘[W]hat if, at a different – but no less irrevocable and structurally necessary – level ideology is effective precisely by way of constructing a space of false disidentification, of false distance towards the actual coordinates of the subject’s social existence?’ (np). The implicit response is that ideology does work that way.
Given the current state of punk, one might argue that much of punk is a form of false disidentification since it seemingly allows one to perform the role of the outsider. Such a generalization, however, ignores the genuine attempts to disarticulate punk from its co-opted and refigured formation by its commercial sponsors. Lawrence Grossberg (1992) illustrates, for instance, that rock (as a more generic genre) is prone to such struggles between the organic and the commoditized: ‘Rock constantly articulates its own authentic center, which is always on the way to becoming inauthentic’ (p. 208). Grossberg, giving voice to an idea or two from the files of Deleuze and Guattari, asserts that the result of these contestations led to some fascinating lines of flight into novel territories.
I would argue that one such line of flight can be found in the collected work of Cristy Road, a prolific artist, writer, and musician. Her work illustrates the manner in which ‘punk’ as a signifier, can be attributed stitched together meanings that escape capital’s formidable powers of containment – a containment that works by packaging punk and selling it as individuality, non-conformity, and authenticity. Road, on the other hand, strives to resist definitional containment. Punk, in this light, refers to nothing in particular, or, at least nothing that is reified in a fixed commodity. In short, by embracing indeterminacy and nomadism alongside a reflexive embodiment, Road’s work aligns itself with punk culture but demonstrates the need to critique punk from a reflexively entrenched position. In doing so, Road largely avoids issues of authenticity since she reconsiders identity not as any singular entity but as an aggregation that is plural, temporary, and contingent. Depending on the circumstances, her roles include: painter, novelist, musician, anarchist, Cuban, bipolar, queer, punk, activist, and more besides.
Her popular art work is rooted in a zine she crafted as an encomium of her favorite band. What some may perceive as ironic is the fact that the band is Green Day, one of a handful of punk bands to emerge from California’s East Bay to significant fame and (presumably) fortune. (Indicative of their mass market success, the band’s ‘American Idiot on Broadway’ will be launching a nation-wide tour for 2012.) Critics of these major label ‘sellouts’ complain that Green Day and their ilk have made possible the rise of an apolitical class of mall punks, poseurs and wannabes, faux-hawked fashion victims, not to mention a vast assortment of otherwise well-coiffed and appropriately tattooed and pierced punk ‘stars’ and ‘starlets’ who quickly become MTV darlings.
Road is keenly aware of the hand-wringers who are chagrined with Green Day’s role in the commodification of punk but she remains an unapologetic fan. In part this is due to her recognition of the band’s ongoing support of progressive causes as well as the members’ genuine (if surprising) lack of pretense. But it also has to do with her unwillingness to abide by consumer-capital’s construction of what the theorist Zygmunt Bauman (1992) refers to as an ‘episodic’ reality – wherein the demand for an unceasing flow of flavors-of-the-week also leads to an ever-growing pile of has-beens and fads. Bauman warns that such episodism contributes not only to cultural amnesia but an orientation for which the present holds no consequences for the future (since one episode of life is disconnected from all of the other episodes – consider the attitudinal differences between generations regarding financial debt as just one example). Rather than relinquish her past, Road acknowledges that her present course in life (i.e. in punk, in activist politics, etc.) is conditioned by that past. Meanwhile, the market monetizes novelty in ongoing efforts to conceal the past as unimportant and even non-existent, and in order to introduce (or re-introduce) the next great distraction. Rather than succumb to such amnesia, Road cultivates a reflexive approach toward her past even as it pertains to capital’s considerable power.
Road’s work exhibits the same sort of reflexivity characteristic of contemporary existence (cf. Beck, 1992 [1986]; Giddens, 1991). However, rather than merely viewing one’s lifecourse as an object to be worked on and worked out for the future, Road perceives her past as well as her present as viable targets for critique. Punk is frequently decried as suburban and dismissed as bourgeois, and many complain that participants in today’s punk scene lack the catalyzing challenges of individuals whose background is more urban-styled and hand-to-mouth. Indeed, much of the music today is fueled by a white, straight, youthful, and male-centered demographic. If there is any distinguishing characteristic regarding what makes this musical genre unique and lends it some modicum of credibility as a counter-culture it can be found in the reflexivity employed by so many of its adherents. Road notes this in Greenzine when she writes:
We could never feed others with our excursions and insurgency without recognizing that we are privileged. Scamming bus passes and single-handed theft wasn’t a commodity – because, honey, unlike a middle class white anarchist – a poor person can’t get away with it most of the time. (np)
While Road is not herself white, the majority of her fellow scene members are. Her critique is not meant as a denigrating slight so much as it is a call to exercise compassion and understanding of those who do not appear to share attitudes and views deemed properly progressive. This suggests that persons who consider themselves to be politically ‘aware’ avoid one-upmanship in a kind of ‘punker than thou’ competition. And it precludes jumping to judgment and the sorts of domineering moralizations that can pervade the left (and not simply the right). 1
In Road’s work we find that reflexivity provides a foundation for broader community engagement. Because she forces her readers to examine their own sets of privileges, readers can begin to see the necessity of avoiding the comfort of routinized insularity. The corollary that comes from such self-examination and critical reflection, is that a degree of self-referential abandonment is necessary. In other words, in an era dominated by niche marketing and hypersegmentation, where massive retail databases actively construct today’s citizen-consumers along dimensions of credit card debt, zip codes, app purchases, preferred grocery stores, brands of jeans, Amazon wish lists, frequency of yoga studio visits, etc., etc., etc. …, one might instead seek camaraderie with those who may not necessarily fit in with one’s own values, attitudes, and lifestyle preferences – or ‘VALs’ to use the common psychographic marketing approach. Road, however, finds commonality along dimensions of commitment (as she does in Indestructible: ‘Acceptance in punk rock was based only on whether or not you showed up’ (np)), and measures of subordination, which she describes in Greenzine as anyone who shares ‘violation in common’ (np).
If Audre Lorde is indeed correct that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, then Road’s style of activism, which necessitates reflexivity and rejects single-issue politicking, should prove to be an effective critique of late capital. In Greenzine she writes:
Goals towards idealism often painted portraits of abusing privilege and power. … Abuse that entails advocacy of quitting your job, when most members of the working class can’t afford to. Abuse where middle class white anarchists scoff at a family for consuming cheap products from large corporations as opposed to making their own. (np)
This is a compelling insight given the role ‘punk’ as a signifier plays in aggregating individuals along dimensions of tastes and preferences. Punk, for Road, while diffuse, is meant as a line of flight away from consumerist forms of containment. Here, one excavates ‘punk’ to reveal its earlier connotations of transgression. To be punk is essentially to rebel, Road says, though the rebellion is not targeted toward the hegemonic fashion or the flavor of the moment but rather toward hierarchicalization, containment, dominance, and identity.
On matters of identity, Road views her (and other) biological body(ies) much like nodes that circulate meanings and exist in relations. Upon this pliable body, gender can be fixed or unfixed. Thus, in Road’s work we further appreciate the random confluence that biology bears on arbitrary social constructs – especially when it comes to gender. In Indestructible she remarks:
At times I wondered if I had to be a woman … I wanted to go out late and drink beer. I wanted to wear overalls and dye my hair green. I wanted to talk about sex and stop pretending that I didn’t know what an orgasm was. I wanted to be who I was in my pre-pubescent fantasies. I wanted to be a teenage boy. (np)
Thinking about the body as a nodal point through which perspectives, values, thoughts, affects, emotions, and beliefs flow, provides a way to also think about the significance of the body as an ideological figure.
While Road appreciates the significance the body has with respect to the ways in which society inscribes and circulates its expectations, she also employs her own body as an instrument for recognition and resistance. This is illustrated well when, in Indestructible, she writes,
To fight an interest in walking upright and wearing short skirts. To fight against feeling like I should bare an interest in cosmetics and the boys everyone wanted to fuck. To fight the need of deodorizing my pussy and my human stench. (np)
Road’s work challenges her readers to think about the ways in which dominance produces its own possibility for resistance in the body.
The works discussed in this essay were all completed while Road was in her 20s. Given the pervasiveness of our culture’s demand that young women adhere to a narrow aesthetic ideal (fair skinned, underweight, etc.), and the severity of society’s sanctions for failing to at least attempt to adhere to such standards, is there anything riskier or more rebellious and transgressively punk than to embrace ‘unattractiveness’? These are issues with which she grapples throughout her work. In one passage she describes a conversation with a friend who, like so many other young women, never felt sufficiently desirable. Road astutely identifies some of the sundry linkages between this insatiable desire to be desired and the possibility of a line of flight (that is beyond the desirable/ugly dichotomy) as she does here in Greenzine:
We sat around the wooden table while she looked at me and said that every girl wants to be skinny. I said that every girl is conditioned to feel she should be skinny. And at some point in the history of human socialization, the standard was created where less skin – to the point of depleting health – constitutes beauty. This was fundamental to our social repression, our weaknesses, and our self-loathing complexes … She said that around me she felt comfortable without a coat covering her. I joked and said that punk rock kids are conditioned to enjoy being naked in public. (np)
Punk, here, becomes a line of flight away from the attributes granted through the marketplace. Punk isn’t about fashion nor is it anti-fashion. Indeed, to be punk is to be bare (naked).
To be recognized as worthwhile, indeed to be viewed as human in the world necessitates different things for different people. The measure of young women today is referenced through their physical appearance – thin but buxom, fair complected but not colorless, and increasingly prepubescent (botoxed expressionlessness and completely hairless below the neckline). To be otherwise is to be consigned either to the category of unlovable or to a highly specified fetish. Road’s work celebrates the hirsute, persons of color, and the fleshy without exoticizing what is conventionally outside the bounds of ‘attractive’.
As a consequence, she reminds us that sex, in spite of what seems to be the dominant thinking in the media, does not exclusively belong in the domains of the ‘beautiful people’. Nor is sex the exclusive territory of: those fortunate enough to be partnered (‘I valued the lessons on theft and finding your g-spot that I got outside of formal education. I valued the afternoons where we could ask one another questions like “What about America makes poor kids poor?”…’ (Indestructible, np)); heterosexuals (‘The truth is, when I fucked women, I carried the phallus. I carried the silicone armor and I wielded the thoughtful size of my tiny hands’ (Bad Habits, p. 56)); and certainly not men (in a description of a high school sex ed class, she challenges the teacher: “‘The sex you’re teaching us about only talks about the pleasure of dudes”’ (Indestructible, np)).
For Road, sexuality is subject to a wide range of coordinates that can be either pleasant or unpleasant, willed and welcomed, or imposed and heavily laden with world worries. However, Road’s appreciation for sexuality is not as an activity that can somehow be walled off and compartmentalized from other areas of life. Sex too is subject to the flows of dominance and ideologies. In Indestructible she asks, for instance, ‘Why does the way I pee, the way I fuck, or the way my chest looks dictate the language that’s acceptable for me to use?’ (np). Indeed, a full appreciation of Road’s work would necessarily include her visual artwork in addition to the substantial written output included in her zines, books, song lyrics, blog entries, and assorted essays and articles. The output of her artwork is substantial but fortunately the written materials referenced in this essay are replete with her drawings, sketches, and paintings. For example, Greenzine depicts the author sitting on a mountain of dildos and vibrators while reading The New Our Bodies Ourselves. From Bad Habits we see Road and others engaging and (importantly) taking pleasure in sex, drug use, and conventional illicit activities. And in Indestructible a nun walks in on two young women in flagrante; while on another page a spray painted message reminds us that ‘Dead Dudes Cant rape’ [sic].
Further discussion of Road’s drawings/paintings on my part would do this aspect of her work a disservice and so I highly recommend that the reader seek some of Road’s visual artwork on the internet. Given the nature of the present review essay, I am forced to instead rely primarily on her writings, which can be quite powerful and moving. Her narratives prove to be especially poignant, particularly when she is reflecting on her first-hand experiences of exploitation and abuse. Like so much of her work, the body is a central organizing figure through which power circulates and through which her understanding of a convergence of past and presents are configured.
In one particular passage from Greenzine, Road, who grew up in South Florida, is recounting the negotiations of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) that took place in Miami in 2003. Road, who participated in the widespread protests that erupted around the meetings, begins in a foreboding tone, ‘Earlier than expected, the riots began on that Thursday’.
She goes on to describe some of the events from her unique point of view which includes the following observations that are worth citing at length:
A friend of mine was shot with a rubber bullet in the knee and sent to the emergency room. A friend of mine was gagged, tear gassed, and sent to prison – she had just turned eighteen. A friend of mine stood there with a blank stare and was threatened with a beating. (np)
In the next paragraph she describes running into a man from whom she had suffered emotional and sexual victimization (‘I only wanted to vomit the life out of me’). He treats her as though nothing had taken place. She writes,
I wondered why he didn’t have the common decency to give me my space … I hated that I never directly confronted him – I invalidated myself … I wished he only knew how much it fucking hurt to consistently fall into submission. (np)
She goes on to describe how difficult the healing process had been and how nightmares continued to plague her sleep. Then she writes, ‘A string of police in riot gear rushed [our] small assemblage … I couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t stop peering through the corner of my eye in rage and disgust’ (np).
The juxtaposition of the FTAA protests with the encounter of an abusive ex-evokes a number of parallels related to both disenfranchisement and reclamation and the ongoing processes of territorialization and deterritorialization are recurring themes in Road’s work. For instance, sexual fantasizing and masturbation become techniques of empowerment not in the sense of control but in self-constitution. In other words, her work illustrates that one’s body is never entirely one’s own in any ontological sense but rather something that is in process with and in relation to other bodies. In a song that may or may not be related to her victimization she writes:
Darling there’s a crack in my self esteem, made up of your sick words and gasoline; sucked from a pump of manipulation and lies till you pulled that thread from between my thighs. ‘Fuck me over’ is, I guess, what you must have heard. When I asked you to go fuck yourself. SO why not go fuck yourself?… Your selfish hands, they certainly ran free, without much regard to me, criticizing my natural inadequacies, like sayin I love you, but your insides are ugly to me. [sic] (from the Homewreckers single Destroy)
One’s body, insofar as it desires and repulses and attracts and climaxes, can be constructed, trained, teased, and taught in a reflexive manner. Masturbation, then, is a means of sexualizing (or re-sexualizing) a body that has been de-sexualized, de-eroticized, and dehumanized by a culture that so often limits such activities to those who strive to remain skinny, young, famous, and wealthy.
Road’s work reveals potential lines of flight by re-asserting not merely that the personal is political, but that the political is biological in addition to biographical. That is, just as the self is not some autonomous entity that can be somehow extracted from its socio-cultural context, neither is the individual body. Road’s work attests to that fact and her reflexive approach to the intersection of her own body with late capitalism allows her to reveal both to herself and (through her work) her readers new ways of understanding bodies and charting them along potential coordinates of resistance.
In spite of middle-aged handwringers such as myself, punk (even today) provides the possibility for transgression and the transcendence of contrived hipsterism, apathetic self-absorption, and solipsistic intoxication. This is no small feat given late capital’s astounding talent for co-optation which has led many people to associate ‘punk’ with some combination of spiked mohawks, shredded t-shirts, pierced eyebrows, combat boots, and the like. Bodies, in our culture anyway, require adornment and ‘punk’ is merely one of many options and thereby functions as a consumerist cipher (after all, the most well known punk progenitor, the Sex Pistols, were no less a pre-fabricated artifice than today’s boy bands). Commodification can indeed evacuate ‘punk’ of any meaningful signification inasmuch as ‘punk’ is intended as a signifier for rebellion and transgression. On the other hand, Road’s work demonstrate that punk can also be recovered through processes of reflexivity and an awareness of the ways in which capital creates striations that segment, contain, and divide citizens into consumers.
The work of Cristy Road (and indeed others) reveals the potential for punk to be genuinely transgressive, in an era, no less, when DIY is just another channel on cable TV. I would suggest that Road’s continually growing oeuvre offers Critical Sociology’s readers a number of things, not the least of which is a reassurance that the kids are all right – or that there is promise and potential for as much. For instructors, her written works can easily be incorporated into classes on urban sociology, gender, race, sexuality, symbolic interaction, and culture, among others. In tandem with a variety of scholarship focused on matters of authenticity, commodification, identity, or social movements, her work articulates the continuing importance of youth cultures, the counter-culture, and the relevance of personal expression in an increasingly rationalized society. To any reader though, her work can be understood as a commendable reaction against complacency and an important artifact for the growing rabble, who with middle fingers in the air, dare to challenge neoliberal domination.