Políticas de cada Estrategia

Take as an example the incredible impact of the Sex Pistols (1976-8) not just on rock music, but on cultural life more generally. In his remarkable book Lipstick Traces: A

Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus (1989: 3) makes much of a

recollection by Elvis Costello of his days "back when he was still Declan McManus, a computer operator waiting for his train to Central London." McManus had seen the Sex Pistols on their first TV appearance (December 1, 1976), and recalls his experi- ence the next day: "On the way to work, I was on the platform in the morning and all

T H E D I A L E C T I C S O F S P E C T A C L E 161

the commuters were reading the papers when the Pistols made headlines - and said F U C K on TV. It was as if it was the most awful thing that ever happened. It's a mistake to confuse it with a major event in history, but it was a great morning - just to hear people's blood pressure going up and down over it." The weight of Marcus's book, however, is to show just what "a major event in history" the Sex Pistols .were, even if they were thought up as "a joke" by their manager Malcolm McLaren — a major event because it was first so transgressive and then so ij.t£DJirinal . p x'p n ;f ahy.gy

accidentally so. The result was indeed important: people took notice. But so was the way Punk was organized and reorganized into a movement, even if short-lived and frequently coopted. "The record that was to change the world": that is how Marcus describes "Anarchy in the U K . " This was ? ^v-^rH _ and amovement - that was both

an act of transgression and resistance, even if now, twenty years on, body-art and piercings, disaffection" an3 mainlining are so middle-class and bourgeois as to be

In this regard it is 4H'jQbablv.m^idRHW,.4a the.realm of cultural politics, to make hard-and-fast boundaries between categories such as "resistance" .and "transgres- sion," and as I will argue in a moment, between alternative culture that.is-SOQiehow " r e d " jjnd,that,which is commodified. For it is always problematic to draw bound- aries between, say, "resistance," and "co-optation," especially in a world, like ours, where there simply no longer is any life outside of commodity production (see especially Frank 1997a; Debord 1994). That is, the power urging conformity and social control can often be turned in on itself: commodities - like records and concerts, like articles of clothing and magazines - can became not necessarily "sites" forresistance. but certainly tools for it. It all depends on _how they are used. Similarly, there may very well be a transgressive or resistant potential in walking in a city or watching TV in a certain way, but it will always remain only a potential until it is ^rgtni7ffl and mfirlf* i n t ^ J L I l I I L f ^ ' That is what cultural politics is all about: strategizing in the realm of practice and meaning to create new worlds, new histories, new ways to live. Or conversely, strategizing to preserve the old.

The Sex Pistols and the Punk movement that flowed from the band were transgres- sion at its rawest: Punk was precisely about impurity, about breaking down borders (between audience and performer, for example, or between professional and amateur, between health and disdain); and it was about shock. In this regard, the Sex Pistols' act tapped into the suppressed (and repressed) history of "carnival," those popular festivals of transgression during the European Middle Ages that ritually turned the world on its head (see Bakhtin 1984; Burke 1978; Cresswell 1996: 121-33; Jackson 1989: 79-80; Stallybrass and White 1986). "Such things as carnivals, fairs, and everyday life," Cresswell (1996: 78) writes, "are a powerful set of tools for subordin- ated culture that constantly undermine the presumptions of elite culture. The inver- sion of symbolic domains of 'high' and 'low,' for instance, pokes fun at the establishment and irritates the agents of dominant culture." Now listen to how Marcus (1989: 67) describes the Punk scene:

15 Or is that an exaggeration? Recall the furor that greeted the celluloid depiction of Scottish drug user?.

Trainspotting (1996), when many interpreted that film as glorifying heroin use (even if it really did the

C U L T U R A L P O L I T I C S

As people in the Roxy heard the Adverts, or the two girls and three boys who made up X- ray Spex, or the balding teenage Beckett fan who sang for the Buzzcocks - all people who had climbed up out of the Sex Pistols' first audiences - there was a reversal of perspective, of values: a sense that anything was possible, a truth that could be proven only in the negative. What had been good - love, money, and health - was now bad; what had been bad - hate, mendacity, and disease - was now good. The equations ran on, replacing work with sloth, status with reprobation, fame with infamy, celebrity with obscurity, nimble fingers with club feet, and the equations were unstoppable. In this new world, where suicide was suddenly a code word for meaning what you said, nothing could be more hip than a corpse

Punk in this sense was a carnival, where the celebration was of the "use value, profanity, and incompleteness [that] temporarily dethrones the sacred, the complete, and the distinguished" (Cresswell 1996: 78). Punk was dangerous - unless it could be contained. For Punk "changed history" precisely to the degree it was "noticed" and recognized-as a subversive inversion -""Where fudiehceTkcame performerTand neither were very good - a n d j o thatdegree it became, for too short a period, clearly, an act of resistance: t° state, fn t j ^ n o r r n s nf pmjTlnympnt anH unemployment and their associated ethic of work, to Art and Music, and, to a much lesser extent, to coTnmo-

Note, however, Cresswell's important caveat about carnivalesque moments: they tpj^nrarily iruietsL^he^wnrM- the m n m e n t k either officially limited"?^ with Mardi Gras) or their-subversive.power is reabsorbed into dominant structures of power and ordered norms of culture. Ritual carnivals had long b e e n a part of the European cultural calendar. Carnivals institutionalized what has been called a "license in ritual"; that is, it was a time in which inversions of the social order were sanctioned - but also contained by their very nature as temporary. Even though Carnival often took place in the streets of the city, it nonetheless took place in a "world apart." This inversion of the "normal" social order created an incredible, but also quite cathartic, "tension between 'social control' and social protest" (Jackson 1989: 80). Carnival thus substituted a temporary spectacle of inversion for a more permanent revolution in the social order. Carnival-was—and-is^a means of lettingjoff steam.16

Even so, there are enough instances of the resistance implicit in Carnival to cast at least some doubt on the degree to which we might want to see Carnival as merely a means of controlling dissent. Indeed, Carnival was..afterL a ksy mornent in the active transformation .aL.societv. That is why Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1993) (drawing on and developing the work of Bakhtin) take pains to show the means by which the old medieval Jymapeauianiivalswere increasingly brought under control - if not outrightuioseddown - as the industrial rp v n l'itirui took bn l d ^ P f l i 2 j . £ lf more '1 moderiL'lii.Qcial order developed. In the period from 1850 to 1890, fairs and carnivals, ritualistic wakes and other public uses of the streets were canceled, closed, or intensely sanitized throughout Europe. While Stallybrass and White's point is that many of the ritualistic transgressions of Carnival were displaced and not eliminated with "the attack on Carnival," they nonetheless show a host of ways in which 16 For a contemporary example, think of the American college ritual of Spring Break in Daytona Beach, Palm Springs and Mazatlan, "carnivals" that are now so ritualized as to be an annual feature on MTV.

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Carnival was driven underground^ or to the margins of the geographical and social order. In England, for example,

the sites of "carnival" moved more and more to the coastal periphery, to the seaside The seaside was partially legitimated as a carnivalesque site of pleasure on the grounds of health, since it combined the (largely mythical) medicinal virtues of the spa resorts with tourism and the fairground. It can be argued that this marginalization is a result of other, anterior processes of bourgeois displacement and even repression. But even so, this historical process of marginalization must be seen as an historical tendency distinct from the actual elimination of carnival. (Stallybrass and White 1993: 291; see also Shields 1991)

Notice what Stallybrass and White are saying. The carnivalesque is_really never eliminated; instead its form and location are c h a n g e d . p e r K a p s m a H p " s a f e r " and

more ordinary. "In the long process of disowning carnival and rejecting its periodic inversions of the body and the social hierarchy," they explain, "bourgeois society problematized its own relation to the power of the 'low,' enclosing itself, often defining itself, by its suppression of the 'base' languages of carnival" (Stallybrass and White 1993: 292). But Stallybrass and White make a key argument at this point. They argue that the displacement and suppression of Carnival was certainly a process ofspatial margin allzat ion^b ut it was also tempgraili Carnival had relied on a ritualized seasonal cycle "which had once structured the whole year" (because Carnival was a particular time as well as a place), then its suppression meant that the carnivalesque was "no longer temporally pinned into" that cycle, and thus could "erupt" at any time "from the literary text, as in so much surrealist art, or from the advertisement hoard- ing, or from a pop festival or a jazz concert" (1993: 292).

So "Carnival" can live on, and it is unpredictable; but it also seems quite well- tamed: in the seaside town to which one might resort for a "dirty weekend," in the Ferris wheels and roller coasters along the boardwalk, and in the touring summer music festivals, carefully staged and choreographed. Stallybrass and White (1993: 292) conclude: "Carnival was too disgusting for bourgeois life to endure except as a sentimental spectacle." But that seems to assume that "spectacle" itself is a one-way street, and not a dialectical moment of potential transgression. And that just might not be a safe assumption to make: Punk, for example, was such an important act of transgression and resistance precisely because it was - it became - such a huge

spectacle, a spectacle that changed Punk from an underground movement of resis-

tance into a hyped and quite accessible event. On the idea of spectacle, then, a whole new complication in understanding cultural politics - and the geography of that politics - comes to the fore.