Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

274 Brian Holmes
this antagonistic logic, which led to the exclusion of most of the artists from
the group. But with the notion of subversive cartography and the practice
of “constructed situations,” it was as though something new had been released
into the world. Without having to ascribe exclusive origins or draw up faked
genealogies, one can easily see that since the period around 1968, the old
drive to art’s self-overcoming has found a new and much broader Weld of
possibility, in the conXicted and ambiguous relations between the educated
sons and daughters of the former working classes and the proliferating products
of the consciousness industry. The statistical fact that such a large number
of people trained as artists are inducted into the service of this industry,
combined with the ready availability of a “Xuid language” of détournement
that allows them to exit from it pretty much whenever they choose, has
been at the root of successive waves of agitation that tend simultaneously
to dissolve any notion of a “vanguard” and to reopen the struggle for a substantial
democracy. And so the question on everyone’s lips becomes, how do
I participate?
“This is a chord. This is another. Now form a band.” 1 The punk
invitation to do-it-yourself music supplies instant insight to the cultural
revolution that swept through late-1970s Britain. And the hilarity, transgression,
and class violence of public punk performance comes surprisingly
close to the SI’s deWnition of a situation: “A moment of life concretely and
deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance
and a play of events.” 2 The relation between punk and Situationism was
widely perceived at the time. 3 But there was something else at stake, something
radically new by comparison to the disruptive tactics of the 1960s,
because the DIY invitation had another side, which said: “Now start a label.”
The proliferation of garage bands would be matched with an outpouring of
indie records, made and distributed autonomously. In this way, punk marked
an attempt at appropriating the media, which in a society dominated by the
consciousness industry is tantamount to appropriating the means of production.
4 Punk as productivism. There’s a constructive drive at work here: a
desire to respond, with technical means, to the recording companies’ techniques
for the programming of desire. The punk movement in Britain was
an attempt to construct subversive situations on the scales permitted by
modern communications.
Something fundamental changes when artistic concepts are used
within a context of massive appropriation, amid a blurring of class distinctions.
A territory of art appears within widening “underground” circles, where
the aesthetics of everyday practice is lived as a political creation. The shifting
grounds of this territory could be traced through the radical fringe of the
techno movement from the late 1980s onward, with its white-label records