Frankfurt School, not Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, or Walter Benjamin, had ever recognized: mass culture’s pop cult heart. Stranger still: the old critique of mass culture now paraded as mass culture, at the least as protean, would-be mass culture. If punk was a secret society, the goal of every secret society is to take over the world, just as the goal of every rock ’n’ roll band is to make everyone listen.
Probably no definition of punk can be stretched far enough to encloseTheodor Adorno. As a music lover he hated jazz, likely retched when he first heard of Elvis Presley, and no doubt would have understood the Sex Pistols as a return to Kristallnacht if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die in 1969. But you can find punk between every other line of
Minima Moralia:
its miasmic loathing for what Western civilization had made of itself by the end of the Second World War was, by 1977, the stuff of a hundred songs and slogans. If in the Sex Pistols’ records all emotion is reduced to the gap between a blank stare and a sardonic grin, in Adorno’s book all emotion is compressed into the space between curse and regret—and on that field, the slightest reach toward compassion or creation can take on a charge of absolute novelty; along with every sort of fraud and swindler, negation empowers the smallest gesture. The negationist, Raoul Vaneigem wrote, is “like Gulliver lying stranded on the Lilliputian shore with every part of his body tied down; determined to free himself, he looks about keenly: the smallest detail of the landscape, the smallest contour of the ground, the slightest movement, everything becomes a sign on which his escape may depend.” When life is recast in these terms, when domination is posited, when a mere gesture, a new way of walking, can signify liberation, one result is an almost limitless opportunity for popular art.
Minima Moralia
was written as a series of epigraphs, of ephemeralities, each severed block of type marching relentlessly toward the destruction of whatever intimations of hope might appear within its boundaries, each paragraph headed by an impotent oath, a flat irony, each (chosen at random) a good title for a punk 45: “Unfair intimidation,” “Blackmail,” “Sacrificial Lamb,” “They, the People.” After 1977 a spoken-rant lp could have been made into an album called
Big Ted Says No
and it would have made perfect pop sense, and for that matter it did: listen to
Metal Box
by PiL, Johnny Rotten’s post–Sex Pistols band, read
Minima Moralia
as you listen, and see if you can tell where one leaves off and the other begins.
What Adorno’s negation lacked was glee—a spirit the punk version of his world never failed to deliver. Walking the streets as pose and fashion, Adorno’s prophecies were suffused with happiness, a thrill that made them simple and clear. “I am the fly,” Wire sang in the Roxy: “I am the fly / I am the fly in the ointment.” The Frankfurt School critique was rusting boilerplate by 1977, less refuted by history or better ideas than turned into an irritatingjingle by having topped too many art-student, student-radical charts in the 1960s: All of social life is organized / From the top down / Through impenetrable hierarchies / To make you into a receptacle / For the culture / That will seduce you into functioning / As a robot in the economy. What was new was the impact of the jingle, its new sound. Now you could name it and claim it. Bits of a theory contrived before you were born rose out of the pavement and hit you in the face as if you’d fallen headfirst onto the concrete. Your face was a totality, in the mirror a representation of the only totality you really knew, and the shock of recognition changed your face—now you walked down the street with a frozen mouth that looked like a death sentence to passersby and felt like a smile to you. Because your face was your totality, and the shock had changed it, the shock changed the street. Once out of
Probably no definition of punk can be stretched far enough to encloseTheodor Adorno. As a music lover he hated jazz, likely retched when he first heard of Elvis Presley, and no doubt would have understood the Sex Pistols as a return to Kristallnacht if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die in 1969. But you can find punk between every other line of
Minima Moralia:
its miasmic loathing for what Western civilization had made of itself by the end of the Second World War was, by 1977, the stuff of a hundred songs and slogans. If in the Sex Pistols’ records all emotion is reduced to the gap between a blank stare and a sardonic grin, in Adorno’s book all emotion is compressed into the space between curse and regret—and on that field, the slightest reach toward compassion or creation can take on a charge of absolute novelty; along with every sort of fraud and swindler, negation empowers the smallest gesture. The negationist, Raoul Vaneigem wrote, is “like Gulliver lying stranded on the Lilliputian shore with every part of his body tied down; determined to free himself, he looks about keenly: the smallest detail of the landscape, the smallest contour of the ground, the slightest movement, everything becomes a sign on which his escape may depend.” When life is recast in these terms, when domination is posited, when a mere gesture, a new way of walking, can signify liberation, one result is an almost limitless opportunity for popular art.
Minima Moralia
was written as a series of epigraphs, of ephemeralities, each severed block of type marching relentlessly toward the destruction of whatever intimations of hope might appear within its boundaries, each paragraph headed by an impotent oath, a flat irony, each (chosen at random) a good title for a punk 45: “Unfair intimidation,” “Blackmail,” “Sacrificial Lamb,” “They, the People.” After 1977 a spoken-rant lp could have been made into an album called
Big Ted Says No
and it would have made perfect pop sense, and for that matter it did: listen to
Metal Box
by PiL, Johnny Rotten’s post–Sex Pistols band, read
Minima Moralia
as you listen, and see if you can tell where one leaves off and the other begins.
What Adorno’s negation lacked was glee—a spirit the punk version of his world never failed to deliver. Walking the streets as pose and fashion, Adorno’s prophecies were suffused with happiness, a thrill that made them simple and clear. “I am the fly,” Wire sang in the Roxy: “I am the fly / I am the fly in the ointment.” The Frankfurt School critique was rusting boilerplate by 1977, less refuted by history or better ideas than turned into an irritatingjingle by having topped too many art-student, student-radical charts in the 1960s: All of social life is organized / From the top down / Through impenetrable hierarchies / To make you into a receptacle / For the culture / That will seduce you into functioning / As a robot in the economy. What was new was the impact of the jingle, its new sound. Now you could name it and claim it. Bits of a theory contrived before you were born rose out of the pavement and hit you in the face as if you’d fallen headfirst onto the concrete. Your face was a totality, in the mirror a representation of the only totality you really knew, and the shock of recognition changed your face—now you walked down the street with a frozen mouth that looked like a death sentence to passersby and felt like a smile to you. Because your face was your totality, and the shock had changed it, the shock changed the street. Once out of
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