How can graphic design be used to speculate on the creative imperatives that inspired post-punk's subcultural neophilia, and what might that reveal about today's cultural stagnation?
Post-punk is a retrospective and clumsy classification for the brief subcultural phenomenon which emerged from the ‘cultural shock’ of 1970s punk rock. Progressive elements of this UK scene have been described as popular-modernists – neophiles, preoccupied with a relentless pursuit of the new and an aversion to the past (Fisher in Butt et al, 2016: 11).
The historical context for UK post-punk is a period of economic recession and social decline. The post-war economic boom which had funded the welfare state, full employment, rising wages and an appetite for the ‘white heat of technology’ had been replaced by disillusionment with left-liberal economic policies, a global oil crisis, stock-market crashes, militant trade unions and high unemployment (Reynolds 2006: XXV).
Culturally, 1970s Britain was also treading water. The 1960s pop explosion and embrace of modernism had been replaced by an increasingly self-indulgent music scene and an appetite for social conservatism. For those who went on to form the vanguard of post-punk, ‘do-it-yourself’ creative experimentation was an opportunity to escape the mundanity of ‘no future’ Britain and speculate on new horizons. Future-facing creative imperatives were informed by the persistent trace of 1960s counterculture, space-age science fiction and early electronic music – all viewed through the prism of rock’n’roll.
Post-punk’s inception coincided with the moment where centre-left governments were displaced by conservatism in America and Britain. The economic policies introduced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (latterly termed neoliberalism) ushered in an era of nationalism and widening social divisions. The eventual erosion of post-punk’s experimental spirit and its shift towards ‘New Pop’ was in turn linked to an increased hostility towards counter-cultural utopianism. Changes to grants and benefits also had the effect of reducing the space necessary for the incubation of youth subcultures.
Post-punk was just the latest iteration in a succession of subcultural forms, stretching back to the 1920s ‘Jazz Age’ (Booker 1969: 54). The expectation was that every decade would herald a completely new set of cultural norms, reducing everything preceding as hopelessly archaic, redundant, a relic of history. The eventual collapse of the Soviet project in the 1980s led Francis Fukuyama to declare a victory for liberal democracies and free-market capitalism and the effective end point of sociocultural evolution and political struggle – ‘The End of History’ (Fukuyama 1992: 63). This notion of stasis is manifest in the decline of artistic production on both sides of the Berlin Wall after 1989.
Retrograde culture manifests itself in a denial of the future in favour of the comforting reassurance offered by the ‘ghost’ of the past. The postmodern promise made by neoliberal capitalism is one of constant innovation driven by dynamic market forces. However, outside of the early 1990s rave culture and sporadic innovations in electronic dance music, subsequent subcultures consist chiefly of revivalism. We can’t be hostile to the past in the way that post-punk was, because there isn’t the same sense of the future anymore (Fisher in Butt et al, 2016: 11).
The concept of hauntology gives voice to a nostalgia for futures which never arrived but whose spectre continues to ‘haunt’ the present. Hauntology provides an opportunity to stir up the ghost of post-punk and its unfulfilled potential without betraying its implicit rejection of retrospection (Stubbs 2018: 344). Understanding the creative imperatives behind post-punk’s pursuit of the ‘shock-of-the-new’ may help us to understand today’s cultural malaise.
Booker, C. (1969) The Neophiliacs: Revolution in English life in the 50s and 60s. Collins Clear-Type Press
Butt, G. Clayton, S. Eshun, K. Fisher, M. Gartside, G. (2016) Post-Punk Then and Now. London, Repeater
Fukuyama, F. (1992) The end of history and the last man. London. Penguin Books.
Reynolds, S. (2006) Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. Faber & Faber Ltd.
Stubbs, D. (2018) Mars by 1980: The story of electronic music. Faber & Faber
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