No Wave, Performance, and the Frenetic Flux of the Unchanging Present
My candidate for the least-striking observation of the day: “authenticity” is a preoccupation of the zeitgeist. The term is bandied about constantly, which is understandable because we’re all fed a lot of bullshit. But I’ve been wondering if authenticity’s neglected counterpart, performance, might not have greater utility for our end-of-days present.
It would be boring to point out that separating authenticity from performance is impossible. We’ve all got our Nietzsches, Freuds, and Sartres at the ready to point out that humans are odd creatures that put on a show for ourselves as much as for others. For my money, sociologist Erving Goffman’s brilliant and hilarious The Presentation of Self in Everyday Lifestands out, though David Grazian’s classic Blue Chicago about how blues performers engineer the impression of an “authentic” performance is just as fun on a different register.
What does it mean to “perform”? A rigorous definition could be derived from Goffman, yes, but countless others as well--Homi Bhabha’s account of mimicry in The Location of Culture, the existentialists, etc. It’s enough for now to say that it has much to do with self-consciously harnessing the inherently performative dimension of social life. If to be human is to manage one’s self-presentation, then consciously steering that performance for reasons beyond those of standard social decorum would lead to the type of performance we have in mind here.
Such as what reasons? Well, regardless of its necessity, performance can enrich experience. I have a soft spot for that pleasure. When critics call something “pretentious,” it’s often a cue I’ll like it, which might have something to do with having grown up in a rural area in which not embellishing at least a bit meant things were going to be pretty bland. More to the point, while there is necessity and pleasure in performance, there’s also utility. Performance can be a means for underscoring unappreciated truths or facets of lived reality.
I’ve been thinking about this recently in terms of No Wave film and punk rock, which are as overtly performative as anything I could imagine. Few things are more self-consciously contrived than the deliberate transgression of social norms in the tit-for-tat terms of punk. On an interpersonal level, punks themselves are often irritatingly histrionic.
Obviously, there is a point behind the comic theatricality of the “loud, loud, proud and punk” performance. At this point, that might not be a particularly original point, but it’s worth asking if it’s relevant and what its effects have been or could be.
It cuts both ways. On the one hand, in its day, the crass and willfully offensive edges of what we know as punk highlighted that many social conventions are arbitrary, hypocritical, and oppressive. In a Bourdieusian sense, a lot of social norms and aesthetic attitudes are vehicles for perpetuating social inequality. No doubt.
On the other hand, a part of me wonders if that performance didn’t help to usher in, or at least reflect, our current shameless social era. As fun as it is to beat up on the squares, I wouldn’t be the first to point out that the logical endpoint of a lot of that strategic offensiveness is reactionary hate and willful stupidity.
But that’s only one side of the story. I’ve been working through some of the classics of No Wave and the Cinema of Transgression over the last few months, which are of course punk’s filmic fellow travelers. Appropriately, they’re often just as intolerable aesthetically as many of their musical counterparts. It’s nice they’re out there, but, man, they can be tough to get through.
Still, what stands out to me is how timely Cinema of Transgression/No Wave’s underlying thrust is even while its trappings might seem a little dated. Of course, the shock value of getting high, saying crazy things, having sex, and speculating on government conspiracies has long since worn off.
Yet, many of the tradition’s points about sexuality, gender, and other oppressive norms might be more relevant than ever. As I’ve worked through them, I almost can’t believe how contemporary many of Nick Zedd, Lydia Lunch, Richard Kern, et al.’s points remain.
The films feel both tremendously contemporary and a little dated. Then again, maybe those dated features aren’t so dated if they’re inextricably linked to the broader conceptual critiques of hot-button socio-cultural issues? It’s unclear. The frenetic flux of our unchanging present where everything is new while fundamentally remaining the same blurs the relevant and the irrelevant.
We are experiencing rapid cultural change characteristic of a new post-Empire era (the terms of which punk may have been an unfortunate harbinger). Yet, it’s all as old as it is new. In many ways, the social categories and terms with which we make sense of our experience are fundamentally the same as those from the 1940s and 1950s. The modern culture wars feel like an eerie recasting of the Red Scare and monochromatic homophobia from times before. The template for our socio-cultural understanding was set nearly a century ago, and it still provides us with the categories with which we make sense of the world. This is all happening in the midst of everything being whipped up into a lunatic cyclone as the culture tanks and the nation declines.
Part of the challenge of the moment is to sort through this blurred relevance/irrelevance and break our stalled social progression. Do we continue to search the horizon for the vanishingly distant possibility of something new? Or draw upon the muted threads of counter thrusts that were both absorbed and not? Both? If so, which ones tighten the knot and which ones loosen it?
In his Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, Zedd wrote of the movement: “There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined.” The problem might be that we have yet to have imagined. Or maybe the problem is that we have.