Autonomy and agency: The event of punk

This article interrogates the contested politics of punk. Against the reactionary trend to accept the ephemerality of punk as evidence of its obvious failure, its political naivete and subsequent recuperation, I defend the continuing relevance of punk precisely as a political project. Identified as an event in Badiou’s sense, punk erupts spontaneously in parallel with complementary European resistance movements and, for a brief incandescent moment, convulses history, placing all criteria of meaning and value in question. So, even if it ‘disappeared just as quickly’, punk survives its transience through people who, haunted by its emancipatory promise and radicalized by its ‘aesthetics of resistance’, are motivated to ‘a new way of being’ in its memory. Channelling the late Mark Fisher (aka k-punk), this article recovers the lost politics of punk, invoking its fidelity to social transformation through autonomous cultural practice to fulfil its revolutionary promise. The argument concludes that, far from an exhausted ‘musical genre’, the event of punk remains efficacious precisely because it is not reducible to any of its actual historical iterations.