Alternative existential territories - Subjective bricolage
From Unearthing The Music
This article, written by Mihai Laurentiu Fuiorea and translated by Octav Avramescu, was first published on Criticatac.ro. The original can be read here.
"As for young people, although they are crushed by the dominant economic relations which make their position increasingly precarious, and although they are mentally manipulated through the production of a collective, mass-media subjectivity, they are nevertheless developing their own methods of distancing themselves from normalized subjectivity through singularization. In this respect, the transnational character of rock-music is extremely significant; it plays the role of a sort of initiatory cult, which confers a cultural pseudo-identity on a considerable mass of young people and allows them to obtain for themselves a bare minimum of existential Territories." - Félix Guattari, The three ecologies
This article interrogates a past experience, centered on the alternative (punk) movement from the main South-West city of Romania called Craiova, in the '90s. How was the apparition of such a phenomenon there even possible? Was it just an adolescent and late manifestation of something that had already begun to disappear in the West? Could that experience reinvent itself? What can be recuperated today from it? How was urban space appropriated by such alternative groups? these are some of the questions that motivated the subjective bricolages that follow.
First of all, we need to specify what this text cannot do. It does not attempt to substitute itself for a sociological discourse on alternative, underground or marginal groups, on popular culture and fandom. It does not use the overly simplified definition of punk as a movement of young rebels who revolt against the system, whatever it may be, shocking the establishment with their eccentric behaviours. It even has no ambition of questioning theoretical or ideological foundations of such a cultural movement. It may do a bit of all this. Above all, this text is motivated by subjective explorations making room for playful ideas, opinions or affects necessary for a repositioning in relation to a not very distant past, and especially in relation to an immediate present. Moreover, the analysis of subcultural or marginal movements such as punk is still an open subject, and cultural memory, evanescent, tends to constantly write and rewrite the past. We therefore acknowledge some subjective excesses.
For starters, it should be recalled that in the 1990s in Romania we were living in a heightened social and economic precariousness, but inside the abstract spectrum of freedom. Then, and perhaps even today, fulfilment did not come from some here and now, but from a fantasized West, subjectively over-invested. Immediately after the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, for Romanians the dream of traveling freely to the West became palpable. One of the most tenacious forms of escapism in the communist era was, in itself, an obsession with fleeing across (closed) borders. For most Romanians the West was identified with an Edenic space of freedom and of material, cultural and social perfection. This desire materialized only for a short while, from the last few days of 1989 until 1992, when borders to the West closed again. And that space outside has remained for most an imaginary territory. However, new flows of ideas, people or objects begun to make inroads more and more easily across the newly re-closed borders.
It is in this context that must be placed the onset of subcultural and underground movements in Romania. The encounter with music, and especially with punk music, is one of those major events that marked many young Romanians of that time. The genre penetrated in Craiova before the 1989 revolution only through rare foreign radio broadcasts or through some of those that had contacts and relatives in the West. It was synonymous from the beginning with a form of freedom, and, in its own way, an unmanifestable cultural manifesto for the period. Immediately after the fall of communism, the few privileged who had earlier contact with punk music quickly disseminated the "genre". Against the background of the newly won freedom and sudden democracy, of major disorientation during the years immediately following the Revolution, of lack of consistency of social markers and models among young people, countercultural and subcultural trends such as punk have gained more and more followers in Romania. If before 1989 there were less than ten notorious fans of the genre in Craiova, by ‘92 their number increased to several hundred, and in the next years it would reach several thousand.
This temporal detour allows for a better representation of the experience had within such a movement, and it is important in order to understand what happened to us then, what forces and intensities traversed us, especially since today such an experience risks being minimized and considered anachronistic. It, however, mediates a necessary repositioning within our past and enables us to understand who we are today.
In what follows, rather than wondering what was the specificity of a Romanian subcultural movement, the stress is on the subjective perception from within, on how we thought ourselves different. This justifies the fact that reference is specifically made only to the punk subcultural phenomenon from Craiova in the '90s, although it is likely such considerations can be applied to other marginal events in different places. Subcultural movements in Romania are among the major social actors of public space after 1989, and can be considered an avant-garde for the latter’s repurposing. Undoubtedly, such presences are related to the dis/functionality of the post/communist public space, heterogeneous and equivocal, as well as to the unstable ideological and social context. The inheritance of a precarious urban space, without an effective praxis, without a civic project but "free", has certainly contributed to the coagulation of such a movement.
One of the problems made visible by the public existence of alternative movements after the 1990s was the destruction of public space through a long period of political and ideological management of the city by the communist power. Alternative movements allowed themselves to be shaped but also shaped the environment of their affirmation, entering a relationship with it. They can be understood first and foremost as ways of being in the streets, with characteristics of presence, exposure and visibility, but also as ways of actively engaging with the urban space, and according to different situations, formulating demands. The street, as an intersubjective space, one of interaction, is a democratic space par excellence. Or, if we think of the public space as a place of intersection, of relationships, of meeting, then we can say that groups belonging to an alternative movement open up the city to new possibilities, beyond the official, imposed practices. And these groups dynamically experience the urban environment through recourse to forms of protests, of street display, nomadism, physically and affectively investing public space. Patterns of behaviour develop that compete with the established social norm and with the uniformization of urban behaviours.
On the one hand, there is a marked difference between the use of urban space by groups belonging to alternative movements in Romania in the ‘90s, and such groups in the West. It depends, in our opinion, on how the city center was used. In Romania, such groups did not evolve, as it happened more often than not in the West, in the urban peripheries, but in the city centers, because the center in the '90s had lost its symbolic power of the years previous. And on the other hand, these groups were ideologically different from such groups in the West. Unlike the West, where underground groups positioned themselves politically on the left, in Romania they appeared to be rather apolitical. This is due to the fact that they came during a background of post-communist crisis, generalized at social, identity and political level. This does not mean that the members of these groups, such as in Craiova, were not seduced by political ideas, including anarchism. However, the political orientation was not defining, and what constituted the group was not strictly related to such an identification.
Nevertheless, there are common traits between East - West: the political, through recourse to the idea of anarchism; the aesthetic, expressed in music and dance; and the ethical, expressed through the assumption of militant behaviour.
The recourse to anarchism, understood rather implicitly then, can be seen in this case not as a political program, nor as an ideology, but as a struggle without a center and a vertical. In other words, a collective struggle, at the same time singular in relation to a daily life perceived as precarious, closed and immobile. Regarding the musical dimension of punk, it can be said that with its immediately defining simplicity it opens the possibility of a common, direct, relational creativity. Especially pogo, as a form of intensive (non) dance, body to body, without structure, without rules, in which the bodies collide randomly, anonymously and impersonally, is a generator of deindividualized energies. And the ethics of the movement was manifested through elementary, raw behaviours, through forms of mocking social elevation, the artificiality of discourses and of any forms of coercion from the other social formations. Behaviours, agreements and the dances of subcultural currents should not be reduced to simple forms of belonging, nor to simple forms of externalization, but to manifestations of some affective resonance, of some collective relation beyond the subjective identity. After all, any forms of cultural manifestation, be it dance, poetry, music or performance, are more than a form of subjective expression. They are ways of artistic “deterritorialization”, which make possible the creation of real, imaginary and symbolic territories, alternatives from the uniformizing pressure of social norms. It can be said on this basis that Romanian subcultural groups in the punk movement were a viable reinvention of the Western musical phenomenon, even if delayed in time and space and without rising to the scale of those in the West.
The cohesion of the movement, as we have experienced it, was more about these ways of being together, rather than about coherent militant ideology. So, more important than finding at any cost a Romanian specificity of the movement, it would be better to ask why and how it worked primarily as a regrouping. The problematic of the group is not insignificant here, as it has been and is at stake in the many forms of political resistance. Problematized in this way, the example of the group in which we took part allows us to further ask ourselves what were and still are our social, urban, aesthetic practices and what type of group we can form under the current structure of power relations. A simpler perspective on Romanian punk as a form of resistance to the dominant forms of power seems unsatisfactory, because it could be deduced that it was only a reaction to the political power of that time. It should be understood rather as an opening up to the affirmation of subjective interferences and alterations, to new forms of communication.
What was then the significance of the movement? We can say as a temporary conclusion that it was a question of (re)gaining spaces for becoming different, of (re)inventing new relations beyond their institutional limitation, their social coding, and available fixed collective identities. In other words, we can speak of a transformation of the subjects' relationship with themselves in response to forms of social implosion, of the individual and collective invention of an immediate, everyday "micropolitics". Certainly, such groups continue to exist today and the forms of resistance are multiple and constantly reinventing themselves. We believe that such a phenomenon is worth questioning. It was for us a personal and social experience of a different subjectivation, of a different form of relationship, different from the stereotyped forms prescribed by our social milieu. The experience from within the group can be thought of as a series of practices that allow for the resingularization of relationships with oneself and the others by inventing relationships of friendship, solidarity, etc. These practices involve timelines unsynchronized with those of an imposed time. Practices such as walking, meeting, reading, concerts, availability, oppose the social imperatives of speed, acceleration, performance, competition.
Today's crises call for the renewal of social practices, aesthetic practices, self-practices and of the relationships with others. The experience of alternative movements such as punk should not be seen as a musical, social or political experiment that has lived its heyday, but as a (re)source in the problematization of the present. It was - and still can be, but otherwise reinvented - an alternative to closing in and uniformity, against identity folding upon itself, away from the functions and roles of power. Thus, the problem of punk, as we see it, is important not only as a recycling of an individual or cultural memory but also because it can question our current ways of being. Why are such forms of relationships no longer possible today and why couldn't such groups be thought of as a laboratory / site for the reinvention of alternative life forms? Such models are at hand. After all, nothing predicted the appearance and scale of the punk phenomenon in Craiova, Romania, in the '90s. Although it may seem nostalgic, such a question deserves to be asked in the current context, in which new technologies or neoliberalism duplicate post-communist reminiscences, determining ways of relating characterized by "dispossession" and "separation".
Without going into details, it seems important to us to mention some of the effects of this double movement, dispossession (of the self) and separation (from others): the tendency of sedentarization of social relations, the bureaucratization of daily life, the degradation of cultural values in increasingly standardized mass media, the consumer-oriented imperatives. The continuous connection to the new technologies determine reactions of loneliness, inability to act or get out of an imaginary world, folding back upon oneself and on immediate preoccupations, the impossibility to form a group. The mapping of such transformations that are manifesting themselves in society today can easily lead us to the thought of a dead end. But it is even more important to think of the urgency of reinventing new forms of life together. We can say that punk, as we have experienced it, can be understood in essence as an art of living, and can inspire alternative models from social uniformity and isolation.