I Wanna Destroy

Towards an Aesthetic of Violence

by Erica Weitzman

POSTMODERNISM’S NOT DEAD

I’m not talking about / a Beatles song / written 100 years / before I was born /
They’re all talking about / the round and round / but who’s got the real / anti-
parent-culture sound / I know nothing’s / gonna be all right again
—The Nation of Ulysses, “N-Sub Ulysses” (1992)

N
ational Gallery, Washington D.C., 1990: I turn into the
next room and it’s there in front of me, impossible to avoid or
even turn away from; it seems to suck the room itself into a
vanishing point that never coalesces, into its infinite depths of ash and
devastation. I feel suddenly frightened, as if the scene is not merely a
painting on a wall, but all reality. On the floor beside me, by the same
artist, is a quarter-sized replica of a charred fighter plane, laden with
bundles of books in what turns out to be lead leaf. There is nothing
written in the books. It takes me a moment to pull myself away.

Cherry Hill, NJ, 1993: Times have changed a little: at one point dur-
ing the show in this suburban basement (the walls are faux-grain ply-
wood panel), the massive, green-haired front-man starts talking about
how difficult it is to be a fat man in American society. When he breaks

54 | Anamesa
down in actual tears, a girl from the audience comes up to him; they hug
for a good half-minute. But the song the band subsequently launches
into is no less desperate for all that: “I’m an android! I’m an android!”
the singer screams into the microphone; during the breaks he picks up a
trombone and works it like a bicycle pump over the speeded-up guitars.
It is at once totally incoherent and surprisingly beautiful. During the last
song, the drummer jumps up on his drums and, banging the cymbals the
whole way down, smashes the set into pieces.

FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER…

Gonna finish up what / Goering Goebbels started

—The Deadbeats, “Let’s Shoot Maria” (1978)

It goes without saying that violence is not a new phenomenon. In fact,

there are good arguments suggesting that violence is the determining fac-
tor of human society, if not the human psyche itself. A total understand-
ing of the origins of violence is without a doubt beyond the scope of this
paper. This paper, therefore, limits itself to discussing what I will call the
“aesthetic of violence”: violence as it manifests itself in cultural produc-
tions, in art, and especially violence as art in itself—violence, as it were,
as self-conscious art form. There are an innumerable number of works of
art which portray violence, and their history goes from the Iliad to King
Lear to The Death of Marat to Badlands, but this is not what I mean.
Such works, to greater or lesser extents, treat violence as something
external: violent acts are portrayed because these things exist; to portray
them objectively is to be “true to life” or “realistic.” Works based on an
aesthetic of violence also portray violence. But they, as opposed to these
other works, take part in the violence they portray: they assault the spec-
tator, they turn against their own media and foundations and mimetic
principles, and they glorify violence as a creative, regenerative force, or
even as a kind of beauty in itself. In Guy Debord’s formulation: “Not a

The Violence Issue | 55

 negation of style, but the style of negation.”1
These principles, too, are not new by the time anything called post-
modernism rolls around. In one sense, the “style of negation” is the
principle of all avant garde movements and certainly with the advent
of modernism and Dada it is well in play. But for all that Dadaism was
a reflection of its historical time, its aims seem limited to the art world,
taking a hammer—even if sometimes a literal one—to outdated notions
of truth and beauty. The aesthetic of violence in the postmodern age, on
the other hand, is comprehensive: it aims to smash everything. “These
are violent times!” the cry goes up, in some cases with alarm, in others,
with a kind of bitter glee. In the 1960’s and, especially, the seventies, the
ideas of aesthetic negation, nihilism, violence, etc.—this time combined,
as a matter of principle, with the more “ordinary” kind of violence—per-
form the very crises of these decades on the stage, in the galleries, in the
libraries, and in the streets. Thus I would like to make a claim in these
pages for the aesthetic of violence—in which “the fractured nature of
perception in an alienated, media-saturated society”2 plays itself out as
tragi-comedy and grotesque—as nothing less than the artistic representa-
tion of postmodernism itself.

VILE MEANS…

This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only

problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had
told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I
was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues,
and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I
saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond
their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
—Joan Didion, “The White Album” (1979)

“In June of this year [1968]” reads the medical report—her own—which
Didion includes in her essay, “patient experienced an attack of vertigo,

56 | Anamesa
nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out. A thorough medical
evaluation elicited no positive findings and she was placed on Elavil, Mg
20, tid…The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality
in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses and
increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality.”3
On June 10, 1968, the National Commission on the Causes and
Prevention of Violence was formed.4 In this case, legal and academic
evaluation elicited several volumes of findings. Signs of failing defenses,
however, continued.
“The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social re-
lationship between people that is mediated by images”5: the image of a
million suburban families, each clustered around the television in their
individual houses, is a familiar one from the thirties onward—so familiar,
in fact, that we can easily forget how much this signifies. (The infinite
mise en abyme potential of mass media, certainly, is evident in the re-
currence of this very image whenever the news media or a film wants
to show public reaction to an event: mediation mediated.) One cause of
this is technological—ever-cheaper gadgets and the money with which
to buy them, not to mention the increase in leisure time with which to
enjoy them. Part of this is sociological: population growth, migration to
cities, and increased communication across national and ethnic borders
require, at once for adequate “control,” profit, and simple convenience,
a greater homogenization and standardization. The world itself gets
bigger: “In recent decades the ability of one society to change the envi-
ronment of another has been geographically expanded, thus extending
the boundaries of our ‘critical’ environment. As this has taken place, we
have become increasingly dependent upon others, particularly the mass
media, to provide us with a survey of a larger proportion of the environ-
ment relative to what we can personally observe.”6 In other words, our
technological advances and increasing cosmopolitanism have made us
precisely into a society of spectators. Perhaps no social critic or philoso-
pher has expressed the situation more completely—and more sinister-
ly—than this Warner Communications bulletin from 1977:

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 Having allowed technology to create the problem, man has begun using tech-
nology to redress it. With the exponentially increased availability of all forms
of communication, the media of ‘entertainment’ have been pressed into service
to provide the individual with models of experience, opportunities for self-rec-
ognition, and the ingredients of identity…a marriage of culture and technology
unprecedented in history, and a commensurate revolution in the human sense
of self.7

This heaven / gives me migraine

—Gang of Four, “Natural’s Not In It” (1979)

Not all revolutions are necessarily for the better, however. Debord
understands this when he writes, “Behind the glitter of the spectacle’s
distractions, modern society lies in thrall to the global domination of
a banalizing trend that also dominates it at each point where the most
advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly broadened
the panoply of roles and objects available to choose from…power and
leisure—the power to decide and the leisure to consume…are the alpha
and the omega of a process that is never questioned.”8 “The promise of
a new life summed up in a few pennies less for eggs and cheese,”9 writes
Greil Marcus of Gang of Four’s acidly satirical “Damaged Goods.” And
on their song “Return the Gift”: “It’s a little tale about how an individu-
al shrinks—how one becomes not a subject but merely an object of his-
tory—when he or she wins a radio give-away contest. It’s a song about
the way the winner exchanges the multitudes of a unique personality for
capital’s reductive prize: fear…the fear that, having accepted a symbol of
a good life…you will cease to exist.”
“I [had] the illusion that I could any minute order from room service
a revisionist theory of my own history, garnished with a vanda orchid. I
watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian
Hotel in Honolulu, and also the first reports from My Lai.”10 Elsewhere:
“We grow accustomed to the weirdest of juxtapositions: the serious and
the trivial, the comic and the tragic…a fantasia of effects that resembles

58 | Anamesa
the debris left by a storm.”11 The essay in which this latter quotation oc-
curs presents a stunning—and all-too-familiar—illustration of this in the
Huntley-Brinkley report of the Robert Kennedy assassination; I quote
the transcription in full:

Chet Huntley: Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the head and gravely
wounded early today before hundreds of people in his political headquarters in
a Los Angeles hotel, a month and a day after the assassination of Dr. Martin
Luther King in Memphis, seconds after he had made a speech celebrating his
victory over Senator Eugene McCarthy in the California Democratic presiden-
tial primary…

Continuing the reporting of this event, the scene was shifted to the hospital:

Jack Perkins: The latest medical bulletin…says Senator Robert Kennedy re-
mains in extremely critical condition…

Frank Mankiewicz, the Senator’s press secretary was then shown reading the medi-
cal bulletin. Perkins had some more to say, and then the camera returned to Chet
Huntley for further reporting of certain aspects of the situation. He was followed by
the face and clipped voice of David Brinkley.

David Brinkley: …we have assembled some of the film from last night, begin-
ning with the Senator’s victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel, after he won
the California primary.

The film, lasting several minutes, showed the speech, the cheers from the crowd, the
moment of the shooting and the ensuing pandemonium and near-panic, the frantic
and repeated requests for a doctor, the wounded Senator on the floor, police cars
taking the suspect away to jail with crowd reactions as he is brought out and sirens
fading into the distance, and then the grief-stricken crowd in the hall again. Then
this:

Announcer: The Huntley-Brinkley report is produced by NBC News and

brought to you in color by Newport, the smoothest tasting menthol cigarette—
Newport king size, and the new extra long Newport Deluxe 100’s.

Then a filmed commercial showing a frivolous barbershop scene:

The Violence Issue | 59

 Said a patron whose name was McNair,
As the barber was trimming his hair;
“This new cigarette has the roughest taste yet!
Who’s got a smooth one to spare?”
Then up spoke a fellow named Dave
Who had just finished having a shave:
“Newport, you’ll find, is a much smoother kind,
With a taste about which you will rave.”
Chorus: Ooooooh, Smother Newport, Fresher Newport—
Smoother, more refreshing cigarette!12

Once human sensibility is thus sacrificed to the demands of expediency

and capital, “all narrative was sentimental. In this light all connections
were equally meaningful, and equally senseless.”13

Go to college / Go to war / Get a job in Daddy’s store

—Rhino 39, “Xerox 12” (1979)

We got the neutron bomb! / Drop it! / We don’t want it / anyway!

—The Weirdos, “We Got the Neutron Bomb” (1978)

“American students have historically succumbed to the annual spring

throes of the panty-raid syndrome, but the current wave of campus con-
frontations is essentially an unprecedented phenomenon.”14 A control-
lable youthful exuberance—”the panty-raid syndrome”—has become,
by 1968, something actively threatening. It is a commonplace that the
seventies were a decade of disillusionment. Much of that disillusion-
ment, of course, was economic with the slowing or even reversal of the
post-war boom in America, and the ripples of it as felt by the rest of the
world. As Jon Savage points out in his book on the early British punk
scene, this recession was particularly felt by young people; less cash
meant less kids buying less stuff. The youth market was no longer as in-
finitely tappable a resource as in the glorious bobby-soxer days. Hordes
of idle teenagers with empty pockets bred not celebration but suspicion.
Hence discipline, frustration, and violence.15 And now that the glow of

60 | Anamesa
winning the war had officially faded, “The whole idea of ‘consensus’ that
had dominated postwar politics and social life was disintegrating. It was
as though the whole postwar ideal of mass consumer enfranchisement…
was being proved a sham.”16 Rebellion has a long history, but there is a
qualitative difference in rebellion after World War II. “The nineteenth-
century artists were faced with the collapse of Christianity and the end
of Hellenism. We are faced with the end of man.”17 After Hiroshima,18
the paradox, not to say the myth, of technological and ethical progress is
exposed: “the square world had now made utterly clear its suicidal inten-
tions.”19 As well, eventually, as its murderous ones. After that ultimate
in alienated labor, the draft, how could established authority claim to
serve the interests of the people? After My Lai, how could it even make
the claim to honor? Two decades later, Baudrillard goes even further
than Nuttall to imply that America could not be anything but violent;
its fundamental attribute is “not only indulgence, but violence, a self-
publicizing, self-justifying violence…the triumphalist violence of the
successful revolution.”20 It’s no accident that Penelope Spheeris’s clas-
sic documentary on the Los Angeles punk scene is entitled The Decline
of Western Civilization. In Baudrillard’s formula, the American idea of
“utopia achieved” has violence as inevitable by-product.
In light of all these phenomena, “square” shock at long or spiky hair,
loud music, sex and scatology becomes more than a little absurd. Noth-
ing any counterculture has ever done has been more violent than the be-
havior of so-called respectable society. In 1968, The Task Force on Mass
Media and Violence concluded that “the claim that the television world
of entertainment and violence is an accurate reflection of the real world
clearly is refuted”21 by the findings of their survey. This survey, however,
limits itself to examining the frequency of people’s being “slapped or
kicked,” “punched or beaten,” “knifed,” “choked,” or “shot at.”22 The
sociologists conducting this study cannot even imagine the possibility of
a generalized, latent, or vicarious violence, for which the above actions
(as well as their television portrayals) are merely metaphors. By the end
of the seventies,

The Violence Issue | 61

 We are more aware of the ugly because human hopes for its reduction, in all
of its forms, were so raised by technical advances, because those very advances
have, along with the gains, created ugliness (affluence = effluence?), because
the incredible ugliness of war continues to pollute the earth, and because
age-old problems have rapidly become more visible and more overwhelm-
ing, as the ‘dump-dwellers’ of the world, living in a sea of trash, expand into
mega-populations.”23

Meanwhile, “the only thing we could do was sit in humiliation and wait
for extinction.”24 This state of affairs can only go on so long without
repercussions.

I got no use for drugs / I never get high / I wanna shoot a cop / I wanna watch
him die / Running through the sixties / Was a whole lotta fun / But a lotta these
pigs / Forgot how to run
—Black Randy and the Metrosquad, “Trouble at the Cup” (1978)

By the early, and certainly the late seventies, it was impossible to ignore
the failure of earlier counterculture movements. Either they had failed
nobly (like Western communist movements, effectively crushed by the
same tanks that rolled into Hungary and Czechoslovakia), or ignobly,
by “selling out” to the mainstream and rendering itself impotent by
drugs and an egotism almost bourgeois. Despite the “apparent social
progress of the free and easy hippie culture that was all around,” all
evidence proclaimed that society “wasn’t free and easy: it was repressed
and horrible.”25 Thus the counterculture movements of the seventies and
the aesthetic of violence are perhaps unique; they are a counterculture
against not just the mainstream, but also against the reigning countercul-
tures of the day. The mere existence of retro as trend—in 1976, Happy
Days was the most popular television show in America26—negates the
oppositional value of earlier underground movements. By the late seven-
ties, hippie and beatnik culture had degenerated into lip-service pacifism,
acid trips, a watered-down Zen and a tedious free love.27 Jeff Nuttall,
writing in 1968 on an article by Allen Ginsburg, effectively nails the cof-
fin shut on hippie culture: “the quick and only way to that peace beyond

62 | Anamesa
‘desire, anger, grasping, craving’ is to cut your throat…anyone who has
no appetite for stress has no appetite for life on human terms, desires
merely life on cosmic terms, desires death.”28 The earlier counterculture,
in other words, has finally absorbed the latent nihilism of the main-
stream. Punk culture thus aims, among other things, at being everything
hippie culture is not. This is carried even to the point of their respective
drugs of choice: not the passive daydreaminess of marijuana and halluci-
nogens, but the strident hyper-realism of heroin and speed.
In her descriptions of Huey Newton’s arrest and the riots at San
Francisco State College, Didion narrates what might be the final break-
down of sixties’ promise: in the former, revolution cynically adopting
attributes of mass media to secure its own influence; in the latter, revolu-
tion itself becoming entertainment. The incarcerated Black Panther is a
mere platitude machine for the cameras, “one of those autodidacts for
whom all things specific and personal present themselves as mine fields
to be avoided at even at the cost of coherence, for whom safety lies in
generalization.”29 And the university demonstration seems “increasingly
off-key, an instance of the enfants terribles and the Board of Trustees un-
consciously collaborating on a wishful fantasy (Revolution on Campus)
and playing it out in time for the six o’ clock news.”30 The movements
thus empty themselves of all content, all truly revolutionary force what-
soever: “Get your M / 31 / ‘Cause baby we gonna / Have some fun.”31
The sixties could perhaps be characterized as widespread (or, at least,
white) recognition of the inadequacy of existing systems. The seventies
embody the despair of the possibility of an alternative.

There are some facts here / which refuse to escape / I could say it stronger / but
it’s too much trouble
—X, “The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss (1978)

Didion’s essay on the end of the sixties does not demonstrate the aes-
thetic of violence but its immediate precedent: the aesthetic of boredom,
in which everything is flat, fleeting, and utterly banal. At a recording

The Violence Issue | 63

 session for the Doors—supposedly the musical equivalent of an orgasm,
a blinking-out in a transcendent rock ecstasy of sex and death—Didion
observes, “My leg had gone to sleep, but I did not stand up…. The pro-
ducer played back the rhythm track. The engineer said that he wanted
to do his deep-breathing exercises. Manzarek ate a hard-boiled egg.”32
This boredom is nothing so much as a narcotized schizophrenia. (Dis-
regarding even Didion’s own history of mental illness, her infamous
style—jump-cut organization paired with affectlessness of tone—is a
demonstration of just this malady). “Leisure (What do I want to do to-
day?),” writes Marcus, “was replaced by entertainment (What is there to
see today?). The potential fact of all possible freedoms was replaced by
a fiction of false freedom.” 33 By 1969, even a member of a conservative
government commission on violence can propose that

those youths who denounce or ignore all authority, who refuse to defer
gratification, who seek to obtain speciously altruistic ends by violent or other
antisocial means, who impose on the rights of others by interrupting and by
shouting down opposition, and especially those who ‘drop out’ and declare by
behavior, appearances and words that nothing is ‘relevant’ or admirable, have
perhaps shown an inordinate capacity for observational learning.34

Violence is a way to shock oneself into feeling: to prove, by inflicting

and experiencing pain, that one is still a human being. (Schematic as it
may be, Burgess’s 1962 A Clockwork Orange demonstrates precisely this
tension between a natural “ultraviolence” and a manufactured civility;
it is telling that Kubrik’s film adaptation cuts out Burgess’s last chapter,
in which the protagonist matures—without brainwashing—beyond his
violent impulses.) Without doubt, the aesthetic of violence has its sadis-
tic, aggressive aspect; but—even more so, perhaps (and this is one of the
things that, I believe, differentiates it from other avant garde and coun-
terculture movements)—it has a masochistic aspect as well. Its violence
is as much that of Alex in A Clockwork Orange as that of Niko in The
Deer Hunter, whose reaction to a reality too horrible to bear takes the
form of a drugged and objectless self-destruction, suicide as joyless

64 | Anamesa
game. The self-mutilation of Iggy Pop, of (in imitation and homage as
much as anything) G.G. Allin, Sid Vicious and Darby Crash, the self-
ironizing of postmodern literature, and the burning, layering, and inten-
tional erasure of much contemporary art, all have something in common.
John Lydon says: “I saw the Sex Pistols as something completely guilt-
ridden,”35 and Marcus writes on Gang of Four, “It was not about the
resistance of the rebel against the ruler. It was about the resistance of the
rebel against him or herself.”36 Such statements do not seem possible for
the Dadaists or the Situationists or the Woodstock crowd. But by 1975,
things had come to this pass.

…VILE ENDS

One evening, I sat Beauty on my lap. And I found her bitter. And I raped her.
—Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

“If religion becomes non-religion, corrupt,” writes Nuttall (and by

religion I think we can take this as any kind of faith or value), “then art,
in order to remain art, must divide itself off from society.”37 “I believe
in / Worker’s Evolution / and I believe in / the Final Solution,” sang the
Buzzcocks in 1979. Faced with the (arguable) apogee of society’s corrup-
tion, what else to oppose it with but the apogee of the anti-social: gratu-
itous violence. “Long live the Incredible Hulk!” proclaims an anarchist
manifesto of 1966, “wildcat strikers, the Nat Turner Insurrection, high-
school drop-outs, draft-dodgers, deserters, delinquents, saboteurs and
all those soul-brothers, wild-eyed dreamers, real and imaginary heroes
of defiance and rebellion who pool their collective resources in the
exquisite, material transformation of the world according to desire!!!”38
But even this does not quite go far enough. The Surrealist Group of the
Rebel Worker Group of the Chicago Anarchist Horde can still exalt
poetry as “breathing like a machine gun, exterminating the blind flags of
immediate reality.” Violence is still the means to an end, a weapon of the

The Violence Issue | 65

 revolution. Though obvious traces of this thinking remain even today,
by the late seventies, violence will have also become an end in itself.

Everybody’s gotten in control but me / Medication takes you in at half past

three / Everybody’s doing the Prolixin Stomp!
—Rhino 39, “Prolixin Stomp” (1979)

The “utopia achieved” of American culture denotes a culture of mass

media and spectacle, of latent violence and advertised tranquillity—
more, of science and rationality and consensus and everydayness. Dis-
neyland, which opened in 1955, is perhaps the ideal symbol of a culture
in which violence itself is gagged, and an eternal pleasantness substitutes
for the sublime.39 “This country,” rants Baudrillard, “is beyond hope.
Even the trash is clean here, the traffic greased, the movement pacified…
[everything here] makes the European dream of death and murder, of
motels for suicides, of orgy and cannibalism, just to bring down this
perfection of ocean and light, this insane ease of living, the hyperreal-
ity of it all.”40 It would be easy to dismiss such statements as neurotic;
however, Baudrillard is really only making explicit what artistic and
cultural movements have already implicitly enacted. A beauty without
conflict is not really beauty, but disease. Thus René Girard notes how
“the tendency to erase the sacred, to eliminate it entirely, prepares the
ground for the surreptitious return of the sacred, no longer in transcen-
dent, but in imminent form, in the form of violence and knowledge of
violence.”41 This is why there is a vast difference between art that por-
trays violence—while keeping its safe distance—and art that in one way
or another enacts its violence, either upon others or upon itself. Tragedy
is a response to the passive and antiseptic Society of the Spectacle; it is
the one thing that both responds to and underlies “the insipidity of the
festival transformed into eternal holiday…the blatantly utopic promises
of a ‘universe of leisure.’”42
“Pastiche and schizophrenia” writes Fredric Jameson in “Postmod-
ernism and Consumer Society,” are the primary “ways in which the new

66 | Anamesa
postmodernism expresses the inner truth of that newly emergent social
order of late capitalism.”43 The aesthetic of violence attempts to reclaim
authenticity, but this time it is in the terms of late capitalism itself, us-
ing (or attempting to use) its own techniques and assumptions against it.
Revolution will no longer be entertainment: now, entertainment will be-
come revolution. The Media—and all media—become both weapon and
target, at once counteracting and reflecting the schizophrenia endemic
to society. One of the most salient features of punk fashion as conceived
by McLaren and Westwood is its emphasis on text—not text as message,
but text as text, so layered and contradictory as to void it of all mean-
ing: “the intention was that [the Sex Pistols] should not be politically
explicit, but instead should be an explosion of contradictory, highly
charged signs.” Punk fashion expresses “the wish to offer up the body as
a jumble of meanings.”44 Gang of Four, one of the most politically astute
bands of the early punk era, composed their lyrics in the same way as
the Pistols created their outfits, as a dryly ironic collage of commercial
clichés: “I do love a new purchase / A market of the senses // Our great
expectations / A future for the good / Fornication makes you happy
/ No escape from society // We all have good intentions / but all with
strings attached” (“Natural’s Not in It”). “In view of the disappearance
of the prerequisites of communication,” notes Debord, there is no art
that “suffers any longer from the disappearance of its own particular
ability to communicate.”45 As we have seen, when art becomes merely
art—and from there, capital—everything communicates, all at once, in
an undifferentiated babble in which Dubuffet is as viable as Delacroix,
and selling cigarettes is as important as reporting an assassination. In
certain obvious aspects, punk conceived itself as everything society was
not. However, it, like so many “postmodern” phenomena, also set itself
against society by becoming everything society is. To society’s latent
sickness, it matched its blatant one; it saw society’s fragmentation and
raised it to the level of psychosis.
“They no longer ‘quote’,” Jameson writes of postmodern artists.
“They incorporate.”46 The last desperate method of fighting the en-

The Violence Issue | 67

 emy is to become the enemy. Furthermore, with all things being equal,
even the artist cannot separate him or herself from that which is reacted
against: simply by creating—simply by existing—one is swallowed by
the cultural Blob. The relentless self-questioning and self-ironizing of
postmodern theory, the way in which it insists on deconstructing itself
as well as those things “external” to it, may be a reflection of this. With-
out a doubt it is a presence in the aesthetics of the time: “punks rejected
the Academy and drew instead from ‘low’ sources: graffiti, underground
comics, advertising, car culture, the tarot, blaxploitation, bondage and
pornography, surf culture, fifties industrial films, Mad magazine, and
the universe of American detritus that winds up in thrift stores. It all got
tossed in the blender.”47 The loss of aesthetic norms means that there is
no longer a 1 : 1 relationship between parodist and parodied; now, the
ratio is 1 : ∞.

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing
of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such
mimicry…without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists
something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic.
Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor.48

If a centered, delimited identity—be it personal, cultural, or artistic—is

no longer possible, the only option left is to become a patchwork of
all identities. The gamble is on whether one will, in self-sacrifice to the
chaos, gain some sort of mastery over it—or whether one will simply
lose one’s identity entirely.

I’m Darby Crash / A social blast / Chaotic master

I’m Darby Crash / Your Meccas gash / Prophetic stature
I’m Darby Crash / A one way match / Demonic flasher
—The Germs, “Circle One” (1978)

Despite his being born a good century before Sid Vicious, Rimbaud
may be the first—and greatest—disciple of the aesthetics of violence. Af-

68 | Anamesa
ter the failed high-modernism of his verse works and his Illuminations,49
A Season in Hell unleashes Rimbaud’s disgust with the modern world—
”We eat fever with our watery vegetables. And drunkenness! and to-
bacco! and ignorance! and worship!”50—not just at the world, but on
the work itself. Even disregarding Rimbaud’s legendary “career suicide,”
the distorted, aggressively anti-classical language, the appropriation of
all dictions from high liturgy to gutter slang, the fragmentation of narra-
tive, the relentless self-ironizing make up an almost textbook example of
performative artistic violence. Rimbaud consigns himself to hell. And his
art is the hell he consigns himself to. He himself makes sure of it.
In one way, the aesthetic of violence has as its true predecessor not
the exuberance of Dada, but the gravity of ancient tragedy and further,
the ritual of the sacrifice. When evangelists passed out flyers at the final
Sex Pistols show that read “There’s a Johnny Rotten in each of us, and
he doesn’t need to be liberated—he needs to be crucified!”51 they must
have seemed merely part of the act. The violence of the punk aesthetic
goes almost without saying. But again, their violence differs both from,
say, the violence of the Watts riots or that of Goya’s paintings in that it is
both self-conscious (unlike the former) and performative (unlike the lat-
ter). It is almost violence camp.52 Marcus describes Sid Vicious in concert
as “a representation of a representation, even streaked with his own gore,
his arm bandaged from a self-inflicted gouging”; in fact the show, the en-
tire punk project is “an act: a collective attempt to prove that the physi-
cal representation of an aesthetic representation could produce reality, or
at least real blood.”53 The aesthetic of violence is the sacrifice ceremony,
played out not in the temple but in the mass media, with not a scapegoat,
but culture itself as the sacrificial victim. The Situationists aimed at “the
revolution of everyday life”; the “vanguard” of culture as a separate,
commodified, spectacular entity was no less than “its own disappear-
ance.”54 Thus there are no longer any lines between performance and
reality, “an image of an image” and the Truth. Both the artifice of art and
the realness of reality dissolve. The fourth wall crumbles; ancient tragedy
is dragged back into reality and time in the act of its performance.

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 A thousand kids / Bury their parents
—X, “The Unheard Music” (1978)

The festival leading up to the sacrifice, as Girard notes, is always a

festival in which values are not simply discarded, but specifically invert-
ed. In other words, it is parodic: “the modern observer notes above all
the transgression of taboos. Sexual promiscuity is tolerated, sometimes
even required…[there is] a general erasing of differences: social and
familial hierarchies are temporarily suppressed or inverted…a mixture of
discordant colors…the use of costume [travesti: drag]…unnatural com-
ings-together, the most unexpected encounters.”55 Compare this to Mar-
cus’s account of the British punk scene: “What had been good—love,
money, and health—was now bad; what had been bad—hate, mendicity,
and disease—was now good. The equations ran on, replacing work with
sloth, status with reprobation, fame with infamy, celebrity with obscu-
rity, professionalism with ignorance, civility with insult, nimble fingers
with club feet.”56 The Germs. The Weirdos. Dottie Danger. Johnny Rot-
ten. Publik Enema. Richard Hell. The Deadbeats. The Subhumans. Pat
Smear. The Zeros. The Dishrags. Chuck Biscuits. Gerry Useless. Dinah
Cancer. Donna Rhia. Punk pseudonyms and band names were partly a
means to reinvent oneself—initiation into the cult—, partly the defense
mechanism of the nerdy kid on the playground, pointing out his own
flaws before anyone else gets the chance. But they were also Debord’s
détournement taken to the extreme. Punk names “not only turned the
insult on its head, but meant that the owners of these pseudonyms were
often required to act out the pejorative definitions of others. Identity
was thus created and reinforced by hostility.”57 The cultivated ugliness
of punk is an estranging device in which the goal is not just to offend an
offensive society as much as possible, but also to construct a self outside
and above society. “The sacrificial victim has, therefore, a monstrous
aspect; one can no longer see in him what one sees in the other members
of the community”58: if one is to be sacrificed anyway (as many people
must have felt then, whether instinctively or objectively), one must make

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oneself worthy of the privilege.
The forms détournement can take are several. Like punk’s emphasis
on filth and aggression, Anselm Kiefer’s use of nature and myth evokes
violence to both oppose and act out the failed project of rationalism.
Civilization vs. Nature is an old, essentially Romantic viewpoint, even if
Kiefer plays it for higher stakes. (It should be noted that, however much
America implicitly threatens mass murder in the name of reason, Kiefer’s
Germany has already delivered it.) But Kiefer’s nature is anything but
the seat of divine wisdom and grace. His landscapes are the landscapes
of the post-apocalypse, the post-Holocaust (in both senses of the word).
More importantly to the aesthetic of violence, he himself has done the
destroying; in the act of creating he does violence, like Rimbaud, both
to the outside world and to his own art. In his “Scorched Earth” series
(begun in 1974), for example, Kiefer frames the charred landscapes with
a lens-like painter’s palette; in one, Nero Paints, the paint brushes are ac-
tually setting fire to the village at the horizon.59 In a 1982 painting whose
composition eerily echoes that of Nero Paints, Wayland’s Song (With
Wing), Kiefer alludes to the myth that could serve as ur-metaphor for
both Kiefer’s art and the aesthetic of violence itself:

Wayland [a blacksmith] was captured by men serving a wicked king, who had
gained control over him by robbing him of a magic ring. Subsequently, Way-
land’s art was put to the service of the king until the queen, suspicious of the
dangerous powers possessed by this worker with fire, convinced the king to
imprison Wayland on an island, after severing the tendons of his legs. The song
of Wayland relates the tale of how he liberated himself, taking revenge against
the king by killing his three sons, burying their bodies under his bellows, and
fashioning silver ornaments for the king, into which he worked their skulls. In
addition, Wayland presented jewelry to the queen, composed of stones made
from the eyes of her sons, and broaches to the princess made from their teeth.
Finally, before escaping by wings fashioned for that purpose from lead, Way-
land seduced the princess, who became pregnant with his child.60

In later paintings, Kiefer’s technique (which owes as much to German

Expressionism as the Situationists’ style owes to Dada) takes the idea

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 of the artist/destroyer/(pro)creator still further, in a way that brings his
work more completely within the aesthetic of violence. Using lead, ash,
sand, fabric, photographs and organic material in addition to paint, now
Kiefer destroys the self-containment of the work itself. He also uses text
in his work: usually, though not always, the title, painted somewhere
prominently on the canvas. These textual superimpositions are most of-
ten allusive, whether to myths (Wayland, Parsifal) or theology (Kabbala
in particular) or works of literature. If modernist demands for “purity”
in art require that “the unique and proper area of competence of each art
coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium”61 Kief-
er’s use of mixed media and collage says that there is nothing pure, there
is nothing inviolate or whole unto itself.62 The very concept of “purity,”
like that of “utopia,” is utterly suspect.
Kiefer is obviously a technically skilled artist (in the classical as well
as the postmodern sense); nonetheless, this “rawness” of technique is in a
way the same thing as the punk musician’s proud ignorance of his instru-
ment, his off-key wailing, the near-unlistenable covers of rock’s golden
oldies and the haphazard production of the recordings constantly point-
ing out the man behind the curtain. In a 1977 recording of “Forming,”
Germs singer Darby Crash finishes out the song by ranting, “Anyone,
anytime, anyhow…Whoever’s buying this shit…Fucking jerk, he’s play-
ing it all wrong; the drums are too slow, the base is too fast, the chords
are all wrong…” It’s true, of course (in a genre filled with unskilled mu-
sicians, the Germs make the Sex Pistols look like Mozart), but it’s also
a pose. In a similar way, “Rather than demonstrating any virtuoso skill,
[Kiefer’s] pictures openly exhibit the processes of their manufacture
and the presence of their maker…. As it creates the impression of often
makeshift handiwork this (feigned) ‘honesty’ and (intentional) ‘mal-
adroitness’ replace the traditional illusionary skills of academic painting
with the physically felt impact of a material presence.”63
The destruction of the mimetic illusion is decisive to the aesthetic
of violence. Seductive as it is, Kiefer’s art does not permit a spectator to
enjoy the complacency of realism. It is—strange as it may seem for an

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artist of such gravitas—ironic. Not merely do his paintings subvert the
“scientific consistency” (c.f. Greenberg) of their genre; they also an-
nounce themselves as performances: every bit as much as the Sex Pistols
were riot as ritual and music as inside joke, Kiefer’s work is painting as
theatre. His canvases are not so much representations (classicism) or
objects in themselves (modernism), but “theatrical setting[s] for elemen-
tal forces,”64 vast proscenia in which the various myths, fantasies, and
juxtapositions Kiefer evokes play themselves out in front of the viewer.
An early painting, Parsifal II, conceives the Parsifal myth as an attic
room with wooden beams and, deep towards the back wall, a bowl of
blood (but how are we sure that it’s blood?: ceci n’est pas du sang) on a
table. Above the bowl is written “Höchsten Heilest Wunder! Erlösing
dem Erlöser! (“Miracle of the highest salvation! Redemption to the Re-
deemer!”). The ambiguous, not to say sardonic, treatment of the myth,
the silent indeterminacy of the setting (Are we, the spectators, supposed
to be the redeemer? Who do the words address? Do they “address”
anyone? What will happen?) create rather than merely represent a drama
“in which that which is happening requires a response which stimulates
ongoing interpretation.”65
Ironic tragedy, then: one possible description of the aesthetic of vio-
lence Punk rock, mixed media, glorification in blood and guts,66 popular
sado-masochism may not be new impulses, but it seems safe to say that
from the late sixties to the early eighties these things come into their mo-
ment. “Tragedy gains its force from its power to confront, to challenge,
and to undermine forms of established ‘civilized’ value, where hidden
agendas and unexpected outcomes distort their intended purposes.”67
In ancient tragedy, this is usually a case of the presumptive rationalist
coming up against darker forces (as in The Bacchae), or rationalism itself
turned against its advocate (as in Oedipus Rex or Antigone). It is all too
easy to see similarities between this and the postmodern era, in which
society’s whole rational project proves to be at once its glory and its
ruin.
But today also forbids any easy distinction between the rational

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 and the irrational, the sane and the mad, truth and its fabrication. Thus
we are now compelled to “set up the laws, and at the same time oppose
them.”68 True as this may be, it is also the perfect formula for a self-
defeating philosophy—for a philosophy of self-destruction. It would
be possible to read the masochistic tendencies of postmodernism as an
act of collective penance for the evil mankind hath wrought in its own
name, doomsday pronouncements on “the end of history,” “the end of
art,” “the end of irony” (!) not accurate pronouncements so much as
self-flagellation and death-wish. Society is so radically sick that it must
burn itself on the pyre, cast itself into hell, exile itself into the wilderness
with its sins written—punk style—on its hide. In this light, “No future”
has an altogether different ring.

THE (SID) VICIOUS CIRCLE

John Doe: Maybe punk’s big contribution to mass culture, the national con-
sciousness, was fucked-up hair…like hippie’s long hair.
Exene Cervenka: Hair for both: all that’s left—our legacy to future genera-
tions—is hairdos. That’s all they keep.
—”The Way We Weren’t: A Conversation with Exene Cervenka and John Doe
[of X]”69 (1999)

Girard speaks of the scapegoat as “at once poison and remedy”70; in view
of the return of conservative politics and general materialistic opti-
mism—an even bigger, even more spectacular spectacle—of the eighties,
it seems that the aesthetic of violence fulfilled its function all too well, in
a way that neither its proponents nor its detractors predicted. In many
ways, the explosions of violence in the 1970’s have “served to bring back
to life, and to illuminate all the more glaringly, exactly those structures…
which they were meant to dissolve.”71 Habermas is talking specifically
about art movements, but it is nonetheless true that even a movement
as ostensibly comprehensive as punk eventually found itself done in by
its own principles. The last page of Forming, headed “Comrades lost in

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battle, R.I.P.,” is the literal sign of punk’s demise. At the other end of the
spectrum, “Dottie Danger,” formerly of the Germs, changed her name
back to Belinda Carlisle, sang for the Go-Gos, and in the mid-eighties
secured a solo career with the hit song “Heaven is a Place on Earth.”
And soon enough, not just punk, but violence itself becomes reincor-
porated into the society that it had set itself against. Early punk is now
just as much of a museum piece as Duchamp’s urinals, to be studied in
university courses and dissected in scholarly tomes. A performance art-
ist shooting himself on stage seems like just one more trendy gimmick.
Happy and unhappy suburban kids get their septums pierced (with their
parents’ permission, of course) and pay thirty dollars for the privilege of
throwing themselves in a mosh pit. Revolution becomes fashion.
It is not surprising that a movement so explicitly self-destructive as
punk would eventually crash and burn in its own flames. “Selling out” is
the cliché of all counterculture movements, but it also fits strangely well
with the cathartic function of tragedy: through the scapegoat, or through
the art work as scapegoat, the violence of a society is concentrated,
experienced, and expelled. Even the degree to which a society assimi-
lates this violence is therapeutic, in the sense of a vaccine: ingesting small
occasional doses to protect against a full-blown outbreak. And even if
the conditions that gave rise to the aesthetics of violence have not gone
away, the sense of newness and urgency that accompanied them have.72

ANGER IS AN ENERGY

Off the pigs / Darby lives!

—Dub Narcotic Disco Plate, “FSU” (1995)

S
t il l , viol enc e a s a for c e in soc iet y and in culture is not, as we
have seen, so easily diffused. Whatever power 1970’s-style punk
had as a social movement may be gone, but its legacy remains in
a thousand contemporary small underground scenes.73 Anselm Kiefer

The Violence Issue | 75

 remains a more potent artist than ever, not to even mention the many
other examples of art and culture one could cite in this context. And
as long as postindustrial society continues to effect “the disappearance
of a sense of history,” to embody “a perpetual present and…perpetual
change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social
formations have had in one way or another to preserve,”74 a response,
of one kind or another, will be required. Lyotard defines a postmodern
aesthetic of the sublime as “that which, in the modern, puts forward the
unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace
of good forms, the consensus of taste which would make it possible to
share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches
for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart
a stronger sense of the unpresentable.”75 What, then, constitutes the
aesthetic of violence? It is the postmodern sublime, expressed in rage.
In so doing, it provides a partial answer to the question Jameson poses
at the end of his essay, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” of
whether postmodernism resists “the logic of consumer capitalism” as
well as it “replicates or reproduces—reinforces” it.76 The aesthetic of
violence does both, of course—though with a paradoxicality, a both/and
quality that is, after all, wholly appropriate.
It is no coincidence that Lyotard ends his The Postmodern Condition
with a declaration of war; nor is it a coincidence that the most well-
known of all “postmodern” theories is called Deconstructionism. For
whatever postmodernism is, it has the aesthetic of violence as one of its
guiding principles. It lashes out; it attacks itself; it makes itself at once
sacrificer and sacrificed. Whether or not this is an effective response to
the problems and issues of late capitalism still remains to be seen. But—
considering the era that created it—it is, at least, a fitting one. r

NOTES

1 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-

76 | Anamesa
 Smith, (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 144.
2 Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and
Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 230.
3 Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 14.
4 Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America:
Historical and Comparative Perspectives: A Report to the National
Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Vol. II (Wash
ington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), vii.
5 Debord, 12.
6 Lyle, “Contemporary Functions of the Mass Media,” in Mass Media
and Violence: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and
Prevention of Violence. Vol. XI, Robert K. Baker and Dr. Sandra J.
Ball, eds., (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1969), 188.
7 Greil Marcus, Essay in Gang of Four: A Brief History of the Twentieth
Century (Warner Brothers Records, 1990), 43-44. My italics.
8 Debord, 38-39.
9 Marcus, liner notes for Gang of Four: A Brief History of the Twentieth
Century, 7.
10 Didion, 13.
11 Robert Lewis Shayon, quoted in Catton, “The Worldview Presented
by Mass Media,” in Mass Media and Violence, 477.
12 Catton, 478-9.
13 Didion, 44.
14 Graham and Gurr, 623-4.
15 Savage, England’s Dreaming, 77.
16 Savage, England’s Dreaming, 109.
17 Nuttall, Bomb Culture (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), 181.
18 (and—what will underlie my discussion of Anselm Kiefer—after
Auschwitz)
19 Nuttall, 41.
20 Jean Baudrillard, Amérique (Paris: Grasset, 1986), 86: “…non plus
seulement l’indulgence, mais la violence autopublicitaire, autojus
tificatrice…cette violence triomphaliste qui fait partie des révolutions
réussies.”
21 Lange, Baker, and Ball, Mass Media and Violence.
22 Lange, Baker, and Ball, Chapter 16, “The Actual World of Violence,”
341-362.
23 J. Milton Yinger, Countercultures: The Promise and the Peril of a

The Violence Issue | 77

 World Turned Upside Down (New York: The Free Press, 1982), 148.
24 Nuttall, 117.
25 Savage, 9.
26 John Roeker and Sherri Schotlaender, “Timeline,” in Forming: The
Days of Early L.A. Punk, 47.
27 Compare, in light of this, John Lydon’s own (professed) views on
sex: “By the time you’re twenty you just think—yawn—just another
squelch session.” Quoted in Savage, 189.
28 Nuttall, 214.
29 Didion, 30. Note too, as a measure of Newton’s auto-dehumaniza
tion and subordination despite all rhetoric to corporate America,
that in the following section he is revealed as “a Kaiser…he belonged
to Kaiser” (i.e., the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan).
30 Didion, 38.
31 Didion, 27-8. Despite certain similarities between this and examples
of the aesthetic of violence, I think this sloganeering is fundamentally
different, mostly because it still takes itself seriously, and treats vio
lence not as its proper medium, but as an expedient method to
achieve certain aims. Between “By any means necessary,” and “Don’t
know what I want but I know how to get it” is a world of difference.
32 Didion, 23-4.
33 Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 51.
34 Catton, 485.
35 Savage, 110.
36 Marcus, A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, 7.
37 Nuttall, 72.
38 Nuttall, 66.
39 And all the more ideal as so many Disney movies are based on
Grimms’ fairy tales, the leitmotif of which is precisely violence’s
sinister ubiquity.
40 Baudrillard, 117: “Ce pays est sans espoir. Les ordures mêmes y sont
propres, le trafic lubrifié, la circulation pacifiée…font rêver
l’Européen de mort et de meurtre, de motels pour suicidaires, orgy
and cannibalism, pour faire échec à cette perfection de l’océan, de
la lumière, à cette facilité insensée de la vie, à l’hyperréalité de toutes
choses.”
41 René Girard, La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Hachette/Pluriel, 1972), 480: “La ten
dence à effacer le sacré, à l’éliminer entièrement, prépare le retour subreptice du

78 | Anamesa
 sacré, sous une forme non pas trancendente mais immanente, sous la forme de la
violence et du savoir de la violence.”
42 Girard, 188: “la tragédie derrière l’insipidité de la fête transformée en vacances à
perpétuité, derrière les promesses platement utopiques d’un « univers de loisirs ».”
43 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1998),
113.
44 Savage, 188.
45 Debord, 135.
46 Jameson, 112.
47 McKenna, “Remembrance of Things Fast,” in Forming, 31.
48 Jameson, 114.
49 This chronology is the subject of active debate: many adhere to the opposite view,
in which Illuminations is the triumphant finale after the torturing doubt of A Sea
son in Hell. This view, to me, seems wishful thinking: “Merde pour la poésie” is not
the statement of a satisfied artist.
50 Rimbaud, “The Impossible,” from A Season in Hell.: “Nous mangeons la
fièvre avec nos légumes aqueux. Et l’ivrognerie! et le tabac! et l’ignorance! et les
dévouements!”
51 Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 36.
52 No pun intended: although punk certainly was—and is—an insular youth colony.
53 Marcus, 84.
54 Debord, 135.
55 Girard, 179: “L’observateur modern y voit surtout la transgression des interdits. La
promiscuité sexuelle est tolérée, parfois requise…un effacement général des dif
férences: les hierarchies familiales et sociales sont temporairement supprimées ou
inverties…le mélange de couleurs discordantes…le recours au travesty…les assem
blages contre nature, les rencontres les plus imprévues.”
56 Marcus, 67.
57 Savage, 193.
58 Girard, 403: “La victime émissaire a donc un caractère monstreux; on a cessé de
voir en elle ce qu’on voit dans les autres membres de la communauté.”
59 Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001), 99-100.
60 Gilmour, Fire on the Earth: Anselm Kiefer and the Postmodern World (Philadel
phia: Temple Univerisity Press, 1990), 125.
61 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, 86.
62 Gilmour, 62.
63 Arasse, 300.
64 Gilmour, 165.

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 65 Gilmour, 67.
66 An expanded study on this topic would do well to look at the slasher flick (and its
effective death -by-parody in the 1990’s).
67 Gilmour, 70.
68 Gilmour, 143
69 In Forming, 93.
70 Girard, 431.
71 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, 11.
72 See Nuttall on counterculture art: “The masterpieces had to be immediate and
sensational in their nature, had to alter people’s minds physically and immediate
ly…an urgent psychological weapon to stop the slaughter” (94).
73 Though a lot of these scenes nowadays take themselves awfully seriously.
74 Jameson, 125.
75 Jean-François Lyotard, “What is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81.
76 Jameson, 125.

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