ABSTRACT
This book starts from the premise that to ‘know punk’ is mission impossible. This is, as Penny Rimbaud so eloquently puts it (above), because the very quality of punk we seek to understand dies the moment it is so defi ned. This does not mean punk did, and does, not exist – it has expressions and consequences that can be traced – but recognises that central to the meaning and signifi cance of punk is a denial of such – ‘a distrust of the punk moment itself ’ (Marcus 1989 : 81). This raises some fundamental epistemological dilemmas. For those embarking on a research project on ‘punk’, the most immediate of these is precisely what can the ‘object’ of research be if that object dissolves the moment it is identifi ed? This is discussed below as the contours and evolution of the research upon which this book is based are outlined. The second concerns the need to account genuinely, rather than formally, for refl exivity in the interpretation of the world we encounter through our research subjects. As Marcus suggests, even the early punk movement was self-aware, constituting itself in ‘the will to say everything cut with the suspicion that to say everything may be worth nothing’ (ibid.). Two decades later, this is captured in the ironically astute statement (above)
of Kirill, an 18-year-old punk musician from the Russian city of Vorkuta, that punk means ‘everything’ but, at the same time, since its truth is never articulated, nothing. These dilemmas are addressed in this chapter by considering how punk has been understood in academic literature to date, before setting out an alternative conceptual framework for understanding the meaning of contemporary punk as manifest across three different punk scenes. The approach follows Rimbaud’s logic of avoiding the reifi cation of ‘punk’ but, recognising the refl exive engagement that contemporary scene members have with this thing called punk, falls short of viewing punk as only existing in its self-negation. The approach adopted suggests rather that punk ‘isn’t’ in that it does not consist in something – either aesthetic or political in nature – above or disembedded from the everyday. Punk ‘is’, however, in the sense that it is continually reconstituted individually and collectively as a product of the interaction between the economic, cultural, social, political and territorial contexts of specifi c locales (shaped as they are by both macro and micro structural factors) and the different modes of agency enacted in these contexts. Adopting this approach allows the tracing of commonalities as well as signifi cant differences in the constitution of punk across the three urban Russian scenes studied. More signifi cantly, it provides access to the experience of Russian punk in a way that challenges the dominant meanings attached to the movement in the West and provides an empirical base for rethinking punk at a theoretical level.
