Post-punk Poaching, Subversive Consumerism, and Reading for Anti-racism

Abstract

After 1979, the spectacularly anarchic and antagonistic moment of punk and “no future” was no more. Although for Peter Hein and Fehlfarben it was well past its prime, the case of the punk-psychiatrist Raspe demonstrates that disappearing by means of subversive adaptation and destabilized positions continued to be the 1983-logic behind a punk escape from affirmative social intervention. In light of Irre’s project, Fehlfarben’s dismissal of punk—that it was “too late”—would seem wrong. To square the band’s dismissal with punk’s chaotic afterlife in Irre, Fehlfarben’s invective must be understood as an avant-garde imperative à la “no future”: it was attuned to a radical futurity for punk to become something else. If focused on the performance of insanity as with Raspe, then Irre’s internalization of its present’s juridico-medico malaise is one example of how punk’s “no future” did not die insofar as it continuously took on other lives. Drawing on literary and sonic markers, this chapter examines the realization of both imperatives—“no future” and “too late”—in the form of a subversively affirmative post-punk existing prior to, concurrent with, and after Irre and S.Y.P.H:’s chaotic fusion of knowledge, power, and motion. True to the unique musical-literary quotient of West German punk, when post-punk picked up strikingly different materials to counter hegemonic stabilization in West Germany’s eighties, the resulting transformation created within youth subcultures musicians, witness Peter Glaser’s assertion in the epigraph above, as arbiters of critical discourse.

By the end of 1980 the musicians had become the better writers. The book of the year was an LP:

“Monarchy and Daily Life” by Fehlfarben.¹