Reflections on a Punk Jesus

Fig. 1: Jesus: Punk or Cunt?  

 

 

I.

 

We all know, thanks to the Ramones, that Jackie is a punk (and Judy is a runt), but Jesus ... can the Nazarene really be conceived as such? 

 

After all, Johnny Rotten campily affirms a cod-Nietzschean position vis-à-vis the Son of God in the opening line of the Sex Pistols' debut single: I am an anti-Christ [1]. 

 

And in case there should still be some doubt regarding this matter, the infamous Destroy shirt designed by McLaren and Westwood for Seditionaries, features (along with a swastika) an inverted crucifix [2] - could that be any more sacrilegious, as Chandler Bing might say.   

 

Despite this, however, there's recently been talk in certain punk circles around the need to enthuse the diverse global subculture that has emerged from what was once simply a sound and a look born of 430 King's Road with a form of Christian spirituality (or faith) [3] - and I for one don't like it! 

 

For as my friends in Cradle of Filth once succinctly put it, Jesus is a cunt [4].  

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, even Nietzsche recognised Christ as someone in revolt against social hierarchy, writing: 

 

"This holy anarchist who roused up the lowly, the outcasts and 'sinners' [...] to oppose the ruling order [...] was a political criminal, in so far as political criminals were possible in an absurdly unpolitical society." [5]

 

So perhaps the idea of a punk Jesus is not so absurd as it seems at first (whilst remaining profoundly problematic). 

 

Or perhaps we might instead understand punk as merely another unfolding of the slave revolt in morality [6]; the marginalised, the disprivileged, and the talentless - driven by ressentiment - attempting to invert the value system of the music business and overthrow the pop elite: No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones ... [7] 

 

 

Fig. 2: Johnny Rotten: Anti-Christ / Photo by Barry Plummer (1976)   

Fig. 3: Destroy shirt by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood (1977)  

  

Notes

 

[1] Sex Pistols, 'Anarchy in the U.K.' (EMI Records, 1976). The track also features on the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to play and watch the official video on YouTube. 

      As one critic writes, the opening line of this song has become one of the most famous in rock history: "As a simple declaration, these words possess an immediate shock value familiar in the themes of transgression and iconoclasm that helped define rock and roll." 

      See Benjamin Court, 'The Christ-like Antichrists: Messianism in Sex Pistols', in Popular Music and Society, Volume 38, Issue 4 (2015), pp. 416-431.

 

[2] The figure of Christ on the Cross was adapted by McLaren from Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16). 

 

[3] In November 2019, for example, Francis Stewart and Mike Dines of the Punk Scholars Network, organised a two-day in person and online symposium on the theme of 'Punk and the Sacred': click here for details. 

      The peer-reviewed academic journal Punk & Post-Punk (ed. Russ Bestley) has also published several articles on punk spirituality; see, for example, Ibrahim Abraham's 'Postsecular punk: Evangelical Christianity and the overlapping consensus of the underground', in Volume 4, Issue 1, of the above (Mar 2015), pp. 91-105, which argues that "the negotiated inclusion of religiously diverse social actors in punk scenes can inform ongoing debates about diversity and inclusion ..." Abraham also edited Christian Punk: Identity and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2020).

      This attempt to give punk a religious gloss doesn't always involve a Christian makeover, however; there have also been attempts to blend punk with Buddhist and Hindu practices and beliefs, for example. If not exactly hostile, let's just say - as an anti-theist [click here] - I'm suspicious of this creeping religiosity; I don't want punk philosophy and art to be corrupted by theologenblut.

 

[4] This line was written on the back of the Vestal Masturbation T-shirt; a controversial item of Cradle of Filth band merchandise, originally printed and distributed in 1993 (the front of the shirt features an image of a masturbating, semi-naked nun). As with several of the early McLaren-Westwood shirt designs, it garnered much controversy and resulted in some fans being arrested for wearing it. 

 

[5] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), § 27, p. 150.

 

[6] See sections 10-12 of the first essay in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).

      It's important to note that this slave revolt is not merely a politics of class war and revenge; it also, crucially, introduces into history the idea of a free-willing human subject (the modern individual) whose existence is conceived in moralistic terms (i.e., as good or evil). Thus, Nietzsche does not simply condemn the triumph of this revolt nor seek to reverse it: "Such an exercise, even if desirable, would be pointless because slave morality has become an essential part of what we are." 

      See Keith Ansell-Pearson, editor's introduction to On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. xv.

 

[7] Lyrics from '1977', by The Clash; B-side to 'White Riot', their debut single (CBS Records, 1977).  

 

 

Diversity: What Would Nietzsche Think?

Image: Scotty Hendricks (2018)  

bigthink.com

I.

The word diversity is frequently used today, particularly by those who regard it as a value and like to signal their politico-moral correctness even if that means denigrating or disprivileging their own people, culture and history.

In order to illustrate this latter point, one might refer to the recent case of students at the University of Manchester who painted over a mural of a poem by Rudyard Kipling and replaced it with a verse by the African-American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.

This was done in the name of anti-racism - for Kipling, a well-known British imperialist, was said to dehumanise people of colour - and in order to celebrate the diversity of a student body looking to reclaim history by - quite literally - whitewashing it.            

I don't here wish to discuss the merits (or otherwise) of either Kipling's or Maya Angelou's work; nor do I want to express my concerns about historical revisionism and literary censorship. But I would like to say something further about diversity and the idea of multiculturalism, from a post-Nietzschean perspective ...


II.

If confronted with a world in which everyone was retreating to their own safe space from which to assert an identity (on the basis, for example, of sex, gender, race or religion) whilst, at the same time, speaking about the benefits of ever-greater diversity within society and culture, I suspect that Nietzsche would feel himself compelled as a philosopher to argue that greatness belongs only to the individual or the people who find a way to stylise chaos and give birth to a dancing star - the latter being a sign of unity within diversity.

Nietzsche loves words like difference, plurality and multiplicity; he thinks of the will to power as composed of a large number of competing forces, flows, and desires. But - and this is important to understand - he doesn't affirm diversity as a good in itself nor as a goal to be aimed at.

On the contrary, Nietzsche insists that culture, for example, has to be unified; that the only alternative to such is a civilization based upon a barbarism of styles and tastes and incapable of ever producing art or sovereign individuals. Nietzsche opposes the systematic anarchy, the aggressive philistinism, and the Volkerchaos that characterise European modernity and are the symptoms of culture's extermination.

Thus, whilst he may have announced the death of God and thereby decentered and demoralised the world, he still believes in shared ethical bonds between people. His nihilism is not the same as the nihilism of those who devote themselves to free markets and money-making, or to the neo-Platonic fantasies of science and technology; those who lack the ability to act under the constraint of a single taste or - as Heidegger would say - to dwell poetically upon the earth.


III.

Deleuze is right to say that, for Nietzsche, history can be read as the process by which "reactive forces take possession of culture or divert its course in their favour". That the will to diversity can therefore be understood as part of an ongoing slave revolt in morals and the overcoding of active forces by the modern State - that coldest of all cold monsters that thrives at the expense of culture and sucks the life out of people in the name of human rights and globalism.

Nietzsche is aggressively opposed to all this and when faced with the ways in which societies become decodified and unregulated, makes no attempt at recodification. But, again, we must be careful here. For whilst Nietzsche makes no attempt to recodify along old lines or patch the holes ripped in the great social umbrella, he very much wants to bring together newly liberated forces onto what Deleuze terms a plane of consistency and regain mastery over the chaos that has been released.

Why? Because for Nietzsche culture is above all unity of style in all the expressions of a people and this requires harmonious manifoldness - not fake diversity built upon idiotic identity politics and an ugly jumble of all styles and peoples. Multiculturalism is not just a failed experiment, it's an absurd fallacy.

Of course Nietzsche's thinking has anti-democratic and illiberal implications - and he wasn't shy about saying so. But I would suggest we need to urgently think about these questions and not simply attempt to close down conversation by calling anyone who does so a fascist or a supporter of the alt-right. 


Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 139.