What Future?

I started this yesterday morning, before I got knocked for a loop by a blood draw in the afternoon. Still, I wonder now if I was entirely coherent in putting together this post.

 Is Contemporary Fiction Too New York-ish? (Thornfield Hall) is more a review of books than an answer to the self-imposed question. Too bad. It is a question I would like answered.

If the future is not the past, if we have too much New York, what is coming our way?

Once upon a time, New York meant Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, the CBGB bands, and The Ramones. It was exciting. There was a promise of changing the future in a street-level way that seemed far less effete than the Hippies. I can still understand the feeling of “No Future” Lexicon: Punk (Public Books).

In fact, Matthew Worley, whose history of British punk No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) urged “historians to take youth and youth culture seriously,” defined punk not through its youth but through its practice: a “cultural process of critical engagement” that—in its multiple manifestations—was based on four central tenets: “a stated opposition to a perceived status quo; a disregard for symbols of authority and established hierarchies; claims to provide a voice for the marginalized or disaffected; an emphasis on self-sufficiency.” Punk may indeed be read as “a cult of youthful exuberance,” to quote George Grinnell, within which negation—and, at times, nihilism—may be conjured from angry disaffection. Then again, the notion of a future could not fail to remain. “Cast in the shadow of potential nuclear war, punk-informed responses were sometimes as ugly as the dystopias they envisaged. By engaging, however, they signalled both warnings and alternative possibilities. ‘We’re the future, your future.’”

We got no nuclear war. We did get Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, Bibi Netanyahu; ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda and Myanmar and East Timor; the internet and Twitter/X and the Dark Web and screen addiction and Facebook; political coups against democracies and Christian Nationalism and MAGA, and Farage and Le Pen; and climate change.

What happens to the No Future ethos once (former or present) punks get older? This is one question elaborated by the authors of the recently published volume Punk, Ageing and Time, edited by Laura Way and Matt Grimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). The book contains 13 chapters, including an introduction by the two editors. The authors deal on the one hand with the future of punk itself, a culture that maintains despite media disinterest in its contemporary formulations. More to the point, Way and Grimes vehemently deny the “youth-centric master narrative of popular music subcultures, [… that] dismissed the potential that subculturalists have for utilising those youthful experiences as a component of post-youth forms of identity.” They also reject the punk’s reduction to tired nostalgia, the endless reliving of—and relistening to—the tropes and sounds of a lost youth.

On the other hand, Way and Grimes recognise that any continuity of a punk identity means negotiation and reevaluation of such life events as parenthood, work, illness, and so on. A punk identity needs to retain a link to perceived core values (to a DIY ethos, to questioning and challenging), even as the sartorial motifs and youthful energy of punk may fade, dissolve, and dilute over time. “Ageist cultural pressures are powerful, and while they can be disrupted, it isn’t straightforward,” explains Alison Willmott in her chapter analyzing how her female punk interviewees resist aging stereotypes. “The result is often a time-consuming inner narrative, whereby exhortations to be ‘age-appropriate’ and exhortations to ‘resist conformity’ or ‘be individual’ are pitted against each other.” Indeed, many chapters of Punk, Ageing and Time examine such continuities with the past: appearances, attitudes, values, and whose voices matter for a history of punk.

But though the book keeps the past firmly in focus, less is said about its aging subjects’ change in their stances toward the future. What happens, after all, when the notion of No Future becomes interwoven with one’s own shrinking biographical horizon?

There is, of course, an implicit preoccupation with the future within any analysis that recognizes continuities with the past. “Ageing is an unspoken context,” admits Grinnell, “evident primarily in how these authors remain attached to a social experiment called punk, taking the time and effort to document it and shaping what it can yet become for the future” (emphasis added). More specifically, Grinnell explains that aging also means taking care of the future: “punk is not juvenile anymore. But its maturity is inconsistent … ageing in punk is not just a personal experience; it is a social experience that involves taking responsibility … bringing it closer to many of its stated goals of equality by realizing what it takes to actually transform relations of domination.”

There came a time in my life, pretty much reaching its crisis in May 2009, when I started to look at what I had hoped to accomplish and how far I had failed, led me to questioning why I should not kill myself and end the joke. My body and mind are in better shape than they were, having had a complete breakdown the following year, because I set about rebuilding myself. It seemed necessary since I was to go on living. The punk ethos crept back into my life. I decided I had to stand for something, instead of just passing through - emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, ethically, physically.

“No Future” Lexicon: The Post-Post-Apocalyptic (Public Books) touches on a point I never noticed - that our post-apocalyptic visions do encompass our destruction; that the visions do nothing more than titillate our biases.

Yet perhaps what is more intriguing is which lines the post-apocalyptic genre have not crossed. The general public still regards tales of the post-apocalyptic as impossible fictions—distant flights of fancies, escapist popcorn entertainment—no matter how meticulous their construction, how potent their messages. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” wrote Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism: Is The No Alternative? (2009), attributing the sentiment that undergirds his seminal work to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. With their waning cautionary powers, apocalyptic dystopias increasingly do little to instruct. Instead, they invite spectacle and apathy, foster misreadings of what might be into what should be, stymie our collective ability to envision alternatives beyond what is presented.

Accepting dystopia is nihilistic. Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 were jeremiads, not the wallowing in spectacle. Depression deepened and amped up my nihilism. We can stop the stampede for the cliff by standing up for life. It is harder than going along with mass suicide.

But, in fact, not having a future is nothing new. As both fictive and factual accounts attest to, lives can be built in the rubble of colonial destruction, which, in turn, offer more inclusive futures to be articulated and inhabited. Indeed, the post-apocalyptic conditions of our current world have already been articulated by writers working in Afro-pessimist and Indigenous speculative fiction. Still, even such inclusive futures have their limits: however local and sovereign they might be, they cannot protect themselves from the effects of climate change that exceed geopolitical borders, nor render themselves immune from epidemics that are transmitted through nonhumans that cannot be curtailed in their movements or governed through regulation. Our collective post-apocalypse may show us how to understand new futures within this already existing “no future.” Still, a shared future depends on articulating a world or worlds that we can inhabit in sustainable and inclusive ways.

“No Future”: A Lexicon (Public Books)

Today, three thoughts come to mind on re-reading what I did yesterday.

First, that the post-apocalyptic has always been with us because we live with the knowledge of our own imminent destruction. Our imagination always sees a dire future due to our not being there.

Second, the reality of our whole species shambling off to extinction exceeds our ability to cope with it. Vanity extends beyond ourselves to the whole of humanity.

Third, The Clash remain The Only Band That Matters.

But I will close with a sermon from Brother Lou and New York:

sch