Post-punk gothic and the turn to the extreme

<p>The Post-punk music movement of the late 1970s and early 80s, was, in various ways, hugely inspired by writers of Gothic (Machen, Poe) and Post-Gothic (Lovecraft to Ballard and Burroughs). The Industrial Culture Handbook (1983) provides copious lists of band members’ book and videotape libraries, which evidence a plethora of gothic preoccupations. These interests manifested also in various video productions and even dabblings with so-called ‘television magick’. Post-punk gothic explored the intensive and affective potentials of contemporary electronic media and my paper will argue that its manifestations constituted forays into what Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize as subversive ‘minoritarian’ culture. Further, I contend that this movement fed into what has been dubbed the ‘turn to the extreme’ in 21st century popular culture. Televisuality, in its broadest sense, has fostered a viral spread of images of extremity and limit experience, connecting us up constantly with boundary- collapsing gothic impulses. However, in a recuperative twist, these impulses have been exploited and commodified. Moreover, as Fred Botting points out, gothic extremities, ‘though celebrated for their subcultural and subversive status, for their fantastic disclosure of another, “realer” if darker reality, are inextricably entangled in webs of simulation’. This paper suggests that an evaluation of the post-punk/industrial movement’s experimentation in the gothic mode is still capable of intimating ‘lines of flight’ in the contemporary mediascape, towards new, untimely forms of resistance and community and the de-railment of the work of the simulation industries.</p>