Malcolm McLaren commodified Situationist negation into punk aesthetics

Evidence

For his next band, formed to promote the “Sex” clothing shop he ran with Westwood in London, McLaren picked out another radical political ideology from history. The Sex Pistols would be “anarchist,” and so they would not be joining a movement with real armies, economies, and geopolitical power locked in conflict with the West. When McLaren drew on the ideology of the New Left as he understood it, and especially France’s Situationist International, he found much to like in the elements that laughed at discipline and authority, were confrontationally anti-hierarchical, and refused to ever make concrete demands. The idea, instead, was a total “negation” of this society, a “voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 102

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Parallel to the complaints-about-immodesty essay’s theme of aesthetic rebellion signaling identity, and to how protest aesthetics get absorbed into consumer culture.
• XREF: connects to: Punk inverted 68 by repudiating pleasure and exposing interiority as ideology — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1018

Broader Connections

• Punk inverted 68 by repudiating pleasure and exposing interiority as ideology #complicates (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1018