from Laboratoire de catastrophe générale. Journal métaphysique et polémique (2000)
In 1976 Malcolm MacLaren, brilliant appropriator, reader of Debord, and shock manager of the former New York Dolls, opened his clothing boutique, “Seditionaries,” on King’s Road, and conceived the idea of delivering a jolt of electroshock therapy to British rock, which was stagnating under the Pharaonic excess of Emerson, Wakemen, Anderson, and the other blowhards of neo-medieval rock. To bring this about, MacLaren, clever cosmopolitan fellow-traveler, took a piece of four-letter New York slang—meaning worthless, poor, and originally a cretin—straight out of articles by Lester Bang and Yves Adrien, giving it, with the help of the Sex Pistols, the fate we are all familiar with.
By the fall of 1977 the battle had begun: The infinite death that propels all twentieth-century art forms into the coma of commercialization was already at work, and two disjunctive phenomenologies appeared, one concealing the other, cannibalizing it shamelessly, appropriating its existence, its codes, and the majority of its insightful discoveries (namely, the overuse of cliché, this being perceived as the residual trace of hidden genius, alchemical and inhuman), to laboriously extract a handful of gimmicks, threadbare from birth, that would help propagate the “revolutionary struggle against capitalist consumer society.”
This doubling in the form of commodities and their nihilisms through which the double feeds off the reality that gave it birth, has been an emblematic figure of fiction ever since its invention by this society (roughly, the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth), and it is not without significance that it was also the emblematic figure of the artists of the “pop mutation,” the dandies of the electronic age I spoke of above. Equally significant is the fact that this figure disappeared when the ideology of personal “creativity” and “authenticity” arrived in force in the modernized socius of the eighties and nineties.
How did this come about?
Robert Bononno 