The Art of Everyday Life and Death: Throbbing Gristle and the Aesthetics of Neoliberalism

In Leaving the Twentieth Century (1974), the first English-language edition of Situationist writings, adventurous readers fortunate enough to find a copy would have discovered a blueprint for an unusual new city. Espousing a radical form of city planning driven by an imaginative and technically impossible architecture, editor and translator Christopher Gray, rendering into English Ivan Chtcheglov’s “Formula for a New City,” describes a city whose buildings and quarters are each individually designed to produce in the inhabitant or pedestrian a specific emotional effect: “There will be rooms awakening more vivid fantasies than any drug. There will be houses where it will be impossible not to fall in love” (17).¹ Though most of the emotions to be elicited stem from familiar ethical and poetic humanist traditions—Gray mentions, for instance, the Gothic-Romantic Quarter, the Happy Quarter, the Noble and Tragic Quarter, the Historic Quarter, and the Useful Quarter—near the end of the essay Gray conjures up a vision of a different tradition altogether, the Sinister Quarter:

The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a distinct improvement on those gaping holes, mouths of the underworld, that a great many races treasured in their capitals: they symbolised the malefic forces of life. Not that the Sinister Quarter need be bristling with traps, oubliettes or mines. It would be a Quarter difficult to get into, and unpleasant once one succeeded (piercing whistles, alarm bells, sirens wailing intermittently, hideous sculptures, automatic mobiles with motors called Auto-Mobiles), as ill-lit at night as it glared bitterly during the day.

(17)

If the other quarters, taken together, can be seen as a product (albeit a strange one) of a familiar and longstanding utopianism directed towards the rational design of a perfectly functioning social organization or place, Gray’s Sinister Quarter indicates a perverse expansion of the content of perfection itself. For the first time in utopian fantasy, the City’s human and technological failings—the very features previous utopias had been imagined to extinguish—are preserved and incorporated as an integral part of the utopia itself. By maintaining the “malefic” as a loud, ugly, and technologically choked Quarter designed to cause injury and displeasure to those who enter, Gray preserves the form of utopia but so dramatically expands utopia’s content that his City appears to lack a supra-rational principle (peace, equality, faith, utility) dictating what the application of rational design is meant to accomplish.

 
The problem of the Sinister Quarter (if we can call the provocation of its utopian existence a problem) can be seen as a concise illustration of a much larger problem that beset Britain’s art world in the 1970s as the Situationist-inspired “revolution of everyday life” gradually infiltrated the practices and theories of a new generation of artists and critics. On the one hand, this revolution anarchically embraced all experience. Aesthetic pleasure, the artists-cum-revolutionaries discovered, was to be had everywhere and in everything—even in things normally held to be boring or bad or sinister. Its reception depended only upon the perceiver freeing him- or herself from his or her socially conditioned expectations so as to receive it. If taken too far, however, the dismantling of socially conditioned expectations—embodied institutionally by the museum and gallery—liberated art from the disinterest (first put forth by Kant) and formal hermeticism (enthroned in the 1950s by Clement Greenberg) upon which the new, revolutionary conception of art-as-anything depended in the first place.² If anything was to be art, Art itself could not be anything, but had to maintain its unique position as ahistorical, apolitical, and rooted in aesthesis.
 
On the other hand, the same artists-cum-revolutionaries discovered that if the revolution was extended so that it overturned the concept of Art itself, the prize of Art-as-anything was that Art could now finally be and do something. Free of the restraints of Kantian aesthetics, Art could re-enter history as useful work and join the politically disenfranchised in their struggles against capitalism, imperialism, and fascism. No longer providers of sensuous pleasure or creators of Culture in the aristocratic sense, artists could now join their social brethren as comrades in the battle for control of the everyday and thus work to repair Britain’s many social failings. Art could become social work, artists social workers.
 
Though most British artists in the 1970s ignored the contradiction at the heart of the everyday by cleaving to only one of these revolutionary perspectives—the anarchic or the socialist—Gray’s Sinister Quarter results from the uneasy combination of both. Essentially an imaginative work of social engineering in which the modern City is “fixed” so that it induces desired emotions and behaviors and provides an ideal existence, Gray’s Situationist-inspired City refuses to discriminate among emotions and behaviors so as to identify which are in fact desirable. Not only does Gray, following Chtcheglov, seek to include them all, but by way of imaginative compensation he devotes the most explicit planning to what would traditionally be labeled the least desirable (only the Sinister Quarter is described in detail). The secret moral connotations normally structuring the art of everyday life are revealed as the concept is stretched to include maleficence, danger, and fear—an art of everyday death.
 
Whether or not Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, or Chris Carter read Gray’s Leaving the Twentieth Century is unknown, but in 1976 when they debuted as the band Throbbing Gristle they seemed—with their ear-splitting sounds, repulsive lyrics, offensive imagery, and mechanical rhythm section—to have stepped right out of the Situationists’ Sinister Quarter. MP Nicholas Fairburn, outraged at what the group, operating previously under the name of COUM Transmissions, had fashioned out of public money (it had received an Arts Council grant), decried its members as “the wreckers of civilisation,” thus positioning them publicly as dangerous dystopians whose art threatened—if not actually wrecked—the hard-earned achievement of British civilization. Fairburn, of course, exaggerated (and did so partly in order to pin the disintegration of Britain’s postwar political consensus upon the ruling Labour government), but his description of P-Orridge, Tutti, Christopherson, and Carter as art-terrorist dystopians astutely identifies the group’s aesthetic strategy. Simultaneously anarchic aesthetes and hyper-rational technocrats, facilitators of the everyday and demonic social workers, Throbbing Gristle uncomfortably straddle the two different understandings of the revolution of everyday life that the Situationists, through Gray’s anthology and the works of their English members Ralph Rumney and Alexander Trocchi, had bequeathed to the British art world. In doing so, Throbbing Gristle invented a disquieting new subculture, named Industrial Culture, which was determinedly dystopian and anti-progressive—while simultaneously revolutionary and anti-conservative—in its approach to contemporary society, artistic production, and political action.
 
Whereas different branches of British art in the 1970s developed out of single sides of Situationist thought—on the one side British happenings, performance art, and Fluxus; on the other “social art” and Art & Language—Throbbing Gristle and the Industrial Culture it created are unique for their rootedness within the contradictions of Situationist thought. Their dystopian aesthetic was thus in large part an effort to maintain these contradictions in an artistic and social space that sought to ignore or suppress them. Though I have described these contradictions in terms of the incommensurable practices arising out of the notions of “anything as art” and “art as political work,” the split in Situationist thought can also be mapped (with identical results) upon the differences between the two canonical Situationist ur-texts: Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967). Though frequently grouped together in accounts of the Situationist project, the two represent vastly different visions of what Situationist thought should be and do. Whereas Debord’s book presents a highly critical, theoretically dense analysis of the spectacle, venomous and pessimistic in tone and rooted in Marxist thought, Vaneigem offers a more lyrical and optimistic meditation, rooted in Kierkegaard and the metaphors of alchemy, on the potential of radical subjectivity to reshape individual and social experience. To the problems of alienation and spectacular consumerism, Society of the Spectacle offers the abstract solution of critical consciousness, realized by the working class through councils that achieve real democracy by transcending the “isolated individual” and the “atomized and manipulated masses” (thesis 221). By contrast, The Revolution of Everyday Life identifies revolution with a non-alienated, passionate form of individual subjectivity, one that reconfigures relationships to everyday life so to as release their subversive dynamism. The two books, themselves representative of the two major modes of Situationist art and writing, thus constitute an aporia within Situationist thought. Because most academic and popular scholarship on the Situationists has ignored Vaneigem in favor of the more theoretically sophisticated Debord, such scholarship has repeatedly failed to register this aporia. As a result, the cultural legacy of the Situationist movement has been constructed in a manner that over-emphasizes critical theory, overt political action, and the spectacle of commodity capitalism. In tracing the contradictory approaches to the everyday that organized Throbbing Gristle’s work, I am thus offering a more complicated—and, I believe, more accurate—framework for approaching both Situationist thought and its legacy within the cultural sphere.
 
Throbbing Gristle is not, of course, entirely sui generis in its relation to Situationist thought—and indeed its aesthetic approach to social work is especially indebted to J.G. Ballard’s late-1960s writings (specifically those collected under the title The Atrocity Exhibition [1970]) and the work and performances of William Burroughs (who lived in Britain during the late 60s and was a friend and collaborator to P-Orridge).³ Situationist thought had an especially vibrant afterlife in Britain in the 1960s and 70s, with countercultural groups like King Mob and the Angry Brigade basing themselves explicitly upon Situationist theory, and artists and musicians/performers such as Art & Language and The Sex Pistols borrowing key elements of Situationist practice or critique.⁴ Throbbing Gristle’s work, however, is arguably the most useful of these artists and groups for highlighting and tracing theoretically the two different valences of Situationist thought, for, more so than the other figures’ works, Throbbing Gristle’s resists easy identification with either Debord or Vaniegeim’s theoretical model alone. What is more, Throbbing Gristle and the Industrial Culture it inaugurated serve together, chronologically, as a kind of endpoint to the post-1968 adventure of Situationist thought within the popular and/or subcultural spheres. They thus also enable us to better understand how changes to information technology and the Western political order, both beginning in the 1980s, served to strip Situationist practices of most of their critical bite.
 
It should be noted that Throbbing Gristle, like other Situationist-influenced groups within the British art world, was more than a mere attempt to realize Situationist theory. Throbbing Gristle was born in 1969 as P-Orridge’s COUM Transmissions, a performance-art enterprise that grew to include Tutti, Christopherson, and Carter before transforming into Throbbing Gristle and leaving the gallery/museum scene for that of the concert and record shop. As COUM, the group experimented with Cage-inspired approaches to art, primarily via happenings and Actionist-style performances, and participated in the burgeoning European avant-garde performance art scene of the 1970s.⁵ Although internationally recognized for its art at the time, COUM has come to be remembered almost entirely for its October 1976 Prostitution show at the ICA, which featured (among other things) framed clips from Tutti’s work as a professional model for the British and European porn industries. When it was discovered by a scandal-hungry press that COUM had received a small Arts Council grant for the show, a storm of protest developed, with Conservative MPs, museum-goers, and newspapers attacking the Arts Council and the ICA for having funded obscenity.⁶ Following so quickly upon the heels of similar ICA “scandals”—including the funding of Mary Kelley’s 1976 Post-Partum Document show and the purchase of Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (purchased in 1972, but not attacked by the press until 1976)—COUM’s Prostitution was partially responsible for ensuring that avant-garde and experimental art would no longer receive government funding once Thatcher came to power.⁷
 
Though the work of COUM Transmissions is an interesting subject in its own right and deserves more scholarly attention than it has yet received, its major artistic preoccupations situate it well within the anarchic or Vaneigem side of Situationist aesthetics. In the spirit of John Cage (whose book Silence helped inspire the young P-Orridge to become an artist), COUM used performance art to challenge the distinction between art and non-art, disrupt passive modes of interacting with the world, and re-invest everyday life with beauty and aesthetic free play.⁸ The group’s transition to Throbbing Gristle and its development of an explicitly techno-dystopian aesthetic can thus be seen as the repudiation of aesthetic anarchy as a self-sufficient strategy for reconfiguring the relationship between art and the everyday and re-humanizing post-war Britain. Rather than advocate a liberatory and institutionally liberated approach to art, Throbbing Gristle sought to bring art into the everyday by re-conceptualizing art itself, paradoxically, as a libertarian form of behavioral science—a dystopian techno-politics. In what follows, I provide a close analysis of this paradoxical approach to aesthetics—its style, its politics, and its philosophical premises—by situating it within the context of both 1970s social art, a short-lived aesthetic movement that developed an aesthetic explicitly modeled after behavioral psychology (but rooted in a Marxist approach to alienation and critical consciousness), and postwar impediments to research and the exchange of information. I conclude by returning to Situationist thought and offering a re-conceptualization, based upon Throbbing Gristle’s work, of the aporia at its heart, and the promise it may—through this aporia—yet hold.
 

From Social Art to Industrial Culture

 
Though Throbbing Gristle originally debuted at the ICA’s opening party for Prostitution—and thus announced itself to the public under the auspices of Britain’s foremost contemporary art institution—scholars and fans have long considered Throbbing Gristle an extra-art-world affair. Exemplary in this regard is Simon Ford, who writes in Wreckers of Civilisation: “The art world, they [P-Orridge et al.] concluded, was elitist, hypocritical, and out of touch, and the music industry promised a more relevant context for their work” (6.26). Even more cautious critics such as Neil Mulholland, who concedes the importance of art-world concerns to Throbbing Gristle, persist in identifying Throbbing Gristle primarily as a commercial music endeavor, thereby placing it outside the bounds of their discipline (Mylholland 61). In doing so, these critics reaffirm the very discursive boundaries both COUM and Throbbing Gristle sought to challenge.⁹ Art History’s rejection of Throbbing Gristle, fitting though it may be given the group’s strong anti-institutional bent, has nevertheless had two particularly pernicious effects on our historical understanding of the group. First, this rejection has effectively written Throbbing Gristle out of professional scholarship since the discourse to which Art History has assigned the group (“rock music”) has until quite recently been treated by most of academia as extra-academic. At the library of an American research university like the University of Pennsylvania one will thus search in vain for an indication that Throbbing Gristle ever existed, let alone exerted an influence on par with the Sex Pistols on the development of popular music in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, fan or underground scholarship, though working to reconstruct the band’s history, has, in following Art History’s lead, positioned as extra-artistic what was in fact an essentially artistic undertaking, rooted in art-world concerns and contexts and dependent upon the specific category of 1970s social or behavioral art for its seemingly novel approach to Situationist aesthetics. Indeed, to fully understand Throbbing Gristle’s dystopian aesthetic—both its origin and its aims—it must be placed in the context of this short-lived leftwing art movement.
 
What was social art? Unlike most other art movements of the 1960s and 70s, social art lacked both a specific formal style (though, as we will see, the various styles tended to produce a single, common effect) and a committed association of practitioners. It was rather defined by a particular approach to the idea of art and the role of the artist in contemporary society. Nicholas Serota, former Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery—the venue for Art and Society (1978), one of the two big social art exhibitions of the 1970s—described such art as “motivated by a belief in the need to change the social and political framework and, in some cases, the generally accepted role of artists in our society” (5). Richard Cork, curator of the other big social art exhibition of the decade, The Serpentine Gallery’s 1978 Art for Whom?, claimed more generally that “[t]he only valid criterion would…be whether the artist enlarges everyone’s capacity to live, with the fullness which should be his or her equal human due, in the world today” (10). Invitations to Cork’s show, however, included a ten-point manifesto, presumably endorsed by the exhibiting artists (though written, it would seem, by Cork), in which social art’s goals were laid out in clear, albeit still somewhat general-sounding, prose. The two most distinctive points were numbers four—”We are convinced that art must be transformed into a progressive force for change in the future”—and nine—”We would like society to regard artists as having an active part to play in dealing with the human, social and political issues which affect everyone’s existence” (qtd. in Levin 16). In other words, social art was to be an art of everyday life in the sense that it would function to improve the lives of the poor and working class (“society”) by addressing basic problems in the organization of modern life: rundown cities, alienation (either too little or too much), industrial pollution, the uniformity of modern housing developments, etc.
 
Different artists pursued the goals of social art in different ways. Formally speaking, the various examples of work on display at the two big shows exhibited a wide variety of artistic media and production techniques, though such works tended to exclude traditional fine arts categories such as canvas painting and sculpture. Conservative critic Bernard Levin provided the following accurate (though hostile) account of such variety for readers of The Times after visiting the Art for Whom? show:

It contains some strikingly attractive brightly-coloured designs by children for the facade of a school; the adult work, on the other hand, consists of things like sheets from the Family Allowances Act torn out and pasted on the wall, similarly displayed notices from the Asbestos Information Council, an advertisement for the products of the Distillers’ Company, annotated to draw attention to the company’s connexion with the thalidomide tragedy, and—this is the contribution of Peter Dunn and Lorraine Leeson—an account of a campaign against the proposed closure (on economy grounds) of Bethnal Green Hospital.

(16)

Two important observations on the nature of social art can be drawn from the above description. First, social art greatly resembled what has come to be called social work, its artists independent social workers. Such artists advocated for change by using art to address what were traditionally seen as either political or (increasingly after World War II) sociological/technocratic problems. By acting as community organizers and socialist propagandists (a word they preferred to “advertisers” or “marketers”), they sought to re-define artists as servants to the people and thus re-situate art as a fundamental aspect of everyday life by transforming it into politics. As Andrew Forge predicted in a 1971 piece for Studio International describing the decline of gallery-based art, “Art utterly democratized becomes politics” (34). Such was the goal of social art. Second, such art, despite its wide variety of styles and media (and excepting the occasional public mural), was formally predicated on the denial of aesthetic pleasure, traditionally defined. Cheaply printed photographs, torn sections of newsprint annotated with marker, columns of figures and statistics, typewriter fonts and sloppy textual blocking—social art deliberately sought to replace the vertical dimension of aesthetic free play with the horizontal dimension of historical materialism. Aesthetic contemplation would no longer be modeled on religious worship but on the practice of reading a Marxist pamphlet or socialist newspaper.

 
As a form of community-centered socialist politics, social art staked out an ostensibly anti-professional position within the art world. Despite the exhibition of work in shows like Art for Society and Art for Whom?—what Dunn and Leeson name “gallery socialism”—working-class (and usually urban) community centers such as town halls, libraries, schools, and tower blocks were deemed the proper place for art, which was itself frequently defined in terms of collective action rather than art objects (43). Social art rhetoric, through variations on phrases like “art for all” or “art for the people,” thus frequently positioned “real” art in opposition to the art of the museum and professional artist. Such institutional art was faulted both for its participation in the capitalist class structure and for the restricted population (educated and supposedly wealthy) it served. Indeed, the role of professional artist was itself attacked for its elitist monopolization of the title. As Ken Sprague, an exhibitor in Art for Society asserted, “It is not a question of every artist being a special kind of man but of every man, woman and child being a special kind of artist” (30). Returned to the people, art would become a progressive force, an invigorating social energy through which communities could fashion their own modern-day utopias. As for the social artists themselves, following a suggestion Justin Schorr made in Toward a Transformation of Art, they re-imagined themselves as therapists, community organizers, and social workers. As Schorr wrote, “My suggestion is that artists should redefine the art enterprise…so that it is no longer considered an economic endeavor but rather is considered a service profession, one that is to be subsidized” (89).
 
In re-imagining the artist as social worker, however, the division between artist and community member that social art had supposedly wished to mend was re-asserted in technocratic terms. The artist, though no longer possessing skills necessary for the creation of art, possessed an understanding of art as politics and an ability to organize under its name that placed him in the position of artist-administrator or -bureaucrat. Thus the drive to create social art resembled in its professional ideology the contemporaneous movement by artists to market themselves to the business world (best realized by the Artist’s Placement Group or APG).¹⁰ Indeed, the function of the social artist was almost identical to that of the new, business-friendly corporate artist, as summarized by Tom Batho of Esso Petroleum in a discussion of APG: “To some extent the artist is a bit like the business efficiency man who goes through the company. It’s not so much what they find wrong but what they release in suggestions from the personnel of the company they’re examining” (qtd. in Lucie-Smith 160). Like these corporate artists, social artists acted as community managers, identifying problem areas and inefficiencies and utilizing organizational skills to spur “every man, woman and child” on to more productive or progressive work (Sprague 30). The social artist, precisely in his or her capacity as social worker, was also a species of technocrat: a manager or human administrator. Stephen Willats, a prominent social artist who continued to produce art according to its principles into the 1990s, thus preferred the term “behavioural art”—highlighting as it does the goal of modified behavior (and the modified consciousness it produces) within communities—to that of social art. (For similar reasons he named his journal “Control”).¹¹
 
With the technocratic aspect of social art in mind, the ugliness of its actual aesthetic productions should appear less surprising. In a market over-saturated with institutionally certified artists and lacking a consistent method of appraising ability, social artists look longingly to professional labor markets that ranked employees based upon specialized knowledge and skill. Because the Romantic ideology underpinning popular, governmental, and educational understandings of art recognized individual genius in place of measurable skills, artists qua artists in the 1970s competed in an anarchic labor market in which one’s individual labor could not be meaningfully compared with another’s; in the absence of a determinable hierarchy, artists thus depended upon patronage, nepotism, and what was sometimes known as “professional incest” (serving on grant-awarding boards to which one later made application).¹² As much then as social art’s “art for everyone” democracy could be explained by the socialist politics of its practitioners, it was just as much a logical response to the devaluation of art as a specialized kind of labor. By inflating the supply of artists so greatly that their market value was zero (everyone is an artist), social artists sought to damn their professionally-trained brethren while re-classifying themselves as technocrats: a new, creative version of scientist, scholar, and administrator. The resulting aesthetic style was thus anti-expressive, anti-Romantic, and anti-Heroic. It was, fundamentally, what a group of German student protestors named in 1968 “information-aesthetics,” in which fact, figure, and technical language approximate dthat of the corporate spreadsheet, governmental paper, or law review (Clay and Kudielka 64). Black and white photography, pay slips, and newspaper articles functioned as mere documentation, what Les Levine called in an early article on information-aesthetics “evidence-creating,” the raw material upon which sociological theses (usually produced under the title of “artist statements”) might be based (264). In the end, social art was ugly because it sought not to be art at all but rather the science and politics of producing changes in human behavior; the aesthetic dis-pleasure of social art was thus premised upon the technocratic pleasure of science.
 
Taken by itself, social art was an extremely short-lived art world phenomenon that (aside from the popularization of community murals) had little direct lasting effect upon either the art world or the everyday of the working class. Indeed, with the sudden profitability of British Art in international art markets under Thatcher (thanks both to the new finance economy of London and the aesthetic innovations of the YBAs) the financial impetus for turning to social art in the first place had vanished. But though 1970s social art remains today little more than a footnote in the history of Fine Art and socialist political activism, it yet must be recognized as the peculiar (and unwitting) progenitor of one of the most vibrant Western subcultures of the late twentieth century: what Throbbing Gristle christened “Industrial Culture.” For the members of Throbbing Gristle were, if not social artists themselves, then the bastard children of social art, produced through the profane dalliance of social art’s fundamental aesthetic principles with the politics (or anti-politics) of extreme libertarianism.
 
The members of Throbbing Gristle were not classified as social artists by art critics in the late 1970s (they were not in fact classified as artists at all), but the band’s artistic production (encompassing not only music, but performance, prose, and a significant amount of visual material) greatly resembled social art’s in terms of its deliberate pursuit of what most would call sensuous dis-pleasure. Visually speaking, the means through which Throbbing Gristle solicited such dis-pleasure were nearly identical: degraded black and white photographs were common, color was generally absent (except for the occasional bit of red), poorly clipped newspaper articles served as backdrops or (in written documents such as Industrial News) the artistic subject in its entirety. Perhaps most exemplary—and extreme in its banishment of visual pleasure—is the cover to the band’s first album, confusingly titled The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle (released in 1977). Lest the entirely blank white cover evoke the minimalism of Richard Hamilton’s White Album (designed for the Beatles in 1968), a single plain sticker containing the corporate sounding title, the production date, and the label’s address in an unremarkable black font is affixed to the top right corner. The back of the LP’s sleeve is similarly blank, save for a much larger sticker, pasted in the sleeve’s center and containing what resembles a poorly photocopied reproduction of the first page of a shareholder’s report. The text, written in corporate-speak, describes the band’s activity in thoroughly un-artistic terms:

This second year of production has shown a definite move towards establishment of a sound business foundation on which further work involving greater capital expenditure can be based. Considerable progress has been made in the fields of research and development which have enabled us to give live demonstrations in five locations.

(Throbbing Gristle, The Second Annual Report)

Though some commentators have read the industrial language here and in other areas of Throbbing Gristle’s oeuvre as a means of mocking the industrial dimensions of the music business, the dimensions mimed are not those of the music industry, the major companies having decades earlier adopted cooler corporate identities.¹³ The aesthetic blandness rather suggests in-house administrative reports of the kind produced by government agencies or scientific/technical R&D departments. In fact, despite occasional music industry gags (particularly with its fourth album, Twenty Jazz Funk Greats), the group’s Industrial Records functioned like a typical late 1970s independent record company; the target of its aesthetic was thus not the record industry at all (of which Industrial Records was in fact a part), but the postwar valorization of techno-rationalism and the authoritarian regime of the expert it supported.¹⁴

 
Before I turn to Throbbing Gristle’s critique of technocracy, let us take a brief look at how the band translated social art’s emphasis on sensuous dis-pleasure into sound. Certainly the music they produced (much of it, especially at its live concerts, might better be classified as noise) was unpleasant by traditional aesthetic standards. With screeches of high-volume feedback, squelches of over-amplified guitars, and the whining improvisations of P-Orridge’s electric violin, Throbbing Gristle’s music seemed crafted on the assumption that even Punk’s three chords were unnecessary for forming a band. Because of the band’s “industrial” label, critics and fans have regularly interpreted such music in mimetic terms, hearing it as a recreation of the postwar industrial soundscape. In an early version of a 1978 review for Sounds, Jon Savage thus observed, “TG take up all the machine made noise in our industrial decline and throw it back in your face. Like PA hum, feedback, static, sonic accidents” (qtd. in Ford 7.12).¹⁵ Savage’s observation is typical for its easy correlation of musical noises with the sound of industrial-age machines, but the particular noises he cites are difficult to identify in the 1970s soundscape, industrial or otherwise—with the single exception of a rock concert sound check. Certainly the loose and often skittery electronic beats (Throbbing Gristle lacked a live drummer) sound nothing like the mechanized rhythm of the factory floor to which they’re often compared. The noises of much of Throbbing Gristle’s songs thus no more belong to a realist or representational aesthetic tradition than they do a recognizable musical form.
 
The band’s sounds were not, of course, entirely without precedent (though some effects, particular those run through Carter’s homemade “Gristlelizer” could not be heard elsewhere). Indeed, they were what sound technicians would readily label noise: excessive or undesired audio information that obscures the primary or desired musical message.¹⁶ For the sound technician (or the musician), such sounds in fact cancel out the expressive and emotional aspects of the music (the jam or the groove), replacing its participatory or subjective effect with a purely informational one: the speaker is too close to the mic, the levels on the bass are too high, the samplers are improperly sequenced, etc.¹⁷ Thus where Punk rock’s noise stemmed from a DIY amateurism that one could ignore in appreciation of the rock music behind it (and which vanished as the bands improved over time), Throbbing Gristle’s noise frequently came off as alarming sonic information behind which no music or meaning could be discerned. In these early days, Throbbing Gristle’s music thus presented its audience with a question: What do I do with this?
 
As the cognitive effects of Throbbing Gristle’s brand of noise should suggest, the band did not pursue sensuous dis-pleasure or what Drew Daniel calls “anti-pleasure” for its own sake (12). As with social art’s annotated newspapers and Xeroxed pay slips, the unpleasant productions of Throbbing Gristle were a corollary of the band’s efforts to construct a popular information-aesthetics; unlike social art, however, Throbbing’s Gristle’s information-aesthetics sought, through the détournement of information itself, to aestheticize information rather than to politicize art. Industrial Records supported this goal or (in the language used by the label) “mission” through the semi-regular publication of Industrial News, ostensibly a newsletter/catalogue produced by the band and its collaborators (such as Monte Cazzaza) and distributed to fans, or “Control Agents” (the term is borrowed from Burroughs), who had joined the label’s mailing list. In place of the official fan club publications of other labels, which feature pin-up photographs and teen-oriented interviews with musicians, Industrial News consisted primarily of quasi-scientific news: descriptions of venereal disease, reports on abnormal psychology, technical instructions for survivalists, illustrations of medical procedures (of the kind J.G. Ballard and Martin Dax had celebrated earlier in the decade via Ambit), studies on the effects of radiation, and numerous articles on serial killers.¹⁸ The band’s songs were similarly loaded with arcane references and free-floating bits of de-contextualized information; Christopherson in particular regularly mixed in sampled snippets of BBC news programs and documentaries as well as his own field recordings—illicitly captured, according to Ford, with “powerful surveillance equipment” (Ford 8.25). In conjunction with Industrial News and the reference-laden interviews given to the underground music press, these informational snippets frequently served as prompts for further research/aesthetic exploration by fans. They thus functioned as the musical equivalent of scholarly footnotes.
 
This emphasis on research eventually came to be one of the dominant features of Industrial Culture itself. As P-Orridge explained to Ford: “You can often trace the songs back to my book shelves. 50% to 60% of the songs were conceived after reading books…. I often ended up with an entire drawer of a filing cabinet of documentation in order to come up with just three or four minutes of lyrics” (7.12). As fans increasingly hunted down these texts and those cited by later industrial bands, various reading lists began to circulate. Re/Search Publication’s volume on Industrial Culture thus appends to each interview with an individual band a long list of important texts and recommended readings. Throbbing Gristle’s entry contains over 150 book references, the titles of which include Post-Mortem Procedures; History of Magic, Witchcraft and Occultism; The Scourge of the Swastika; and Nuclear Survival Handbook (“Throbbing Gristle” 18-19). As Daniel, reflecting upon his own initiation to Throbbing Gristle, observes, “Industrial culture had to be sought out through deliberate research and slow archival accumulation, consumed on record and in print at a scholarly remove” (12).
 
Of course, what Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Records presented as research would probably strike us today as informational trash: no more authentically “research” than the pornography of the 1970s and 1980s whose credits frequently announced the film’s scholarly relevance in an effort to avoid prosecution for obscenity. Indeed, information on serial killers and pictures of medical atrocities (such as the surgically mutilated penis on the cover of Surgical Penis Klinik’s Meat Processing Section, released on Industrial Records in 1980) are today easily accessible via the internet by anyone who is interested (and many who are not). Throbbing Gristle’s information-aesthetics thus imitated the style of social art, but replaced the progressive and often moralistic purpose of the latter’s socialist aesthetics with an anarchic commitment to non-purposiveness and Kantian disinterest. The socialist project of radical left-wing artists, who hoped by their art to remake the social world for the sake of the working class and poor, was transformed into an obsession with information—often disgusting or inscrutable, though nevertheless sometimes strangely beautiful—for its own sake. But just as COUM’s art for art’s sake was also for the sake of a virulent anti-institutionalism, Throbbing Gristle’s emphasis on information for information’s sake was in service to two specific politico-aesthetic principles.
 
First, Throbbing Gristle sought via the valorization of research and information to affiliate and empower non-professionals who, by definition, lacked institutional accreditation as scholars. The band’s earlier efforts as COUM to liberate art from artists was thus transposed into the professional sphere of science and sociology; information was to be “liberated” from the experts who produced and managed it. As P-Orridge argued in a 1979 manifesto (usually) titled “Nothing Short ov a Total War”: “Thee power in this world rests with thee people who have access to thee most information and also control that information” [sic] (24). As the management of human beings (particularly by government) occurred through the manipulation of information, the key to individual power, P-Orridge concluded, lay in the reclamation by everyday people of the ability to direct and produce information. Throbbing Gristle’s “Control Agent” fans were thus those who had achieved individual agency by taking control over information’s form.
 
Of course, P-Orrdige’s emphasis on the dangers of managed information may seem over-stated and paranoid to us today. Thanks to the internet, information of almost all types has become readily accessible to all (or at least all those with internet connections) in virtual form. And when particular information is not, its material incarnation is generally easy to locate thanks to online libraries, storefronts, and auction sites. Research, in fact, has become effectively de-institutionalized through the web; today’s budding researcher can pursue his or her project (whatever it might be) independently—with neither authorization nor assistance. (Of course, the availability of online resources assumes a complicated web of production in which multiple individuals participate; these individuals, however, need not interact formally or be institutionally affiliated.) But in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, information was more rigidly organized and demarcated—perhaps, thanks to new technology (which greatly increased both the quantity of recorded information and the possibility of illicit surveillance), even more rigidly so than at any time since the Enlightenment successfully challenged the censorship of religious authority. The Cold War created an atmosphere of secrets, where the open movement of information risked triggering nuclear annihilation. In such a climate, the spy, glamorized by 007, became for much of the early postwar period the ultimate fantasy profession—while the State, guarding its secrets even from itself (witness Nixon, but also serious CIA and MI5 scandals), bred an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. Censorship and obscenity laws were increasingly enforced as cheaper production costs lowered the barrier to publication.
 
To do independent research at such a time was not easy, especially if the subject of that research was controversial or out of the mainstream. Such research—say, for example, into Nazi occultism or nuclear radiation—required a network of individuals with whom to exchange primary and secondary texts that were often rare and/or prohibitively expensive. It also required some alternative means of publication or information-exchange (as simple as the exchange of letters or as complicated as independent publishing) if the research were going to exist as anything but self-education. Information, as an object, was thus quite a different entity from information today, precisely because information in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was still constituted by an object. And, as an object, it produced aesthetic communities—cultures or sub-cultures, depending upon the perceived value of the information—that revolved almost entirely around its circulation. Because information cannot exist as such without being potentially accessible (it must, that is, contain the capability to inform), different kinds of information in the post-war period became ontologically identified with the different communities that kept them circulating. Most of these communities were organized in the form of professional institutions, which served to limit access by carefully managing membership. But the aesthetic community that has come to be known as Industrial Culture tended to maintain an open network in which any person could participate by producing or exchanging information (as with the first generation of Punk, passive consumption seems to have been rare). Supported by Industrial Records (and later by other labels such as Tesco, World Serpent, and Cold Meat Industries), participants in Industrial Culture fashioned themselves into DIY experts, anarchic technocrats colonizing the extreme borders of science, sociology, and psychology.¹⁹
 
Whereas liberating art from artists produces, in theory, the dissolution (or total expansion) of the concept of art, separating technocracy from professional technocrats does not produce a similar conceptual collapse with regard to technocracy. For even if technocratic science is wrenched from the hands of professionals and opened to all, Throbbing Gristle’s fundamental problem with technocracy—that it works to control people—remains unresolved. The name given to the band’s fans, “Control Agents,” thus conveys a disturbing double-sense: though meant to signify people who had taken control of the information stream that had previously manipulated them, it likewise suggests guerilla practitioners able to use information to control others. In other words, though lacking the institutional validation of the real thing, DIY technocracy still functioned and felt like the professional version it challenged. As P-Orridge advised listeners on Heathen Earth (1980), “You should always aim to be as skillful as the most professional of the government agencies.” Not surprisingly then, the area of research encouraged most by Throbbing Gristle was behavioral psychology—books such as Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, J. Delgado’s Physical Control of the Mind, and J. P. Chaplin’s Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Crowds featured prominently in reference lists, their subjects translated into songs with names such as “Convincing People” and “Persuasion.” Such songs often exhibited a schizophrenic logic, reveling in the very acts of manipulation they seemed to decry. Daniel, for example, observes that though “Persuasion” “functions as an analysis of mechanisms of control, a critical unpacking of the personality that needs to control others…it also permits a pleasurable identification with that controlling position, a fantasy scenario in which the affective charge experienced through having power over others is gloated over, wallowed in and recirculated” (105). By identifying its critique of manipulation with manipulation itself, Throbbing Gristle substituted for social art’s hypocritical denouncement of false consciousness (a diagnosis that establishes the diagnostician’s freedom at the expense of the person or group diagnosed) the disturbing admission that the freedom to critique another’s lack of freedom creates and/or reifies the very lack it critiques.
 
If one important effect of Throbbing Gristle’s information-aesthetic was the formation of a DIY research community whose existence challenged both the monopolization of research and the progressive use to which it was put by professional technocrats, the other was a clever recovery of the Vaneigem-inspired revolution of everyday life towards which COUM had originally been directed. Indeed, with Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Culture the very concept of the everyday was expanded, in a direction that seems to have left Cage behind by more fully embracing Vaneigem, to include events and experiences (murder, radiation, pollution, boredom, etc.) that are usually seen as waste products of industrial society and thus out of bounds to art’s distinction-granting gaze. As waste products, such objects resisted appropriation by both progressive causes (which usually cited them only as negative examples) and traditional notions of beauty, which generally associated beauty with morality (the latter often identified with the concept of nature or the natural).
 
The anti-progressive aspect of Throbbing Gristle’s aesthetic was achieved, in a manner that resembles Gray’s representation of the Situationist City, primarily through the selection for representation of objects that cannot rationally be accounted for by any functioning utopia. Exemplary in this regard was the band’s handling of murder, which (especially in its early days) was a frequent topic of its music, writing, and performances. Songs like “Urge to Kill” and “Slug Bait” reported the activities of serial killers like Edmund Kemper and Charles Manson not as calls for moral outrage (and subsequent corrective action), but as aesthetic phenomena. Through such songs and reports in liner notes and Industrial News, the band endorsed the desire to commit murder as a legitimate form of radical human subjectivity and sought to encourage such subjectivity in its audience.²⁰ Sometimes this encouragement even assumed the form of a direct imperative, as at the band’s 1977 “Rat Club” gig, during which P-Orridge wrapped up one song by repeatedly shouting at the audience, “All I want you to do is go out and kill” (Ford 7.11-7.12). Certainly the band did not actually hope to incite murder, but wished instead to open up modes of experiencing murder and the fantasy of committing it that are not wholly determined by the familiar problem-oriented discourses of sociology and psychology. In a June 1976 piece for Studio International titled “Annihilating Reality,” P-Orridge and Christopherson explained:

Edeward Paisnel, known as the Beast of Jersey, was found guilty of thirteen charges of attacks on six people on Monday 13 December 1971. On 13 September 1440 Gilles de Rais was found guilty of 34 murders, though it is believed his victims numbered over 300. Rais, Prelati, Poitou made crosses, signs, and characters in a circle. Used coal, grease, torches, candles, a stone, a pet, incense. Words were chalked on a board. Could these rituals preceding child murders, in another context and properly photographed, become Beuysian performance?

(45-46)

Such musings would come back to haunt P-Orridge during his later investigations by Scotland Yard for producing, along with Derek Jarman and the members of Psychic TV, what looked like a snuff film, but “Annihilating Reality” does not actually advocate murder; rather it argues for the separation of the act’s formal qualities from its social effects and moral value.²¹ Instead of immorality, murder, the band argued, can be seen as an aesthetic event, as art. Furthermore, when the concept of art was thus expanded so as to include murder as a paradigmatic example, it shed the need to reflect what ought to be and contribute to that ought’s utopian realization.

 
Though murder appeared frequently as an object of aesthetic contemplation in Throbbing Gristle’s work, a more common figure of anti-progressive desire for the band is that of thwarted biological reproduction. The mutilation of sex organs, abortion, rape involving murder, and (male) masturbation appeared frequently in its lyrics and imagery.²² A regular video backdrop for early Throbbing Gristle concerts, for instance, featured a highly realistic simulated castration. The image of wasted semen, however, received some of the most sustained attention.²³ The cover for the “Something Came Over Me” side of Subhuman/Something Came Over Me (1980) featured a laboratory photograph of Christopherson’s semen suspended in water while the song’s lyrics celebrated the anti-social pleasures of male masturbation. A single line, “something came over me,” is repeated incessantly in a regular rhythmic pattern by P-Orridge, who occasionally substitutes for it additional lyrics (“Was it white and sticky?” “I think I kind of liked it,” and “Mommy didn’t like it”) that reveal the title’s sexual significance. The final refrain, “And I’m do-do-do-do-doing it again” communicates a triumphant dismissal of the mother’s censure, the extended staccato of the word “doing” signaling not only the speaker’s defiance of social expectation, but the excessive jouissance achieved by doing so. In its 1980 performance of the song at Oundle School, then an all-boy’s boarding school near Peterborough, the band further expanded the song’s significance by using a greatly extended version as the center-piece for its entire performance.²⁴ For the audience of adolescent schoolboys, P-Orridge shifted to a didactic register, transforming the final lyric (repeated again and again for minutes) from committed avowal to militaristic imperative—”Do-do-do-do-do it anyway!”—thereby hijacking the educational discourse of the institution for non-productive and socially harmful instruction. Through such careful undermining of the progressive ideology governing the production and reception of art, Throbbing Gristle offered an art that deliberately countered the moral desires of socially conscious citizens.
 
Of course, the vast majority of the band’s music and visual production was unconcerned with desire at all, moral or otherwise, and there was little of it that directly attacked specific moral values. Indeed, as described earlier, much of Throbbing Gristle’s work was concerned with what was generally perceived as informational trash. The band took functionless research and discredited or fringe science and, refusing to render it “art” by translating it into a fine arts language of visual pleasure, presented it as research. Because such research lacked functional value, however, it simultaneously served as a successfully realized expression of what could be called “pure information”—information, which through a process resembling détournement, had been removed from any particular function or purpose. As a material phenomenon, pure information maintains the form of science or purpose (it looks like data) but cannot be meaningfully identified with either a professional research institution or a particular project or purpose. It thus lacks a rational cause, but looks like it has one; and this odd conjunction—the appearance of purposiveness in general—is precisely (and not incidentally) the definition of beauty offered by Kant and the tradition of aesthetics to which he gave rise. Ultimately, Throbbing Gristle’s strongest weapon against the colonization of art by experts was thus to adopt the form of expertise while emptying it of reason. For data denied function can communicate to its receiver only as pure form: a discarded recording of computer sounds (“I.B.M.”) becomes music; a medical textbook illustration of a surgical procedure becomes a drawing. Furthermore, by creating its own non-professional research communities in which all could produce such research-cum-art, Throbbing Gristle likewise created a host of un-trained (even inadvertent) artists. Throbbing Gristle thus turned the form of social art against social art itself; the expertise of the social artist, secured by his superior progressive vision, was undone by divorcing expertise from reason both pure and practical (to use Kantian language) and thus opening it to all. If anyone could produce research without rational aim or direction and communicate that research, then anyone who did so was simultaneously producing art.
 
Throbbing Gristle “ceased to exist” (to use the group’s own language) in 1981, but its influence was felt throughout the eighties and much of the nineties as a host of new bands and subcultural artists adopted the “mission” of Industrial Culture. Though the bands and labels started by the original four (Tutti and Carter’s Chris and Cosey, P-Orridge’s Psychick TV, and Christopherson’s Coil) still set much of the research agenda, new experimental groups such as Whitehouse, Current 93, Nurse with Wound, SPK, Test Dept, Cabaret Voltaire, Einsturzende Neubauten, Boyd Rice, and Der Blutharsch, introduced their own aesthetic tweaks and produced their own “scholarly literature.”²⁵ By the 1990s, Industrial Culture had even had limited mainstream success as bands like Skinny Puppy, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails translated Throbbing Gristle’s “musical” style into more familiar song structures (most featuring recognizable choruses and stable electronic rhythms).
 
Despite Industrial Culture’s longevity, however, information technology and the social reality undergirding the subculture has changed so significantly as to render unviable the subculture’s aesthetic. The personal computer and the internet have created a new kind of de-hierarchized social sphere, very different from that of “everyday” Britain during the post-war period, in which communities could function outside the bounds and without the remit of law, social mores, and professional institutions; indeed, the internet seems even to have freed communities from the limitations of geographic space. On the face of it such open access to the exchange of information might appear to be the realization, on a global scale, of the kind of DIY research/aesthetic community on which Industrial Culture was based. In practice, however, the mode of community enabled by computers and the internet privileges postmodern—or, as Alan Kirby has called them, “digimodern”—communication practices and social values that are incompatible with the essentially modernist values of Industrial Culture and the Situationist aesthetics it inherited.²⁶
 
Although, as Mitchell Waldrop has recounted in his authoritative history of personal computing, both the computer and the internet were originally designed to aid scientists and researchers in the processing of scientific data, even before the launch of the early internet (as ARPANET), they were already serving an important secondary function: personal communication—or what most communication scholars call Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). In CMC, multiple computers, connected via the internet, enable through special software new forms of communication platforms (the newsgroup, the email, the instant message) that privilege direct or low-latency communication between distinct individuals. Though there has been a continuous debate over the value of the communities produced through CMC, both its proponents and its detractors typically support their judgments by comparing these computer-mediated communities to traditional, communitarian notions of inter-subjective belonging derived from Romantic or anti-modern notions of what a community is.²⁷
 
The model of community put forth by Throbbing Gristle, by contrast, rejected communitarian values (which the band viewed as both overly conservative and excessively utopian) in favor of those stemming from aesthetics and radical subjectivity. In place of personal communication, Industrial Culture privileged the exchange of useless information: of non-purposive texts (informational trash), citations, and prompts for research. Such exchange, though occasionally also leading to the formation of personal relationships premised upon intimacy or inter-subjective familiarity, was directed primarily towards the enabling of aesthetic experiences and DIY (a practical ideology whose name itself is at odds with traditional notions of community) activities that are fundamentally individual or mono-subjective in orientation. Whereas Industrial Culture was premised from the start upon a Modernist notion of the text—non-responsive, impersonal, self-sufficient (or endogenic) with respect to meaning—CMC substitutes for the thick mediation of the text the transparent mediation of software (offering direct, often immediate exchange). On the newsgroup rec.music.industrial, started in 1991 and still operative today, one finds virtually no aesthetic texts (and few links or citations to such texts), but rather personal exchanges about favorite and least favorite music, requests to meet up at concerts, advice on which CD to purchase, and a small degree of personal name-calling and invective (“flames”). Though by some criteria this may very well constitute informational trash, it offers little potential for “art as anything” détournement nor the radical aesthetic experience such détournement seeks.
 
The development of CMC alone, however, was not responsible for the finished viability of the kind of détournement practiced by Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Culture; the rise of new media (beginning in the early 1990s) brought with it a change in the ontology of media itself that robbed détournement, in virtually all its modes, of critical power. Lev Manovich explains this change in terms of variability:

Old media involved a human creator who manually assembled textual, visual, and/or audio elements into a particular composition or sequence. This sequence was stored in some material, its order determined once and for all. Numerous copies could be run off from the master, and, in perfect correspondence with the logic of an industrial society, they were all identical. New media, in contrast, is characterized by variability. (Other terms that are often used…are mutable and liquid.) Instead of identical copies, a new media object typically gives rise to many different versions.

(36)

Lacking an ideal (in the Platonic sense) or proper form, the new media object is too mutable, too unfinished and open to change to serve as a fitting target of détournement. As strings of 0’s and 1’s meant to be decoded by software (in contrast to the hardware needed to access old media such as film or vinyl), new media objects lack the very qualities previously taken to constitute an object. They have content, but no essential form—and lacking such form, they lend themselves more to use than to study or beholding. Indeed, the eminent usability of the new media object has given rise in recent years to the dual ideologies of Web 2.0 and “prosumption,” each advocated by technophiles, media journalists, and marketing gurus.²⁸

 
In the face of such an object, which not only allows itself to be changed/mis-used but seems to positively invite it, what is a twenty-first-century Situationist to do? Détournement in the style of Debord—meant through the collage of plagiarized texts to short-circuit the spectacle in order to raise the spectator’s critical consciousness—loses its critical purchase in a world of re-mixed and mashed-up content. But so too does the détournement of Vaneigem, which aims to revitalize the revolutionary potential of the everyday through what he sometimes called the pre-analytic “consciousness of immediate experience” (195). No longer is it possible to restore an object’s lost aesthetic surplus by reframing it as pure information, for the ontology of the object within a cultural sphere dominated by new media is no longer objectivity in the traditional sense at all, but rather customization, personalization, and mis-use.
 
Because of the twin problems of CMC and new media ontology, Industrial Culture deliberately resisted adapting to the internet. Throughout the 1990s, few of the bands and artists associated with the subculture had any web presence at all, while today the key living practitioners make little use of it other than for advertising and sales.²⁹ Unusual for contemporary pop musicians, many of these sales revolve around limited edition, physical objects (usually vinyl, but sometimes CDs) in handcrafted packaging or bundled with special art objects. While it would be easy to criticize such a practice as a conventional form of commodity fetishism, it might be better seen as a form of object fetishism—that is, an insistence, under the dominance of new media, on classical objectivity, textual closure, and aesthetic disinterest. Those industrial musicians who have adopted digital production techniques have done so in ways that seek to undermine or challenge the ideology of free-form variance and mutability, most often by relying upon alchemical or magical working methods (which emphasize continuance and development rather than dissonance, plagiarism, and customization).
 

From the Art of Everyday Life and Death to the Aesthetics of Neoliberalism(s)

 
What, ultimately, were the political valences of Throbbing Gristle’s aesthetic productions and the subculture that formed around them? Politically speaking, their commitment to what we can call (paradoxically) a technocratic libertarianism maps poorly onto traditional schemas of political affiliation. As P-Orridge (writing as David Brooks) told Sounds in 1978: “It is very important that TG be allowed to point out that they have absolutely no political stance of any kind. Throbbing Gristle are apolitical…. Long live the Industrialists!” (qtd. in Ford 8.15). Though such an apoliticism can to some degree be read as anarchic resistance to the post-war political order, the silliness of the concluding exclamation indicates Throbbing Gristle’s distance from the usual forms of (leftwing) anarchism, which see the State and the warring political groups to which it gives rise as one of the central problems of the modern political order.
 
Because Industrial Culture (like the tail end of the first wave of Punk) was at its peak during the period of Conservative rule under Margaret Thatcher, the ugliness of Throbbing Gristle’s art has (again, as with Punk) sometimes been interpreted as leftwing resistance to modern capitalism and the Conservative Party under Thatcher.³⁰ As my discussion of the group’s relationship to social art should suggest, however, its commitment to dystopian models of social (dis)organization actually locates it closer to Thatcher than her opposition during the late 1970s (recall that the group “ceased to exist” after 1981). As “Sleazy” explains in an interview with Daniels:

[A]t that time I think that the Labour government was seen as the bad guy. They had been the cause of many of the social problems that we had railed against…. So when the conservatives first got into power, nobody really knew who they were aside from the fact that it was a change from the supposed darkness of the past. All the negative things that we ascribe to the Conservative or Republican viewpoint now were unknown to us at the time.

(78)

Of course, there are significant ideological differences between Thatcher’s Conservatism and Throbbing Gristle’s libertarianism, but given the social and economic climate of the time, the similarities—particularly their simultaneous suspicion of and attraction to the very idea of government itself—are striking. Indeed, Thatcher’s various efforts to encourage individual self-reliance and private financial markets through the withdrawal of both state support and bureaucratic tinkering resembles in its liberalizing strategies the efforts of COUM/Throbbing Gristle to empower individual non-professionals as artists, researchers, and anarchic technocrats. Both goals squarely opposed the left’s efforts to produce a coherently organized society built upon community and equality through the empowerment of the working class.

 
For this reason—and for Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Culture’s wry hostility to socialist political ideals such as community, fraternity, and equality—it is tempting to position Throbbing Gristle as a kind of neoliberal vanguard, a libertarian aesthetic project contributing, however minutely (and perhaps even unwittingly), to the disintegration of the postwar social order and the rise of an atomized, individual-oriented political sphere dominated by economic imperatives. Viewed through such a lens, Industrial Culture would bear a strong similarity to Punk, which—though repeatedly hailed by scholars as anti-capitalist and radically (if insufficiently) socialist—shares many aesthetic principles with Industrial Culture: an anti-technocratic or DIY approach to aesthetic production; a celebration of the ugly, violent, and ruined aspects of postwar social life; and a rampant—indeed, uncontrollable (witness Malcolm McLaren and Sid Vicious)—individualism.
 
Throbbing Gristle’s relationship to Situationist theory, however, suggests problems with this assessment. The first revolves around the difficult and perhaps paradoxical nature of aesthetics as a politics, which we find in Vaneigem’s work—although in a deliberately proto-theoretical mode of discourse. Vaneigem prescribes a politics in the form of aesthetic practice, which through its détournement of the everyday is designed to produce revolution at the level of individual subjectivity. “The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life,” he insists, in one of many similar-sounding formulations (202). This prescription may at first also appear a blueprint for neoliberalism; indeed, aesthetics itself (and with it the Kantian idea of the beautiful) has since the 1980s come to been seen as essentially individualist in orientation, the judgments of taste that underpin it functioning as little more than psycho-social expressions of class difference. This is unfortunate, in that the aesthetic, as first theorized by Kant, is posited as precisely that mechanism that enables human beings to link their individual subjectivity (via sensations or aesthesis) to the universality of a shared social order. As Kant states, “in the judgment of taste nothing is postulated except…a universal voice with regard to satisfaction without the mediation of concepts, hence the possibility of an aesthetic judgment that could at the same time be considered valid for everyone” (101). From a Kantian perspective, the aesthetic judgment directed at everyday life would thus function to lay the ground for a community not based on shared interests, values, or antagonisms, but rather that of sense itself—what Jacques Rancière sometimes calls a communis sensus. This communis sensus is a kind of community persisting through (and indeed because of) separation; it posits a mode of togetherness founded in disinterested, sensual autonomy. As Rancière explains, “aesthetic autonomy is not that autonomy of artistic ‘making’ celebrated by modernism. It is the autonomy of a form of sensory experience. And it is that experience which appears as the germ of a new humanity, of a new form of individual and collective life” (Aesthetics 32). As Rancière notes elsewhere, the aesthetic mode of experience produces for the individual a radical dis-identification with his own social situatedness; and it is precisely this dis-identification (in Vaneigem, immediate experience) that allows one to create new identities, forms of consciousness, and relationships with others (Rancière, Emancipated 73). Ultimately, this is the form of experience that Throbbing Gristle aimed at, and through this experience a communis sensus, which, in contrast to the more traditionally political utopias proposed in the postwar period, would not require co-presence, cooperation, or even direct communication in order to create belonging.
 
The second reason we might reject the attribution of neoliberalism to Throbbing Gristle stems from a problem with the concept of neoliberalism itself. Humanities and social science scholars use this word to signal a politico-economic order, dominant in Britain and the US since the 1980s, wherein the order of politics has been completely (or almost completely) reduced to that of economics, all in the name of individual freedom and competitive markets. Neoliberalism thus represents an end to community, to distributive notions of justice, to universal ideals; in exchange, it offers what David Harvey has called, “the financialization of everything” (33). For these reasons, it serves as the bête noir of contemporary scholarship, where it is universally attacked or lamented, sometimes even as an “evil” or a “terror.”³¹ Despite its prevalence within scholarly debate, however, the concept of neoliberalism has managed largely to escape the kind of critical complication that surrounds other key scholarly concepts. Taylor C. Boas and Jordan Gans-Morse, after conducting a survey of the term’s appearance in scholarly articles on development and political economy between 2002 and 2005 (admittedly a far-cry from humanities scholarship, but the comparison is still instructive), find that the term is rarely subject to definition, though surprisingly monosemous in usage:

Despite its prevalence, scholars’ use of the term neoliberalism presents a puzzle. Neoliberalism shares many attributes with ‘essentially contested’ concepts such as democracy, whose multidimensional nature, strong normative connotations, and openness to modification over time tend to generate substantial debate over their meaning and proper application. In stark contrast to such concepts, the meaning of neoliberalism has attracted little scholarly attention.

(138)

Instead of neoliberalisms scholars must thus currently make do with neoliberalism, and with it a surprisingly—and, I believe, unhelpfully—monologic vision of a dominant order unmarked by serious internal difference, contradiction, or conflict at the level of logic.

 
Throbbing Gristle and the illumination its aesthetic practice offers with respect to the contradictions of Situationist thought, however, point the way to a richer notion of neoliberalism as a concept. For it is clear that what is neoliberal about Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Culture—their individualism, their substitution of aesthetics for traditional politics, and their hostility toward collective social projects—had been inherited from Situationist thought, which, via Vaneigem, celebrated the very same values as a corollary to the revolution of everyday life. This revolution, albeit rooted in individual psychology, nevertheless sought something larger—a reconceptualization of what individuality and community are and can be, a communis sensus in which aesthesis is enough to produce belonging. If it contributed to the ultimate dominance of a neoliberal order, it did so, paradoxically, out of ignorance—for certainly, the content of our contemporary social order is not what Vaneigem imagined—but also deliberateness, in that the form of our social order is as close a realization to what Vaneigem wanted as the West has yet known. By drawing a line from Situationist thought (itself subject to internal contradictions and multiple potentialities), through Industrial Culture, to the concept of neoliberalism, my intent is not to paint the Situationists or Throbbing Gristle as evil, but rather to suggest a deeper, more complicated, and internally conflicted conceptual mapping of neoliberalism. Industrial Culture and its approach to Situationist thought offer us a better understanding of the revolutionary hopes and desires that helped supplant social democracy with neoliberalism, as well as the radical possibility that somewhere hidden within the workings of neoliberalism itself may lie a path to these hopes and desires’ eventual fulfillment.