attempt to bring the notion of place within this atmosphere and by referring to it as historically funded cultural expression.
Materialities and Emergent Cultural Sensibilities
Marx described the forces involved in economic production as the structure, the real foundation,
on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Marx 1977)
This primacy asserted by Marx to the economic sphere has brought to a variety of attitude towards culture, in terms of its production, consumption, and circulation. For instance, Adorno described how capitalist economic forces shape the cultural industry so that, therefore, culture under capitalism can only produce goods to be consumed. For Williams, however, superstructure cannot be interpreted as a mere reflection. The production of a cultural order is always material; it takes places in space, it determines what we are able to see, to grasp of everyday reality:
Cultural work and activity are not now, in any ordinary sense, a superstructure: not only because of the depth and thoroughness at which any cultural hegemony is lived, but because cultural tradition and practice are seen as much more than superstructural expressions—reflections, mediations or typifications—of a formed social and economic structure. On the contrary they are among the basic processes of the formation itself and, further, related to a much wider area of reality than the abstractions of ‘social’ and ‘economic’ experience. (Williams 1977, 111)
Building on the work of Gramsci, Williams affirmed that even at the cultural level, dominant forces maintain their power by saturating practices, meanings, senses of reality, and values into the cultural hegemony. Hegemony is a whole body of practices and expectations covering the whole of the living experience; it is a lived system of meanings and values, a sense of reality, which is internalised and therefore as profound as anything that Marx would make exclusive to the so-called economic base.
Cultural hegemony is not static, it depends on real social processes of selection and incorporation, and it is perpetuated, for instance, through education, family, training, and class. Dominant culture must be continuously made and remade, especially because it cannot exhaust all forms of being and understandings of reality. There are no main modes of production, dominant societies, and dominant cultures, which can exhaust the full range of human practice, human energy, and human intention.
Continuously there are subaltern forces in the making; these are residual or emergent. These forces are residual when they are expressions of the past, but they are lived as if they were present, such as organised religion or rural living, for instance. They are emergent when they convey new meanings and values, new practices, and new relationships. They can also be alternative or oppositional, with reference to their standing towards society as a whole. Alternative forces are the ones that run side by side with the dominant ones and create a parallel space, while oppositional forces want to change society as a whole and substitute the dominant hegemony. Hegemony’s reactions can range from incorporation and attack to overlooking and ignoring, depending on the nature of the subaltern forces. The hegemony consciously and continuously selects and organises cultural practices born outside it.
Art as a form of cultural expression is based on specific activities and relationships of real human beings. According to Williams, it is important to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions, not its components:
What we are actually seeking is the true practice which has been alienated to an object, and the true conditions of practice—whether as literary conventions or as social relationships—which have been alienated to components or mere background. (Williams 1980, 49; emphases are mine)
According to Williams, the base/superstructure dichotomy was overcome in the work of Gramsci by the concept of cultural hegemony. Cultural hegemony simply corresponds to the reality of social experience in a certain society; it saturates society and constitutes the limits of common sense. Gramsci was therefore able to assert a specific value to culture and, at the same time, to theorise to the possibility of destabilising the dominant hegemony through cultural action.
The bands, scenes, and movements from industrial cities described in this book should be understood as emergent and anti-hegemonic. As we will see, some experiences were oppositional and some were alternative in nature, but they all shared a preoccupation with space.
As noted before, economic crises have a deep impact on the urban environment with regard to decay. Spaces of production might become redundant and therefore emptied and abandoned, ongoing urban developments might be abruptly stopped, whole districts might be left shrinking and decaying by speculators waiting for an upswing, and mortgage-dependant flats and houses might end under foreclosures. The city as a functioning network of transports, energy supplies, and services might experience seizures and blockages. Certain districts might be stigmatised by a major presence of unemployed, and city centres might become the sites for demonstrations and resistance, maybe leading to violence and repression. All European cities have experienced, at least once, some of the above-mentioned real features of an economic crisis in their recent history.
Industrial cities have been particularly stigmatised under economic crisis, and the step towards new economic paradigms has deeply affected their nature. Born as articulations of space, they had to quickly submit to the dominance of place, that is, creating a brand, becoming recognisable, building a history, and assigning a marketable cultural value to themselves. As stated before, in some cases, popular music has been adopted as an instrument to achieve these goals.
What is more interesting for this book is to understand how popular music was affected by these changes in the material dimension of the industrial city, for instance, how urban decay has affected popular music production, consumption, and circulation. Of course, the consequences have been different in relation to national contexts, popular music markets, and other implications. However, one generalising argument could be made through the notion of cultural sensibility, which I defined elsewhere as an individual or collective reaction to certain social or spatial circumstances, which asserts a certain aesthetic or emotional value to a particular place. To offer an example, it is common in every European city to find a former factory turned into a theatre, a media facility, or a restaurant, sometimes with grotesque results. However, there is nothing culturally relevant in an abandoned factory; it is just the expression of a local or global change at the level of capitalist accumulation, a change that affected manufacturing or production. It is cultural sensibility and its spreading from the individual level to the collective that adds a particular symbolic value to the material building and makes it pleasant and inspiring enough to become an art gallery, for instance. There are, of course, very clear logistic elements to it—namely, the size, illumination, and location—nonetheless, its appeal originates in the cultural sensibility of an individual or a few.
What has been previously described as ‘industrial crisis atmosphere’ is therefore not something given, but it has an origin in a specific socio-economic context: the 1980s urban crisis and in relation to a specific group of people, which I identify with the post-punk scenes developing in the late 1970s in European and North American industrial cities.
The four cities I will refer to in the following chapters, again, belong to different regions of Europe. They are all secondary centres in their own national settings, but they maintain a strong regional supremacy and, during their industrial history, were central for the globalised movement of different goods.
At different stages, and in different modalities, all four urban conurbations had at least to partly modify their economic paradigm, following deindustrialisation and the 1980s urban crisis. Still, their architectural and planning features still maintain intact many features of their past.
From the late 1970s to the early 1980s in all four cities, popular music became a significant element in youth and cultural activism and leisure time, with the appearance of very active punk and post-punk scenes. Fanzines, bands,