Abstract

The following article is an account of the early British punk subculture from the standpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is argued that where cultural studies has failed in its attempted elucidation of one of its earliest and foundational objects of study, Lacanian psychoanalysis helps to understand punk’s relation to wider society. Punk gleefully expressed the demise of Symbolic efficiency and meta-narratives, and the concomitant failure of identity, not least in their willful assumption of their abject status; this created, or realized a scene, the cinematic overtones of which are not discounted. In this way enmired in the logic of drive, it is argued that punk was also engaged in the logic of pure desire. To the extent cultural studies approaches continue to fail in their attempted elucidation of the punk phenomenon, the terrain for cultural analysis remains open to other approaches, including Lacanian psychoanalysis