The disorder of things: Punk rock objects

Alongside its political ideals, DIY practices and forms of community, punk is also held together by the production and circulation of objects. When punk is represented, archived, remembered or displayed, it is often in material terms: zines, studded belts, Mohawks styled with glue, records, shirts. Punk is not reducible to its objects, but it is also unthinkable without them. And when punks worry that an anti-capitalist ethos is compromised by all this stuff, they tend to insist that these things ought to be understood as evidence of human activity designed to create a new world. Yet perhaps there is another way of thinking about such matters beyond the story of dynamic people who bring inert things to life. The article explores several speculative theories of vital materialism and object-oriented ontology in order to explore what can happen when we treat objects as things that exist ontologically with or without humans and how such an approach broadens our understanding of punk’s borders and expresses its foundational appreciation for a more-than-human world.