Join us Thursday, January 24th at 4:30 pm in Goodspeed Hall room 205 for this week’s workshop, featuring Shane Greene. Shane will be presenting On the Peruvian Reality of Punk’s Mode of Underproduction.
Abstract: Parting from the historical context of Peru’s 1980s underground punk scene – which emerged amid the country’s descent into a civil war and the rise of Shining Path Maoists – I develop a theory of punk as a mode of global underproduction. Theoretically, the aim is to elaborate on under-production as a point of relative contrast to both Marxian understandings of capitalist over-production and the more specifically aesthetic forms overproduction takes with artistic and musical commodities. I apply this theoretical framework both the general emergence of Lima’s “underground rock” phenomena in the 80s and to one of its most iconic examples of musical production: Narcosis’ “Primera Dosis” demo cassette first recorded in a garage in 1985. Details of its various lives of production and circulation – then on pirated cassette; now on US-produced vinyl – reveal the inherent relativity of under to over-production at different moments and in different contexts. Originally an under-produced icon of Lima’s street piracy-based market, “Primera Dosis” now also circulates as an over-produced status commodity in and outside of Peru.