Grab it and change it, it’s yours: Affect, attitude and politics in 1970s Northern Irish punk music

Abstract

This paper argues for incorporation of attitude into geographical work on affect. We do so through an engagement with affect in musical experiences and adopting as our focus punk music in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. Through a combination of lyrical analysis and in-depth interviews with some of those involved in the punk scene in Northern Ireland at that time, we find that affective responses to musical experiences can be translated into attitude, shifting from intentional expression, e.g., through clothing or demeanour, to habituation and pre-reflective persistence at the level of the everyday, extending the duration of affect and interweaving the cognitive and pre-reflective. Further, through our emphasis on the temporalities of affect, our focus on punk music in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles identifies the attitudinal prefiguration of an anarchist utopia. However, due to the habituation of attitude, this political aspect becomes invisible to and unacknowledged by those exhibiting and instantiating it. This paper extends the affective moment into durable attitudinal dispositions, unsettles rigid notions of separation between the cognitive and pre-reflective, questions the radical openness of affect in the face of the regulatory power of attitude, provides theoretical insights into punk as instantiating an attitudinal form of utopia, and contributes to growing engagement with the political potential of affect.