Justin O’Connor, author of Reset: een nieuwe start voor kunst en cultuur, recently pusblished by Starfish Books will talk about the memory of Joy Division and what it means for an urban future beyond the so-called creative city.

Joy Division’s music and career play a foundational role in a narrative of Manchester’s “urban regeneration”, whereby a decaying industrial city was to become a vibrant, globally integrated post-industrial city-region. In this transformation – one that would soon be placed under the rubric of ‘creative city’ - popular music culture was held, by citizens and elites alike, to play a central role. Unlike many such ‘creative cities’ the popular music scene of Manchester had a globally recognised gravitas, in which narratives of regeneration could be closely linked to the collective memory of a generation. 

The collective memory crystallised and mobilised by a particular moment of music experience, was also a period of transition from an “industrial” to a “post-industrial” society, which was increasingly framed as one from a welfare-centred to a ‘free-market” economy. Though punk and post-punk were stridently oppositional, they also had an emancipatory vision of art and culture (what Mark Fisher called ‘popular modernism’) which animated much of the new politics of culture that was to take off in the 1990s.

This talk aims to look back to that transformative moment, not as an ‘objective’ history but as an attempt to rub the collective memory ‘against the grain’ of the creative city. I am interested in exploring the collective memory around Joy Division/ Manchester in particular and more generally in the moment of punk and post-punk. Collective memory is social memory. It can be used politically-ideologically but it also organises people’s investment in their past, making sense of their life course and disappointments - how they did not ‘change the world’ (see Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 book Mayflies). I wish to explore the extent to which the current conjuncture may or may not ‘reorganise’ the collective memory of punk/ post-punk; how this relates to ideas of class; and how this might change our relation to this ‘pre-history’ of the present.

Music by DJ Oscar
 

Bio Justin O’Connor: 
Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy, University of South Australia. He is also visiting Professor in the Department of Cultural Industries Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University. From 2012-2018 he was Professor of Communications and Cultural Economy at Monash University. Between 2012-18 he was part of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity.  Previously he helped set up Manchester’s Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS) and has advised cities in Europe, Russia, Korea and China. Under the UNESCO/EU Technical Assistance Programme he has worked with the Ministries of Culture in both Mauritius and Samoa. He has just published Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (2020) and co-edited Re-Imagining Creative Cities in Asia (2020). At the moment he is visiting professor at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology at Avans University in Breda.