No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

 

Adapted from k–punk post, January 9, 2005

If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it’s because they capture the depressed spirit of our times. Listen to JD now, and you have the inescapable impression that the group were cataton-ically channelling our present, their future. From the start their work was overshadowed by a deep foreboding, a sense of a future foreclosed, all certainties dissolved, only growing gloom ahead. It has become increasingly clear that 1979-80, the years with which the group will always be identified, was a threshold moment – the time when a whole world (social democratic, Fordist, industrial) became obsolete, and the contours of a new world (neoliberal, consumerist, informatic) began to show themselves. This is of course a retrospective judgement; breaks are rarely experienced as such at the time. But the 70s exert a particular fascination now that we are locked into the new world – a world that Deleuze, using a word that would become associated with Joy Division, called the ‘Society of Control’. The 70s is the time before the switch, a time at once kinder and harsher than now. Forms of (social) security then taken for granted have long since been destroyed, but vicious prejudices that were then freely aired have become unacceptable. The conditions that allowed a group like Joy Division to exist have evapo-rated; but so has a certain grey, grim texture of everyday life in Britain, a country that seemed to have given up rationing only reluctantly.

By the early 2000s, the 70s was long enough ago to have become a period setting for drama, and Joy Division were part of the scenery. This was how they featured in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (2002). The group were little more than a cameo here, the first chapter in the story of Factory records and its buffoon-genius impresario Tony Wilson. Joy Division assumed centre stage in Anton Corbijn’s Control (2007), but the film didn’t really connect. For those who knew the story, it was a familiar trip; for those not already initiated, however, the film didn’t do enough to convey the group’s sorcerous power. We were taken through the story, but never drawn into the maelstrom, never made to feel why any of it mattered. Perhaps this was inevitable. Rock depends crucially on a particular body and a particular voice and the mysterious relationship between the two. Control could never make good the loss of Ian Curtis’s voice and body, and so ended up as arthouse karaoke naturalism; the actors could simulate the chords, could ape Curtis’s moves, but they couldn’t forge the vortical charisma, couldn’t muster the unwitting necromantic art that transformed the simple musical structures into a ferocious expressionism, a portal to the outside. For that you need the footage of the group performing, the sound of the records. Which is why, of the three films featuring the group, Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary, Joy Division, patched together from super-8 fragments, TV appearances, new interviews and old images of postwar Manchester, was most effective at transporting us back to those disappeared times. Gee’s film begins with an epigraph from Marshall Berman’s All That Is SolidMelts Into Air: The Experience Of Modernity: ‘To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.’ Where Control tried to conjure the presence of the group, but left us only with a tracing, an outline, Joy Division is organised around a vivid sense of loss. It is selfconsciously a study of a time and a place, both of which are now gone. Joy Division is a roll call of disappeared places and people – so many dead, already: not only Curtis, but also the group’s manager Rob Gretton, their producer Martin Hannett and of course Tony Wilson. The film’s coup, its most electric moment, the sound of a dead man wandering in the land of the dead: a scratchy old cassette recording of Ian Curtis being hypnotised into ‘a past life regression’. I travelled far and wide through many different times. A slow, slurred voice channelling something cold and remote. ‘How old are you?’ ‘28’, an exchange made all the more chilling because we know that Curtis would die at the age of 23.

Asylums with doors open wide

I didn’t hear Joy Division until 1982, so, for me, Curtis was always-already dead. When I first heard them, aged 14, it was like that moment in John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness when Sutter Cane forces John Trent to read the novel, the hyper-fiction, in which he is already immersed: my whole future life, intensely compacted into those sound images – Ballard, Burroughs, dub, disco, Gothic, antidepressants, psych wards, overdoses, slashed wrists. Way too much stim to even begin to assimilate. Even they didn’t understand what they were doing. How on earth could I, then?

New Order, more than anyone else, were in flight from the mausoleum edifice of Joy Division, and they had finally achieved severance by 1990. The England world cup song, cavorting around with beery, leery Keith Allen, a man who more than any other personifies the quotidian masculinism of overground Brit bloke culture in the late 80s and 90s, was a consummate act of desublimation. This, in the end, was what Kodwo Eshun called the ‘price of escaping the anxiety of influence (the influence of themselves)’. On Movement the group were still in post-traumatic stress, frozen into a barely communicative trance (‘The noise that surrounds me/ so loud in my head…’)

It was clear, in the best interviews the band ever gave – to Jon Savage, a decade and a half after Curtis’s death – that they had no idea what they were doing, and no desire to learn. Of Curtis’ disturbing-compelling hyper-charged stage trance spasms and of his disturbing-compelling catatonic downer words, they said nothing and asked nothing, for fear of destroying the magic. They were unwitting necromancers who had stumbled on a formula for channelling voices, apprentices without a sorcerer. They saw themselves as mindless golems animated by Curtis’ vision(s). (Thus, when he died, they said that they felt they had lost their eyes…)

Above all – and even if only because of audience reception – they were more than a pop group, more than entertainment, that much is obvious. We know all the words as if we wrote them ourselves, we followed stray hints in the lyrics out to all sorts of darker chambers, and listening to the albums now is like putting on a comfortable and familiar set of clothes…. But who is this ‘we’? Well, it might have been the last ‘we’ that a whole generation of not-quite-men could feel a part of. There was an odd universality available to Joy Division’s devotees (provided you were male of course).

Provided you were male of course… The Joy Division religion was, self-consciously, a boys’ thing. Deborah Curtis: ‘Whether it was intentional or not, the wives and girlfriends had gradually been banished from all but the most local of gigs and a curious male bonding had taken place. The boys seemed to derive their fun from each other.’ (Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance, 77) No girls allowed…

As Curtis’s wife, Deborah was barred from rock’s pleasure garden, and could not pass into the cult of death that lay beyond the pleasure principle. She was just left to clear up the mess.

If Joy Division were very much a boys’ group, their signature song, ‘She’s Lost Control’ saw Ian Curtis abjecting his own disease, the ‘holy sickness’ of epilepsy, onto a female Other. Freud includes epileptic fits – along, incidentally, with a body in the grip of sexual passion – as examples of the unheimlich, the unhomely, the strangely familiar. Here the organic is slaved to the mechanical rhythms of the inorganic; the inanimate calls the tune, as it always does with Joy Division. ‘She’s Lost Control’ is one of rock’s most explicit encounters with the mineral lure of the inanimate. Joy Division’s icy-spined undeath disco sounds like it has been recorded inside the damaged synaptic pathways of a brain of someone undergoing a seizure, Curtis’ sepulchral, anhedonic vocals sent back to him – as if they were the voice of an Other, or Others – in long, leering expressionistic echoes that linger like acrid acid fog. ‘She’s Lost Control’ traverses Poe-like cataleptic black holes in subjectivity, takes flatline voyages into the land of the dead and back to confront the ‘edge of no escape’, seeing in seizures little deaths (petil mals as petit morts) which offer terrifying but exhilarating releases from identity, more powerful than any orgasm.

In this colony

Try to imagine England in 1979 now…

Pre-VCR, pre-PC, pre-C4. Telephones far from ubiquitous (we didn’t have one till around 1980, I think). The postwar consensus disintegrating on black and white TV.

More than anyone else, Joy Division turned this dourness into a uniform that self-consciously signified absolute authenticity; the deliberately functional formality of their clothes seceding from punk’s tribalised anti-Glamour, ‘depressives dressing for the Depression’ (Deborah Curtis). It wasn’t for nothing that they were called Warsaw when they started out. But it was in this Eastern bloc of the mind, in this slough of despond, that you could find working class kids who wrote songs steeped in Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Burroughs, Ballard, kids who, without even thinking about it, were rigorous modernists who would have disdained repeating themselves, never mind disinterring and aping what had been done 20, 30 years ago (the 60s was a fading Pathe newsreel in 1979).

Back in ‘79, Art Rock still had a relationship to the sonic experimentation of the Black Atlantic. Unthinkable now, but White Pop then was no stranger to the cutting edge, so a genuine trade was possible. Joy Division provided the Black Atlantic with some sonic fictions it could re-deploy – listen to Grace Jones’s extraordinary cover of ‘She’s Lost Control’, or Sleazy D’s ‘I’ve Lost Control’, or even to Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak (with its sleeve references to Saville’s ‘Blue Monday’ cover design, and its echoes of Atmosphere and ‘In A Lonely Place’). For all that, Joy Division’s relationship to black pop was much more occluded than that of some of their peers. Postpunk’s break from lumpen punk R and R consisted in large part in an ostentatiously flagged return-reclaiming of Black Pop: funk and dub especially. There was none of that, on the surface at least, with Joy Division.

But a group like PiL’s take on dub, now, sounds a little laborious, a little literal, whereas, Joy Division, like The Fall, came off as a white anglo equivalent of dub. Both Joy Division and The Fall were ‘black’ in the priorities and economies of their sound: bass-heavy and rhythm-driven. This was dub not as a form, but a methodology, a legitimation for conceiving of sound-production as abstract engineering. But Joy Division also had a relationship to another super-synthetic, artily artificial ‘black’ sound: disco. Again, it was they, better than PiL, who delivered the ‘Death Disco’ beat. As Jon Savage loves to point out, the swarming syn-drums on ‘Insight’ seem to be borrowed from disco records like Amy Stewart’s ‘Knock on Wood’.

The role in all this of Martin Hannett, a producer who needs to be counted with the very greatest in pop, cannot be underestimated. It is Hannett, alongside Peter Saville, the group’s sleeve designer, who ensured that Joy Division were more Art than Rock. The damp mist of insinuating uneasy listening Sound FX with which Hannett cloaked the mix, together with Saville’s depersonalising designs, meant that the group could be approached, not as an aggregation of individual expressive subjects, but as a conceptual consistency. It was Hannett and Saville who transmuted the stroppy neuromantics of Warsaw into cyberpunks.

Day in/ Day out

Joy Division connected not just because of what they were, but when they were. Mrs Thatcher just arrived, the long grey winter of Reagonomics on the way, the Cold War still feeding our unconscious with a lifetime’s worth of retina-melting nightmares.

JD were the sound of British culture’s speed comedown, a long slow screaming neural shutdown. Since 1956, when Eden took amphetamines throughout the Suez crisis, through the Pop of the 60s, which had been kicked off by the Beatles going through the wall on uppers in Hamburg, through punk, which consumed speed like there was no tomorrow, Britain had been, in every sense, speeding. Speed is a connectivity drug, a drug that made sense of a world in which electronic connections were madly proliferating. But the comedown is vicious.

Massive serotonin depletion.

Energy crash.

Turn on your TV.

Turn down your pulse.

Turn away from it all.

It’s all getting

Too much

Melancholia was Curtis’ art form, just as psychosis was Mark E Smith’s. Nothing could have been more fitting than that Unknown Pleasures began with a track called ‘Disorder’, for the key to Joy Division was the Ballardian spinal landscape, the connexus linking individual psychopathology with social anomie. The two meanings of breakdown, the two meanings of Depression. That was how Sumner saw it, anyhow. As he explained to Savage, ‘There was a huge sense of community where we lived. I remember the summer holidays when I was a kid: we would stay up late and play in the street, and 12 o’clock at night there would be old ladies, talking to each other. I guess what happened in the ‘60s was that the council decided that it wasn’t very healthy, and something had to go, and unfortunately it was my neighbourhood that went. We were moved over the river to a towerblock. At the time I thought it was fantastic; now of course I realise it was an absolute disaster. I’d had a number of other breaks in my life. So when people say about the darkness in Joy Division’s music, by age of 22, I’d had quite a lot of loss in my life. The place where I used to live, where I had my happiest memories, all of that had gone. All that was left was a chemical factory. I realised then that I could never go back to that happiness. So there’s this void.’

Dead end lives at the end of the 70s. There were Joy Division, Curtis doing what most working class men still did, early marriage and a kid…

Feel it closing in

Sumner again: ‘When I left school and got a job, real life came as a terrible shock. My first job was at Salford town hall sticking down envelopes, sending rates out. I was chained in this horrible office: every day, every week, every year, with maybe three weeks holiday a year. The horror enveloped me. So the music of Joy Division was about the death of optimism, of youth.’

A requiem for doomed youth culture. ‘Here are the young men/ the weight on their shoulders,’ went the famous lines from ‘Decades’, on Closer. The titles ‘New Dawn Fades’ and Unknown Pleasures could themselves be referring to the betrayed promises of youth culture. Yet what is remarkable about Joy Division is their total acquiescence in this failure, the way in which, from the start, they set up an Antarctic camp beyond the pleasure principle.

Set the controls for the heart of the black sun

What impressed and perturbed about JD was the fixatedness of their negativity. Unremitting wasn’t the word. Yes, Lou Reed and Iggy and Morrison and Jagger had dabbled in nihilism – but even with Iggy and Reed that had been ameliorated by the odd moment of exhilaration, or at least there had been some explanation for their misery (sexual frustration, drugs). What separated Joy Division from any of their predecessors, even the bleakest, was the lack of any apparent object-cause for their melancholia. (That’s what made it melancholia rather than melancholy, which has always been an acceptable, subtly sublime, delectation for men to relish.) From its very beginnings, (Robert Johnson, Sinatra) 20th-century Pop has been more to do with male (and female) sadness than elation. Yet, in the case of both the bluesman and the crooner, there is, at least ostensibly, a reason for the sorrow. Because Joy Division’s bleakness was without any specific cause, they crossed the line from the blue of sadness into the black of depression, passing into the ‘desert and wastelands’ where nothing brings either joy or sorrow. Zero affect.

No heat in Joy Division’s loins. They surveyed ‘the troubles and the evils of this world’ with the uncanny detachment of the neurasthenic. Curtis sang ‘I’ve lost the will to want more’ on ‘Insight’ but there was no sense that there had been any such will in the first place. Give their earliest songs a casual listen and you could easily mistake their tone for the curled lip of spiky punk outrage, but, already, it is as if Curtis is not railing against injustice or corruption so much as marshalling them as evidence for a thesis that was, even then, firmly established in his mind. Depression is, after all and above all, a theory about the world, about life. The stupidity and venality of politicians (‘Leaders of Men’), the idiocy and cruelty of war (‘Walked in Line’) are pointed to as exhibits in a case against the world, against life, that is so overwhelming, so general, that to appeal to any particular instance seems superfluous. In any case, Curtis expects no more of himself than he does of others, he knows he cannot condemn from a moral high ground: he ‘let them use you/ for their own ends’ (‘Shadowplay’), he’ll let you take his place in a showdown (‘Heart and Soul’).

That is why Joy Division can be a very dangerous drug for young men. They seem to be presenting The Truth (they present themselves as doing so). Their subject, after all, is depression. Not sadness or frustration, rock’s standard downer states, but depression: depression, whose difference from mere sadness consists in its claim to have uncovered The (final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire.

The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life – or inner death – overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty. For the depressive, the habits of the former lifeworld now seem to be, precisely, a mode of playacting, a series of pantomime gestures (‘a circus complete with all fools’), which they are both no longer capable of performing and which they no longer wish to perform – there’s no point, everything is a sham.

Depression is not sadness, not even a state of mind, it is a (neuro)philosophical (dis)position. Beyond Pop’s bipolar oscillation between evanescent thrill and frustrated hedonism, beyond Jagger’s Miltonian Mephistopheleanism, beyond Iggy’s negated carny, beyond Roxy’s lounge lizard reptilian melancholy, beyond the pleasure principle altogether, Joy Division were the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups, so much so that they barely belonged to rock at all. Since they had so thoroughly stripped out rock’s libidinal motor – it would be better to say that they were, libidinally as well as sonically, anti-rock. Or perhaps, as they thought, they were the truth of rock, rock divested of all illusions. (The depressive is always confident of one thing: that he is without illusions.) What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between Curtis’s detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will, the Beckettian ‘I must go on’ not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror, the life-Will paradoxically assuming all the loathsome properties of the undead (whatever you do, you can’t extinguish it, it keeps coming back).

Accept like a curse an unlucky deal

JD followed Schopenhauer through the curtain of Maya, went outside Burroughs’ Garden of Delights, and dared to examine the hideous machineries that produce the world-as-appearance. What did they see there? Only what all depressives, all mystics, always see: the obscene undead twitching of the Will as it seeks to maintain the illusion that this object, the one it is fixated upon NOW, this one, will satisfy it in a way that all other objects thus far have failed to. Joy Division, with an ancient wisdom (‘Ian sounded old, as if he had lived a lifetime in his youth’ – Deborah Curtis), a wisdom that seems pre–mammalian, pre-multicellular life, pre-organic, saw through all those reproducer ruses. This is the ‘Insight’ that stopped fear in Curtis, the calming despair that subdued any will to want more. JD saw life as the Poe of ‘The Conqueror Worm’ had seen it, as Ligotti sees it: an automated marionette dance, which ‘Through a circle that ever returneth in/ To the self-same spot’, an ultra-determined chain of events that goes through its motions with remorseless inevitability. You watch the pre-scripted film as if from outside, condemned to watch the reels as they come to a close, brutally taking their time.

A student of mine once wrote in an essay that they sympathise with Schopenhauer when their football team loses. But the true Schopenhauerian moments are those in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart’s desire – and feel cheated, empty, no, more – or is it less? – than empty, voided. Joy Division always sounded as if they had experienced one too many of those desolating voidings, so that they could no longer be lured back onto the merry-go-round. They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t want really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road. If you ‘can’t replace the fear or the thrill of the chase’, why stir yourself to pursue yet another empty kill? Why carry on with the charade?

Depressive ontology is dangerously seductive because, as the zombie twin of a certain philosophical wisdom, it is half true. As the depressive withdraws from the vacant confections of the lifeworld, he unwittingly finds himself in concordance with the human condition so painstakingly diagrammed by a philosopher like Spinoza: he sees himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junky hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions. The depressive cannot even lay claim to the comforts that a paranoiac can enjoy, since he cannot believe that the strings are being pulled by any one. No flow, no connectivity in the depressive’s nervous system. ‘Watch from the wings as the scenes were replaying’, go the fatalistic lines in ‘Decades’, and Curtis wrote with a depressive’s iron certainty about life as some pre-scripted film. His voice – from the very start terrifying in its fatalism, in its acceptance of the worst – sounds like the voice of man who is already dead, or who has entered an appalling state of suspended animation, death-within-life. It sounds preternaturally ancient, a voice that cannot be sourced back to any living being, still less to a young man barely in his twenties.

A loaded gun won’t set you free – so you say

‘A loaded gun won’t set you free,’ Curtis sang on ‘New Dawn Fades’ from Unknown Pleasures, but he didn’t sound convinced. ‘After pondering over the words to ‘New Dawn Fades’,’ Deborah Curtis wrote, ‘I broached the subject with Ian, trying to make him confirm that they were only lyrics and bore no resemblance to his true feelings. It was a one-sided conversation. He refused to confirm or deny any of the points raised and he walked out of the house. I was left questioning myself instead, but did not feel close enough to anyone else to voice my fears. Would he really have married me knowing that he still intended to kill himself in his early twenties? Why father a child when you have no intention of being there to see it grow up? Had I been so oblivious to his unhappiness that he had been forced to write about it?’ (Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Faber&Faber, 1995, p85) The male lust for death had always been a subtext in rock, but before Joy Division it had been smuggled into rock under libidinous pretexts, a black dog in wolf’s clothing – Thanatos cloaked as Eros – or else it had worn pantomime panstick. Suicide was a guarantee of authenticity, the most convincing of signs that you were 4 Real. Suicide has the power to transfigure life, with all its quotidian mess, its conflicts, its ambivalences, its disappointments, its unfinished business, its ‘waste and fever and heat’ – into a cold myth, as solid, seamless and permanent as the ‘marble and stone’ that Peter Saville would simulate on the record sleeves and Curtis would caress in the lyrics to ‘In a Lonely Place’. (‘In a Lonely Place’ was Curtis’ song, but it was recorded by a New Order in a zombie state of post-traumatic disorder after Curtis’ death. It sounds like Curtis is an interloper at his own funeral, mourning his own death: ‘how I wish you were here with me now’.)

The great debates over Joy Division – were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes? Were they Fascists? Was Curtis’ suicide inevitable or preventable? – all turn on the relationship between Art and Life. We should resist the temptation to be Lorelei-lured by either the Aesthete-Romantics (in other words, us, as we were) or the lumpen empiricists. The Aesthetes want the world promised by the sleeves and the sound, a pristine black and white realm unsullied by the grubby compromises and embarrassments of the everyday. The empiricists insist on just the opposite: on rooting the songs back in the quotidian at its least elevated and, most importantly, at its least serious. ‘Ian was a laugh, the band were young lads who liked to get pissed, it was all a bit of fun that got out of hand…’ It’s important to hold onto both of these Joy Divisions – the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were ‘just a laff’ – at once. For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must also be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased some 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males.

‘I crept into my parents’ house without waking anyone and was asleep within seconds of my head touching the pillow. The next sound I heard was “This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend, the end. I’ll never look into your eyes again…” Surprised at hearing the Doors’ ‘The End’, I struggled to rouse myself. Even as I slept I knew it was an unlikely song for Radio One on a Sunday morning. But there was no radio – it was all a dream.’ (Touching From a Distance, p132)

Ghosts Of My Life  

 Mark Fisher