No longer the pleasures: Joy Division

 

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-cally 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 evaporated; but so has a certain grey, grim texture of everyday life in Britain, a country that seemed to have given up rationing only reluctantly.

Mark Fisher

1968 - 2017