Abstract

British post-punk experimentation was heterogeneous, but one important dimension of the assemblages post-punk groups formed with popular culture, music genres and the avant-garde, was an art of imposture, the magic of disguise and distraction as a power of escape from an oppressive subject-form. Against Foucauldian fixation with panoptical power, Papadopoulos et al, in their recent book, Escape Routes, argue that social and cultural change is triggered by the ‘refusal and subversion of imperceptible subjectivities’. ‘The escape of the subject-form’, they claim, is ‘not a retreat and disengagement from the world... It is a means to experiment and to initiate speculative ways to deal with the immediate and concrete facts which dwell in our worlds'. This paper understands post-punk impostures as such experimental and speculative figurations, with a strong dimension of fictionality along the lines of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the ‘powers of the false’. With examples, I flesh out these impostures in terms of a number of pragmatic strategies Brian Massumi recommends for an imperceptible resistance.