Research Seminar - Department of Art History and Cultural Practices, University of Manchester
Joy Diversion: Popular Modernism in Manchester
Justin O’Connor, Professor of Cultural Economy, Adelaide University, Visiting Professor, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Hallsworth Visiting Professor, University of Manchester
Abstract
This lecture takes a retrospective view of Manchester’s ‘creative city’ narrative and the band Joy Division’s role within it. The focus will be less on the “winners and losers” of the city’s subsequent wave of property-led gentrification, and more on the specific moment in which Joy Division emerged in the late 1970s. Manchester’s regeneration narrative mobilised Manchester’s music scene, and Joy Division were emblematic of the city’s post-industrial reinvention. In part this reinvention concerns “popular modernism”, the encounter of popular culture with modernist currents in art and architecture, which for Mark Fisher testified to a future still open to possibility. Manchester: Original Modern comes directly out of this. Yet much of Joy Division music was about “No Future”, or as Tony Wilson had it, in relation to the transition from punk and post-punk: from “fuck off” to “we’re fucked”. How is it that this bleak music became anthemic to the re-invented Manchester? Might the moment of Joy Division connote the ending of something, a musical time-image in which a certain past could be mourned as it slipped away? Was it as much about thwarted possibilities than a preparation for the regeneration to come? In this sense maybe Joy Division speak more to our moment now, more than the narratives of boosterism in which they have become embalmed.
Biography
Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy at Adelaide University, Visiting Professor at the School of Cultural Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester. Justin’s research led to the establishment of Manchester’s Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS), of which he was co-chair. Justin was lead academic advisor to Manchester’s Urbis museum of the contemporary city, and led the team which established Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Between 2012-18 he was a member of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity.
Justin recently co-authored Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (2020, Intellect), and published his latest monograph Culture is Not an Industry (2024,) with Manchester University Press as part of the Manchester Capitalism series. More information at https://justin-oconnor.com [justin-oconnor.com]
