In 1977, punk rock said that everything in England was rotten and proposed Anarchy in the UK as a response. Needless to say, then and since punk has been battered from all sides. Either it was all a con manipulated by Malcolm McLaren, or the bands were never that into the politics, or it was all a huge mistake. Only in the wake of the appalling “Jimmy Savile” scandal it turns out that it wasn’t. The punks were right.

If you haven’t had time to follow this, Jimmy Savile was a dreadful mainstream DJ of the glam rock era with dyed platinum hair, a phallic cigar and a “I’m working-class me” overdone Yorkshire accent. The BBC saw him as a “star,” the first of the modern celebrities, who are famous because they are famous. In exchange for his ratings, Savile was allowed to use the BBC for decades as a procurer for the underage teenage girls he desired. He used other TV programs to claim to be a benefactor of the disabled and was allowed special access to hospitals for the disabled and mentally ill, where he carried on his relentless abuse.

More recently, it’s emerged that it wasn’t just him. A tradition in British broadcasting going back to the Second World War gave special license to the entertainment world to abuse and harass, even while the mainstream news continued to speak of the disgrace of the sexual revolution, of queers (a word they might have used in the negative sense), and all forms of transgression.

Janie Jones in the 60s

One name that emerged among all this had a certain resonance for me: Janie Jones. Janie Jones was a singer charged in 1973 with running a prostitution ring for the benefit of BBC radio DJs, who would then play specific songs requested by the industry. In her trial, various Mr Xs and Ys turned up, often involved with underage girls. Jones was the fall-girl and later gave her name to a song on the first album by The Clash. I played that record to death without ever realizing that Janie Jones was a real person.

Now it’s pretty clear who Mr X and Y really were–people like Savile and other lecherous Radio One DJs of the time. There’s a lot of comment in the UK to the effect that, in the words of the feminist Joan Bakewell who was part of the BBC of the period:

What we now find unacceptable was just accepted back then by many people.

Such acceptable things including a primetime TV show called The Black and White Minstrel Show in which white people in blackface performed Jim Crow ballads; an anti-semitism so blatant that the school I attended had a quota on the number of Jewish people allowed because “otherwise,” the headmaster told my mother, “they would take over the school”; and a racism that led to street violence on a daily basis.

Punk refused all of that. It said that it was not in any way acceptable and if that was the future, it preferred no future. It said no to Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all the other abusive dinosaurs of the music industry as symbols of this thorough-going corruption. It was–we were– right.

Occupy 2012 has decamped to Europe for a few weeks, from where I’ll be reporting back on the response of the European movement to the crisis and what’s been going on in New York. So have a happy Thanksgiving everyone!

For the present, I’m in London, where I grew up. Most of the city landmarks by which I oriented myself–cafés, clubs, record shops, book shops–are gone now, leaving me to discover a city that resembles the one I knew but feels strangely different. The resonance has changed.

Although there was a passionate student demonstration just yesterday, it feels less tense here than New York. Perhaps because there hasn’t been a devastating hurricane. Or perhaps it’s just because, living downtown as I do in NYC, I feel the resonance of all the past year’s conflicts everywhere I go but don’t get them here.

Tiqqun, the French collective that authored The Coming Insurrection in 2009, suggest that “movements do not spread by contamination,” but by “resonance” between radical moments, and that is certainly what we have seen with the upsurge of popular resistance in recent years.  As I’ve often argued here, feeling those resonances is crucial to building and growing a movement.

However, in academic, let alone journalistic, contexts such an approach is ruled out of court. Academia remains tied to a positivist system of evidence. For example, I write about a Puerto Rican painter called José Campeche, who was the son of an enslaved artist. His father bought his own freedom and Campeche worked for governors and bishops. But when I see influences of African syncretism in his work (meaning that there is a “hidden” but visible reference to African beliefs), I am always asked for “evidence” beyond what is in the image.

So this extraordinary painting of a dis/abled child is described by catalogs as being of scientific interest. Only it’s a full-size oil painting not a black-and-white drawing and the awareness displayed by the child far exceeds what the actual two-year-old might have been expected to display. In Central African belief systems, certain spirits called tohusu can manifest as dis/abled children. This resonance is there in the painting and thousands of enslaved Africans from Kongo had been brought to Puerto Rico around this time, who would also have “seen” it. It seems that inferred influence is allowed only within the confines of the (white) canon.

It seems like a labored way to make the point but that’s what happens: you get drawn into extensive discussion of specific details and lose the wider picture that you are trying to convey. Of course, for academic realism, such a picture can only be built by the accumulation of such building blocks of documented detail.

So it was a pleasure to read Charles Darwin, author of perhaps the most influential history of resonance, The Origin of Species. Darwin points out that the fossil record is incomplete and that it is absolutely impossible to reconstruct the precise genealogy of variation within species. But nonetheless, he noted that the naturalists of his time:

win their prizes by selecting such slight differences, yet they ignore all general arguments and refuse to sum up in their minds.

Darwin was sure of the idea of evolution in 1844 but waited until 1859 to publish it for fear of the critics.

But of course it’s the Origin that we remember, just as a book like Graeber’s Debt will long outlive the nitpick-fest that has followed its publication. So without comparing myself to these two giants, I intend to see what can be learned by resonance over the next few weeks in the expectation that it is the means by which we can countervisualize against the “common sense” of the mainstream.