Punk home in the salvage yard

To make a house a home

How do we destroy the master’s house and, at the same time, build ourselves a new kind of home?

For the novelist Toni Morrison, there was no question more central to her work. Introducing her then-forthcoming novel Home to an academic audience in 1997, she considers how the ambiguities of her new book’s title are reflected in more academic discussions of race as well.

“As an already- and always-raced writer,” Morrison affirms the ways in which her self-understanding as a black woman carries many inheritances from her enslaved ancestors.¹ Central amongst these is a perspective on the world that is defined by abduction from the ancestral home and enforced proximity to the master’s house.

‘Race’ thus becomes that most impactful and ambiguous form of ‘home’ for Morrison, pulling in two directions. It registers itself as a violent act of categorisation and enclosure, whilst nonetheless providing a sense of identity and belonging. A sense of ‘home’ is stretched and malformed between the two.

‘Home’, then, like ‘race’, becomes a point of orientation and disorientation; a site upon which to be and a trajectory along which to become. As a consequence, these concepts are sometimes exploited in order to alienate us from each other, whilst we might also seek to protect them for the sense-making opportunities they provide us with.

Morrison’s self-elected task as a writer is to recuperate these nuances without seeking to over-define them. After all, if concepts like ‘race’ and ‘home’ are at their most violent when upheld by ideals of purity, then is it not all the better to embrace the mess? But to understand these ambiguities as an irresolvable trap can still hurt us. In light of this, there must be some guiding principles that determine how we live amongst and rebuild upon the wreckage.

“If I had to live in a racial house,” Morrison writes:

it was important, at the least, to rebuild it so that it was not a windowless prison into which I was forced, a thick-walled, impenetrable container from which no cry could be heard, but rather an open house, grounded, yet generous in its supply of windows and doors. Or, at the most, it became imperative for me to transform this house completely.²

Salvagepunk

In order to undertake the transformative work of rebuilding, perhaps the most significant task faced by the new homemaker is one of salvage. But what kind of salvage is able that can both destroy and rebuild in tandem, and most importantly, without simply rebuilding all that we have been fleeing?

In his 2011 book, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Evan Calder Williams proposes the term ‘salvagepunk’ to name a new methodology for a post-2008 world. This world has been defined (at least in part) by the crash of a financial system irredeemably in crisis and yet deemed ‘too big to fail’. It was a crash notably caused by a structural greed that gambled the global economy on a housing bubble which saw so many homes foreclosed.

From out of this wreckage, salvagepunk offers a:

post-apocalyptic vision of a broken and dead world, strewn with both the dream residues and real junk of the world that was, and shot through with the hard work of salvaging, repurposing, détourning, and scrapping.³

Far from wallowing in misery, salvagepunk affirms the function of the negative. The world is a ruin; it is already post-apocalyptic. In facing up to this reality, the question of what comes next is made all the more pressing.

Here the ‘-punk’ of salvagepunk warrants some clarification, as it constitutes its own kind of dis/orienting contradiction. It certainly “has nothing to do with [the] noirish spike-haired heroes and digital samurai” that glide across more ‘cyberpunk’ surfaces, for example.⁴ It also has nothing to do with punk’s free-floating association with anything obstinately reactionary, superficially subversive, or wantonly bloody-minded. All forms of punk, in whatever era they emerged from, have instead named “the intersection of a close attachment to [their] historical present with the fact that [they] no longer [believe] in a future – the present is already the hollowed-out promise of that future.”⁵

Salvagepunk proceeds similarly: it affirms its close attachment to a crashed present and accepts the hollowed-out future established by capitalism’s suicidal status quo. But at the same time, it also sits consciously within a contradiction, asking what might still come next for humanity.

In this sense, salvagepunk is a mode of thought and action that says, ‘no, there is no future – not unless we (re)make it.’

After the end of the world

As in any ‘post-apocalyptic’ scenario, the new world to be built upon the wreckage of the old requires a materialist nous and ideological ingenuity. It is a struggle, and therefore requires far more discipline and skill than ‘punk’ proper ever thought necessary. In this way, it is a kind of post-punk that is not nostalgic for punk’s initial moment of emergence, but still hopes to salvage integral parts of punk’s inherently modernist structures of feeling:

it is a certain turn of thought to cut against current trendlines of nostalgia, the melancholia of buried history, and static mourning for radical antagonistic pasts seemingly absent from contemporary resistance to capitalism.⁶

All of this situates salvagepunk as a fitting addition to a pantheon of other ‘post-punk’ popular modernisms.⁷ As it was for Williams’ interlocutor, the late Mark Fisher, writing on his k-punk blog in 2010:

The terrain – the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects – is there to be fought over. And I believe that it can be seized by those who have been most deeply cooked in neo-liberalism and post-Fordism […] We can only win if we reclaim modernization.⁸

To modernize is to build better, to improve, to update what is decrepit, using all that is presently at our disposal, so that the infrastructure of our lives is better suited to the present and a future world-to-come.

We may nonetheless remain suspicious of acts of salvage in a world where so much immiseration is already founded upon logics of extractivism and plunder. But for Williams, this is why acts of salvagepunk are all the more necessary today. Indeed, we must draw out “the logic of salvage itself […] past the point of its own consistency.”⁹ Salvagepunk thus appropriates:

the basic ground of salvage (there is value here somewhere, if we sift through the ashes, or keep the ship from going under, or strip these bodies) on its own terms, and in doing so, wrecks it. Salvagepunk wrecks salvage with the simple recognition that the world is now irrevocably structured as apocalyptic wasteland. The very notion of recuperation means that the former world is no more, but that we are left with its persistent remainders and after-effects.¹⁰

Neither a form of principled utopianism nor a seductive dystopianism – forms of which we already have a litany to choose from – “[a]cts of salvagepunk strive against and away from the ruins on which they cannot help but be built and through which they rummage.”¹¹

It is here that Williams’ thesis can be related to Morrison’s fraught quest for home. By consciously inhabiting the contradiction, salvagepunk can also be aligned with the more nuanced positions found within the black radical tradition as well.

Afrofuturism, for example, must be understood as a critical approach to any speculative future that foregoes all escapism from the horrors of the past without sacrificing its own fantastical imagination. In fact, it is only by acknowledging the end of the world that we can truly begin to imagine what comes next. To quote Sun Ra:

It’s after the end of the world – don’t you know that yet?

Salvagepunk thus looks out across the wreckage of our crashed present, removing the rose-tinted spectacles of more feel-good poptimisms, whilst also jettisoning a left-wing melancholia. It is the work of reconstruction that always follows (and is necessarily commensurate with) grief. Like bands of roving engineers, salvagepunks set themselves confidently to work upon the disaster that our present already is.

Salvage after ’68

Of all the wreckages strewn around us today, the ruins of Gaza may be the most harrowing, where ‘rebuilding’ efforts are left to a colonial regime that seeks to install a new totality upon the flattened enclave. In response, we might hanker for a more total revolution, finding a world that has allowed this catastrophe to unfold to be irredeemable.

The title of a recent book by Idris Robinson captures the sentiment well. In The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer, he contends with all the failings of a dominant system that appears dependent on its own repetitious crises. The Nakba of Palestine, first initiated in 1948, is a primary example of a crisis that has long been allowed to repeat itself. For this reason, the system as a whole is to be rejected on the grounds that its attempts at salvage too often fall back on a ‘humanitarian’ complicity with the system that is to blame (as in the logic of certain NGOs).

But what is the revolt to be initiated in response? Clearing the ground completely may well go too far, as such a clearing always poses its own complications as well. As in Gaza, where the Zionist regime wishes to clear the rumble as soon as possible in order to bury all evidence of its crimes, a blank slate clears everything away, even justice. The desire for a tabula rasa is also an inevitable daydream, as we can never wholly escape the forms of consciousness already constructed by and shaped through the (social) world as it is, and so attempts to establish a radical newness are paradoxically undermined by their own repetitions as well.

For example, in the final chapter of his book, Robinson writes on the encampments that spread across the West’s university campuses after Israel intensified its genocide in Gaza. As a defiant response to an unfolding catastrophe, Robinson’s appraisal nonetheless carries many echoes of May ’68 in France and its global contexts – which include the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam war – when he writes:

There is a struggle over the identity of the colonizer and over whiteness itself. The foundation of the settler state sought to transfigure a historically minoritarian identity into that of a dominant Western nationality. What the youth is doing in the streets and on the campuses is rejecting this by redefining themselves on their own terms.¹²

This is a radical response to be commended, and a struggle that will shape the political consciousness of a generation for many years to come. But of course, the encampments were not without their problems. They faced internal and external pressures. They demonstrated the sort of confidence necessary to achieve real change, but more anecdotally, it seems they also replicated certain flaws and misunderstandings that led to a repetition of 1968’s shortcomings, both on the streets and on campuses.

The historian François Dosse has suggested, for example, that the ’68ers, in presuming their movement to be inherently more dynamic than the supposedly static structures of power around them, “believed that they could free themselves from the structures of alienation in order to take the great leap toward freedom.”¹³ But the ’68ers were not able to disentangle themselves from social structures as absolutely as they may have hoped.

Similarly, Max Elbaum argues that the “movement’s young cadre made undue generalizations from their intense but brief experience” of political struggle during 1968, ultimately embracing “a ‘voluntarist’ perspective on the pace and ease of social change, thinking that virtually anything could be accomplished if revolutionaries only had sufficient determination and correct ideas.”¹⁴ This left the movement vulnerable to the system at large, which is always primed to enacted its own methods of recuperation and entrenched alienation. Undoubtedly, an ascendent neoliberalism bit back at the ’68ers hard.

The lesson of May ’68 is that, unfortunately, nothing is ever solved so simply by a voluntarist leap toward freedom alone. This is not to unduly disparage the efforts and achievements of more contemporary movements; it is only a tentative acknowledgement that things could have been and can still be improved upon. Given that the failure of May ’68 saw the rampant intensification of neoliberalism, in part due to power’s attempts to fully squash all revolutionary sentiment, lessons must be learned from this period if we are to avoid the vindictive intensification of the very catastrophes that we are protesting against.

This necessitates that militants everywhere be more cunning and selective in their thought and action. Establishing a stable form of base and even ‘home’ remains a part of this struggle. The encampments were left vulnerable in this regard as well. They were a form of counter-occupation, establishing a home away from home. This was true in a sense that was doubled for many students, who swapped their already-temporary student accommodation for tents on campus grounds. But in also reflecting and displaying solidarity with the experiences of Palestinian refugees in temporary encampments of their own, they also faced many of the same vulnerabilities, browbeaten by roving fascists and security personnel.

The raided home

These vulnerabilities become all the more obvious when we turn to more explicitly domestic dreams of punk homes constructed from the wider wreckage that surrounds us. Indeed, the ambiguities and vulnerabilities of ‘home’ are not restricted to encampments of various kinds, but also complicate the place we already call home as well.

Over the past few years especially, there have been so many activists who, along with their friends and families, have had their homes raided, simply for seeking new protections for themselves and others. Long after the raid, the state may well institute bail conditions that transform homes into makeshift open prisons, once again transforming a place of safety into a toxic enclosure.

The state positions itself to loom over everything, electing itself as both homemaker and homewrecker. But the remaking of home becomes all the more important in the aftermath of the state’s intrusions within it. What kind of home is possible when this is the wreckage we reside within? This is another question that has never felt more pressing.

In response, a vulnerable sense of belonging is constructed across activist movements on the basis of this shared exposure to state power. To enter this shared house of experience, nonetheless bursting with difference, and attempt to make a home there can be as wounding as it is grounding. Traumas are shared, or at least held together. In the midst of our ruptures, we come to reaffirm how essential it is to support each other, speak to each other, and reflect together. In this way, movements reverberate with the affections and solidarities of many a ‘found family’.

We may be more comfortable engaging in this sort of solidarity out on the streets. ‘This is what community looks like’ goes the common protest chant. But alongside more public acts of care, advocacy, and solidarity – activities that sustain the momentum necessary for a movement to call itself a movement – quieter and more private conversations take place with more difficulty in the vulnerable home. These conversations require a stillness that does not always come naturally to those who feel they are always on the move or on the run.

Caught within this further contradiction, many of us use our more static moments to speak and write, whether to ourselves, to each other, or in order to grab the fleeting attentions of a wider world. Language becomes another flawed anchor point in a world where words wound often, but the world would be unthinkable without them. In naming and describing our material conditions, their causes and consequences, we engage in a process of sense-making that becomes another act of salvage.

We compare and contrast. We approach the present and its histories materially. We navigate differences and celebrate commonalities. We dismantle and untangle vindictive narratives that seek to delegitimise and damage us. We seek to tell our own stories of who we are and what we are hoping to achieve. (In this context, narratives of self, community, justice, and belonging are more abstract forms of ‘homes’ left vulnerable as well.)

These valences nonetheless help bring forth a new image of ‘home’ to be constructed. ‘Home’ is no longer an overtly sentimental concern here. Instead, to speak of ‘home’ invites questions of construction, both material and ideological. It interrogates the imperative to reside within what we construct or what is constructed for us. It jousts with all the ambivalences and antagonisms that haunt our various senses of ‘home’ in general.

What sort of home are we (re)building, then? What sort of home do we wish for those who have none? Yes, we keep each other safe, but where?

Home as a ‘third world’

‘Home’ is already a disaster for many. As it was for Morrison, ‘home’ is a term capable of holding all manner of frictions, joys, immiserations, and ambiguities at once. She lists the following examples of ‘home’ to be interrogated:

an intellectual home; a spiritual home; family and community as home; forced and displaced labor in the destruction of home; dislocation of and alienation within the ancestral home; creative responses to exile, the devastations, pleasures, and imperatives of homelessness as it is manifested in discussions on feminism, globalism, the diaspora, migrations, hybridity, contingency, interventions, assimilations, exclusions. The estranged body, the legislated body, the violated, rejected, deprived body – the body as consummate home.¹⁵

Two perspectives on the sorts of home to be salvaged soon emerge from this kaleidoscope of conflicts and comforts.

One critiques ideals of ‘home’ – whether made of bricks and mortar or flesh and bone – which are always to be questioned:

• socially arbitrated constructs of race and gender;
• the complex processes that provide these constructs with their material bases and institutionalised pretensions;
• the ways in which these ‘homes’ pre-exist us, claiming care whilst instituting conformity.

Another perspective works to produce a speculative idea of ‘home’, salvaged from all that remains positive about this concept that all of us – even or especially those without any home to speak of – continue to hold so dear:

• not an ideal, nor an Edenic final belonging, but something more immanent and adaptive;
• something more domestic and local in its loves and labours, as well as more global in its capacity to welcome all;
• something supportive, sheltering, and restful, but also not devoid of the many tensions that make a life.

It is a complex form of ‘home’ that requires maintenance, management, structure and discipline, but does not replicate the oppressions that power and control seeks to imprint upon it from without.

These two perspectives are necessarily held together. They allow us to strive for new securities whilst acknowledging pre-existing vulnerabilities. This requires real vigilance, Morrison notes, since within the freedom she seeks, “as in all freedoms (especially stolen ones), lies danger.”¹⁶ An irresolvable question haunts every tentative step in any direction:

In short, wasn’t I (wouldn’t I always be) tethered to a death-dealing ideology even (and especially) when I honed all my intelligence toward subverting it?¹⁷

It is nonetheless from within this ambivalence that something old might be dismantled and something new constructed, Morrison concludes, for all the world’s exiles, nomads and diasporas:

[a] new space […] formed by the inwardness of the outside, the interiority of the ‘othered’, the personal that is always embedded in the public. In this new space one can imagine safety without walls, can iterate difference that is prized but unprivileged, and can conceive of a third, if you will pardon the expression, world “already made for me, both snug and wide open, with a doorway never needing to be closed.” Home.¹⁸

As we continue to circle this ambiguous conception of ‘home’, a series of questions emerge that loom over our contemporary movements, and which warrant more careful consideration: taking Morrison’s open framing seriously, how might we better envelop ourselves within the wreckage of home’s ambiguities? How do we stay vigilant in our dwellings, so that we do not simply reconstruct the imprisoning houses we are supposedly fleeing? How do we forestall the anxieties that state power embeds within the home, as if knowing that our struggle against its complexities, once heightened by their intrusions, may well lead to a home wrecking itself?

A domestic Prometheanism

For the philosopher Helen Hester, to ask these questions of home is inherently political, despite the fact that home is often framed as a site of abolition outside of politics proper.

Speaking of ‘the family’, for example, as yet another ambiguous notion that resides within ‘the home’ already, Hester writes:

For some, the exhortation to “just think of your family” cannot be dismissed so easily by discipline and an effort of will in the face of familial, domestic, and other material caregiving responsibilities, and this should prompt us to reflect upon and revisit what we consider to be meaningfully political.¹⁹

Love becomes political here, and although such a concept might appear anathema to the hard realities of politics, to eject it from our considerations risks hollowing-out all that we are supposedly fighting for.

Here, Hester turns to a Promethean politics made synonymous with many cyberfeminisms that seek to utilise technologies to transcend what has been ideologically determined as a ‘natural’ limit (for example, as found in the work of Shulamith Firestone).²⁰ These feminisms are often associated with the family and its reproductive labours, which are to be abolished, but acts of salvagepunk remain relevant here as well. Hester continues:

As far as possible (and acknowledging that, yes, there will indeed be situations in which the demands of the collective outweigh those of the individual and her dependents), Promethean endeavor must not be positioned in such a way as to pit it against the immediate responsibilities of reproductive labor to the extent that the demands of one can only be met at the expense of the other. This kind of framing of emancipatory leftist politics repels and excludes too many with a stake in the debates, and is likely to give rise to precisely those boring and boorish militant masculinities…²¹

This is an issue that Hester sees emerging from all manner of political projects. Commenting on the work of Angela Davis, for example, who sought to free women from their domestic labours in order to make them more politically active, Hester argues that, within this argument, “the domestic sphere, perhaps surprisingly, appears somewhat denuded of political opportunity.”²²

In accepting this position as the only truly liberatory option available, however, “[t]he home, to use the language of Prometheanism, comes to be positioned as an un-remakeable given.”²³ On the contrary:

The home can be reconceived of as a site of Promethean potentiality rather than as an example of stubbornly embedded material hegemony; that is to say, it is a space that can be mutated to facilitate a Promethean politics rather than a site of risk aversion inherently obstructive to the development of the solidarities that such a politics demands.

This is what Toni Morrison, Evan Calder Williams, Mark Fisher, and Helen Hester all have to offer our contemporary moment. A politics of liberation from home risks facing off against movements fighting for the right of others to have a home of their own. Within our own movements, then, home must be attributed a new (and no less malleable) significance. Home is what we are fighting for – for ourselves and for others.

A new beginning

As I put the final touches on this series of reflections, which have been weeks in the making, two men are removing all of my worldly possessions and putting them in the back of a Luton van. Tomorrow morning, I will travel 300 miles and begin to build a new home in a new city with new friends.

I am leaving one home in search of a far grander one. After many years spent on the run from one thing or another, to decide to move closer into the orbit of a movement and its support networks is necessary, but it still triggers many anxieties. Every home is vulnerable, and I am afraid of the risks that come with pursuing a better life for the sake of the love I have for and receive from others. Even when acting in all good intention, it is still hard to get away from the fear of the gamble – it is all to play for.

With my home now empty, the wait for my final exit is bittersweet. Sacrifices made over the last year have necessitated the restructuring of a previously comfortable life. So much has been lost, but there is also so much to be gained.

It is always a harrowing experience to leave one’s home. At times, the sense of vulnerability can be too much to bear. To think about those who are already without home is a small comfort. None of us are that far away from losing it all, and it is no small feat to risk one’s comfort so that someone else might gain comforts new.

We should all be in a position to receive security and safety when we need it most. What must be shared, then, is a sense of home that will catch us, whether that home is a building, a community, or something more abstract. ‘Home’, after all, is never so easily defined.

From one home to another, we bring what uplifts us, and leave behind whatever drags us down. Cleaning house is not just for spring. But as with ‘home’ itself, identifying the difference between what liberates and what traps us is far easier said than done.

To begin this process transforms home into a malleable site of politics all the same. It is an act of salvage, yes, but more importantly, we must understand homemaking as an act of salvagepunk.

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1. Toni Morrison, “Home”, in: Wahneema Lubiano (ed.), The House That Race Built. New York: Vintage Books, 1998, pg. 4. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. London: Zer0 Books, 2011, pp. 19–20. ↩︎
4. Ibid., pg. 32. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7. See: Phoebe Braithwaite, “Mark Fisher’s Popular Modernism”, Tribune, 18 January 2019: <https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/mark-fisher-kpunk-popular-modernism> ↩︎
8. Mark Fisher, “Spectres of Revolution”, k-punk, 17 January 2010: <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011453.html> ↩︎
9. Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, pg. 36. ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. Ibid, pg. 20. ↩︎
12. Idris Robinson, The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2025, pg. 232. ↩︎
13. François Dosse, History of Structuralism, Vol. 2: The Sign Sets, 1967–Present, trans. Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pg. 117. ↩︎
14. Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London: Verso, 2018, pg. 7. ↩︎
15. Morrison, “Home”, in: The House That Race Built, pg. 5. ↩︎
16. Ibid., pg. 4. ↩︎
17. Ibid., pp. 4–5. ↩︎
18. Ibid., pg. 12. ↩︎
19. Helen Hester, “Promethean Labors and Domestic Realism”, e-flux, September 2017: <https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/artificial-labor/140680/promethean-labors-and-domestic-realism> ↩︎
20. For an introduction to Firestone, see: Susan Faludi, “Death of a Revolutionary: Shulamith Firestone”, Verso Blog, 6 January 2026: <https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/1964-death-of-a-revolutionary-shulamith-firestone> ↩︎
21. Hester, “Promethean Labors and Domestic Realism”. ↩︎
22. Ibid. ↩︎
23. Ibid. ↩︎