Description
Scholarship on peripherality in popular music has illuminated how marginal positions shape production and circulation, often tracing processes through which peripheral scenes and identities gain visibility. While such work has redressed historical neglect, it assumes that peripherality seeks valorisation within existing cultural and academic economies. This paper challenges that assumption by examining musical practices in which peripheral positions neither convert into symbolic capital nor aspire to integration within a core–periphery dynamic. Through a comparative analysis of two late socialist post-punk formations—the Hungarian avant-garde group Spions and the Soviet band Kino—I argue that not all peripherality aims at recognition.Spions, led by Gergely Molnár since 1977, enacts a radical refusal to transform exile, marginality, or national belonging into representational resources. Articulating what Molnár termed a “philosophy of treason,” the group rejects not only institutional and political affiliation but also the cultural economy in which peripherality functions as symbolic capital. Rather than converting marginality into value, Spions dismantles the logic through which peripheral status becomes legible or convertible within dominant structures of recognition.
Kino, by contrast, does not reject identity outright but persistently defers its stabilisation as symbolic capital. Although since the 2010s the band has been politically instrumentalised in divergent ways—both within state-nationalist discourses in Russia and through oppositional appropriations—its practices in the 1980s resisted such categorical fixation. Kino and its leader Viktor Tsoi refused definitive inscription as national icon, political emblem, or ethnic category. This instability of meaning is understood as an aesthetic practice of deferral.
Drawing on Adorno’s aesthetics of non-identity and Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital, I conceptualise these two modes as refusal and deferral. Rather than treating peripherality as a position to be valorised, the paper foregrounds its capacity to unsettle the logics of recognition and value structuring musical practice and scholarship.
| Period | 1 Jul 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 2026 IASPM UK and Ireland Branch Conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Aberdeen, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |