Punk Dogs from the Beskid Mountains: The Rearguard of The Non-Conformist Revolt after the "End of History"

How and on what basis to resuscitate the non-conformist revolt in the Czech Republic after 1989? And why at all, since the new regime no longer “treads on the heels” of alternative culture and Havel the dissident has become Havel the President? These questions have been circulating through the local underground and subculture communities. The answers to them varied—differing, among other things, in the length of involvement in underground cultures, but also in the place of their formation. In the youngest, post-revolutionary versions, rebellious voices calling for the need for a new underground and non-conformist radicalism began to emerge in various parts of the country. They resonated loudest in those places where the subcultures of punk, hardcore and techno were intertwined with rediscovered anarchist politics. One of the most distinctive, but also the most persistent places of this type, which I have been visiting since 2000 and conducting long-term ethnographic research in since 2007, has been the punk scene of Rožnov pod Radhoštěm in the foothills of the Beskid Mountains. In a unique punk combination of music and visual arts, rehearsal rooms and studios, the Rožnov scene has been taking shape in the northwestern corner of the Western Carpathians since the late 1980s and early 1990s, and over the years it has become one of the most significant scenes of the post-revolutionary cultural underground in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It even got its own name— it became known as the so-called Roznov or Wallachian Punk School and its members as Vrahouni (Murderers) after the name of their autonomous centre/club Vrah (Murderer) (2000–2014). 

This research aims to zoom in on the murderous resurgence of nonconformist revolt. In doing so, it attempts to avoid both methodological Pragocentrism and a regional scope to acknowledge the countrywide power of the subcultural underground far beyond just the major cities. What is more, in line with the anthropological imperative of exploring “big problems in small places”, research on the punk scene from Rožnov will discuss a range of topics beyond the question of non-conformist revolt—issues of Czech political culture, late industrialism, sensual ecology, avant-garde or posthumanism. 

When the Murderers were looking for a place to anchor their revolt, they rejected the sphere of political ideology in the spirit of the popular anarchist slogan of the time “trust no one, not even us”. In fact, in the time of post-revolutionary openness, they were heading beyond it, to the experience of life itself, to the existential dimension, to ontology. For at the heart of their revolt is the reordering of human relations at the level of ontology—not only to other humans or to the political dimension of revolutions, protests and movements, but also to the environment and thus to other-than-human entities, the home and the surroundings. To them, after the experience of the 20th century, a human becomes a fundamentally error-loaded entity in the context of his political potential. The Murderers ask how to revolt with the admission of erroneousness and thus without the horizon of a flawless future society or new Man promised by many earlier revolutions. The removal of humankind from the pedestal of her own idealisation and infallibility goes hand in hand with the repositioning of anthropocentrism towards different more-than-human relations. The world as seen through the eyes of the Murderer becomes a world of blurred boundaries both between human and nature and between human and technology. Indeed, the perspective of the Wallachian punks is shaped not only by the cultural landscape of the Beskid Mountains, their foothills, slivovitz, vigour, magic and hills, but also by the recent history of Rožnov. Since the end of the 1940s, it has been fundamentally shaped by the entry of light industry in the form of the national company Tesla. 

The Murderous perspective was and is full of monsters to be feared—people powered by petrol or with the eyes of beasts like cars. In the same way, it is full of monsters in whom one can see hope and more-than-human revolt—artists with the power of weed or human dogs, punk variations of ancient cynics. After all, the Murderer himself was such a monster, a collective person connected artistically, materially and ethically—not only within communities with each other but with the place itself. If Bruno Latour calls for the necessity to land on Earth and fight from a particular home, then the Murderers are an example of a collective that did not spread out across the world or into large cities. The cultural and natural magnetism of the long-settled mountains kept them in place, together, anchored, at home. The Murderers were and are punk natives—dogs who bark from home with the technical aid of electric guitars, amplifiers, LP records, as well as prints, flyers and paintings. 

In answering the central question, research shows that the Murderers favour revolt, but a cautious, even minimalist version of it—as a revolt of conduct. The latter is shaped by the cultivation not only of underground art in the narrow sense but by all the art of the rebellious life of a small community of Murderers on the loose. The Murderers, then, have revived non-conformist revolt, especially in the context of post-revolutionary punk and anarchic politics, but they occupy its rear rather than its front guard—where radicalism and rebelliousness are associated with prudence, ethics, community, existential and more-than-human struggle, rather than with a utopian vision of the future, a political programme or society-wide change.