What exactly is HAUNTOLOGY to pop music?

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Really good to see K-punk making a (slight) return.

I re-read the Wire piece and its not quite as troubling as I thought, as the stuff about the "end of pop" or the protracted middle-aged crisis of pop bit does uncover the key to it-and in some respects he's correct, of course when all the lines of current enquiry are dead ends, you re-trace your steps, re-visit the sites of previous modernistic endeavour to find threads that were left to hang... however the best current (or near history) version of that that I could think of is something like Dancepunk... a fairly undeveloped postpunk strategy which was picked up and run with, for a bit. But almost the ENTIRE POINT of hauntology ought to be the absence of the thing... perhaps you could almost say that this heartbreaking absence is most in effect in the very MOR-indie the barren landscape consists of at the moment, that sense of smothered aesthetic potentiality running as an alternative virtualised history, a constant spectre hanging over all of this stuff. I'm really unsure as to how the kind of British peculiarity-tronica of GhostBox and co amplifies this further. Hauntology as theory of current pop works well, but as a genre, or even as Simon writes an "entity, nebulous and as yet nameless", well, not so well. Post modernity has created (as Simon rightly points out thru "sheer drag caused by the mass of its memory flesh") a hyperstitional narrative of defeat in the face of its own past achievement. I'm not sure how Ghost box and friends have escaped this.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Gek-opel, I think you make a very important point. Nostalgia qua authenticity-baiting in pop is not hauntological per se.

My problem with what seems more and more like the careless bandying about of the term is that, yes, you can make hauntology apply to pop, you can find sonic analogs where spookiness or echo- and reverb-drenched production (or even on the other end of the spectrum bonedry, airy production) are the content of the music's hauntological significance, but I think it's a disservice to Derrida's still very relevant notion of "hauntology" to think that pop is the arena in which it applies MOST or BEST or EXCLUSIVELY.

Really, if you "think through" hauntology, it applies to a much more deeply and inextricably embedded set of metaphysical principles in which Derrida means to find a locus for the most fundamental "Western" aporia of them all--our privileging of presence over/against absence. Pop music need not sound spooky or ethereal to be manifesting hauntology. Ariel Pink's "Haunted Graffiti", which explicitly thematizes its own hauntological significance, is, I would argue, not even as good an example of Derrida's notion than, say, Devendra Banhart, whose sonic aesthetic is less creepy/ethereal but even more in debt to an imaginary past's retrofuture for its legitimacy. An even better example, which I'm pretty sure K-punk brought up recently, is Christina Aguilera's new album. (I, too, anticipate future variations on this theme on kpunk: )

..

I suppose that this is the best way to sum up my concerns: it's important to acknowledge the metaphysical and ontological dimensions of Derrida's use of "hauntology"--otherwise, if you're only using the post-structuralist inflected "capital"-centered analysis, you're missing out on the distinctly Derridean meta-level flavor. Remember, Derrida of anyone was always rather coyly gesturing on meta-levels hoping to slowly reveal his real point by concealing it. (And almost always talking about Heidegger even when he wasn't.)
 
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Enjoyed both Simon's and Mark's pieces. Simon's 'backing away' from all the 'post-structuralist baggage' is completely fine with me, cos all that Derrida referencing stuff means nothing to me at all - my lack of education showing through there;).

Interesting that Simon homes-in on a specifically english point of reference, from a period roughly 1958 - 1978, and the prominence of the Television in providing the raw data, which fits entirely with my own perception of what Hauntology might be (for me the time slot would be the tail-end of that period, I suppose). What I experienced in the '70s has had a spectral bearing on my entire adult life (it was a constant background hum in my blog) and it's kind of amazing to me to see that 'feeling' being recognised, described and defined by Mark, Simon and others.

Mark raises the point about "seen once, and then only remembered" in relation to TV, which chimes in with the 1978 cut-off point, as that would be roughly the period when video recorders started to appear on the market. Before then, TV broadcasts were intangibile...you couldn't store them electronically, only replay them in the mind's eye, and the memory can play such tricks years later. Combine that with the imperfect/grainy/particle-flecked nature of the original analogue signal.

Still not entirely convinced by Ghost Box though. I love the design of the sleeves and I can understand completely where they're coming from but it seems a bit too contrived..to the point where it comes across as almost Retro-chic, in the same way as Stereolab. It becomes a pose. I prefer BoC, where the past just sort of leaks out in a less explicit way. And Johnny Trunk's direct-from-the-source excavations are wonderful.

But then you'be got Burial, haunted by a completely different era, mid-90s pirate broadcasts floating on the ether, or whatever. It's not what haunted me, but I recognise the similarites. Each generation produces their own set of spectral signposts.
 
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mms

sometimes
charley patton country blues

Country blues
Come all you good time people While I have money to spend
Tomorrow might be a monday And I neither have a dollar of friend
When I have plenty of money My friends were all standing around
Just as soon as my pocket book was empty
Not a friend on earth to be found
I wrote my woman a letter I told her I's in jail
She wrote me back an answer Saying honey I must come to go your bail
All around this old jailhouse is haunted
Forty dollars won't pay my fine
Corn whiskey has surrounded my body
Pretty womans a-troublin' my mind
For if you don't quit your drinkin'
Sometime you'll be just like me
A workin' out your livin' In the penitentiary
When I'm dead and buried
And my pale face turned to the sun
You can come around and mourn little woman
And think of what you've done.


All around this old jailhouse is haunted
 
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nomadologist

Guest
nice!

just saw the new kpunk post, and of course, it said anything i would have wanted to much more elegantly. i have to say formulating something like the "technological uncanny" seems heroically brilliant to me, but i have to think about it longer before i can say if i agree. funny how prominently the uncanny figures in early-mid heidegger ; )
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Still not overly enamoured with the Ghost Box crew, but K-Punk's piece is extremely enlightening. The idea that part of the process of deterritorialisation created by capital includes the deterritorialisation of time itself, and that therefore the explicit way in which hauntological music unveils the innate dyschronia of our times by foregrounding the temporality-warping technologies of the recording studio is in itself an anti late-capital critique of the highest order... brilliant stuff...
 
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nomadologist

Guest
even hauntology is more fun if you make it deleuzian

P.S. Belbury Poly annoy the shit out of me.
 
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swears

preppy-kei
Enjoyed Simon Reynold's piece on Hauntology in this month's Wire. One thing though, he mentions the term "dub" in relation to music, coming from the Jamaican term "duppy" meaning ghost. I just thought it came from the technical term to "dub" music fron one track to another.
Which is it then?
 

tatarsky

Well-known member
just saw the new kpunk post, and of course, it said anything i would have wanted to much more elegantly. i have to say formulating something like the "technological uncanny" seems heroically brilliant to me, but i have to think about it longer before i can say if i agree.

I'm not sure if hauntology can be said to be that heroic really. It seems like an understandable and perhaps admirable reaction, but it has an air of resignation about it that I'm a little uncomfortable with. Put in a more Badiouan perspective, hauntology seems like a tired and wearisome form of fidelity to previous Events, that aims at nothing more than to put the truth to bed quietly and with dignity. What comes after the mourning?
 

tate

Brown Sugar
The idea that part of the process of deterritorialisation created by capital includes the deterritorialisation of time itself, and that therefore the explicit way in which hauntological music unveils the innate dyschronia of our times by foregrounding the temporality-warping technologies of the recording studio is in itself an anti late-capital critique of the highest order... brilliant stuff...
Out of curiosity, what do you have in mind when you speak of "dyschronia"? (I have read K-Punk's post very carefully, btw.) Another question: you speak of the "deterritorialisation of time itself" as if it were something created by capital's deterritorialisation (your words). This suggests that there was once a period when "time" was not deterritorialised. When was that, on your view?
 
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nomadologist

Guest
being-with

Tatarsky: I don't think "hauntology" itself is heroically brilliant (if you'll note earlier along in the thread, I actually called it one of Derrida's more lazily tossed-off obscurant--er, neologisms), but that Kpunk's formulation of the technological uncanny as a solution to the problem of the "hauntological" versus the merely "ethereal" was brilliant to me, mostly because I suspected Kpunk would have to appeal to Heideggerian metaphysics/ontology to bridge that gap. And he did.

In Sein und Zeit, as I'm sure many of you already know, Heidegger attempts to lay the groundwork for any sort of "legitmate" or proper Western ontology. For Heidegger, the most radically unproblematized notion in the West is that of Being (general), and beings--what are they? Being is always temporal, but just how is unknown and unquestioned. It's here that his notion of the "uncanny"--in German, der unheimlich, or very literally the "unhomelike"--is Heidegger's take on both Sturm und Drang sort of angst, and the more pedestrian Freudian notion of anxiety. Because all Being is experienced as Da-sein, being-there, being-thrown into time and the world, the "uncanny" is really just a byproduct of being-in-the-world, Being thrown into an "event horizon" (Ereignis) already in progress. For Heidegger, the world is not properly Being's home--which is what the "existentialists" (bah, what does that word mean? i'm using it like SparkNotes would) had been going on about with all of that talk of "alienation."

The limits of Heideggerian ontology are exactly where "hauntology" becomes relevant. Derrida's "hauntology" is covertly dealing with Heideggerian limits, and slyly pointing out that Heidegger was too Western to get outside of Being as anything other than presence--this is why, Derrida claims at the end of "Différance", Heidegger's later works take an unfortunate turn into Teutonic mysticism/pastoralism/nostalgia. Derrida finds this point to be the limit of his ability to be a Heidegger apologist--he seems a bit sad that someone who went so far couldn't quite get there, and there's a lot of playfulness in his jabs at late Heidegger. He's also talking about Marx and capital, of course, but "hauntology" is an idea I would wager was at least partially born of Derrida's deep engagement with early-mid Heidegger around the time he wrote Spectres of Marx.

To really rigorously reply to Kpunk I would have to reread Heidegger on The Question Concerning Technology, since it's been about 6 years. All I remember for sure is Vorstellung being super-important. Anyone who finds that distinctly Heideggerian "poesis" any fun at all should google it--pretty interesting stuff if you've mostly read Lyotard, Badiou, Deleuze, it's fun to read what Badiou was responding to with his ideas about strucutural relationship of being to history.

The technological uncanny as a response to the formal limitations of "hauntology" as pop cultural exegetical tool of the week really borrows a couple of Heideggerian notions from vastly different points in his career. I want to put that puzzle together
 
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nomadologist

Guest
unheimlich is an adjective that means "unhomelike". thank you for correcting that. the saddest part is that i lived in germany and studied german for years and i'm still that sloppy in my typing and continuous self-editing.

my use of the uncanny is all about "groundlessness". i appreciate your more precise exposition, but i don't see where i contradicted it. [edit: unless, of course, you mean that Freud's "uncanny" has an origin, the breach, the trauma, whatever, and H actively avoids using the same noun to avoid the Freudian notion altogether. in my mind, though, this would seem to indicate that H thought the source of ALL anxiety was the same. Heidegger ignored anything like a psychoanalytical model of consciousness, didn't he? that was a weakness of his, i would think. and why he seems so out of line to so many. correct me if i'm wrong.]

i also explained that i wasn't being rigorous at all.

PS to cite this doesn't mean i do, either. just that i wanted to point out that "technological uncanny" in reference to hauntology from Spectres of Marx HAS to be an appeal to Heideggerian ontology on some level. i guess i'd like to see Kpunk parse that in more detail.
 
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tate

Brown Sugar
It's here that his notion of the "uncanny"--in German, der unheimlich, or very literally the "unhomelike"--is Heidegger's take on both Sturm und Drang sort of angst, and the more pedestrian Freudian notion of anxiety.
For the record, it's not der unheimlich. The form unheimlich is an adjective. The range in meaning can include eerie, uncanny, odd, and even sinister, for starters. In contemporary speech, together with gut, the word can even mean "really fcking good," unheimlich gut. In its substantivized form, there are two nouns, one in the feminine, die Unheimlichkeit, and one in the neuter, Das Unheimliche. The latter is the form used in Freud's essay of the same title. Hdggr uses the adjective unheimlich and the noun die Unheimlichkeit (no masculine, in other words). His use of the two terms in Sein und Zeit was in order to differentiate between a fear that occurs in response to an actual object or thing, and a fear that has as its object no thing, nowhere (Nichts und Nirgends). Therefore when one experiences anxiety (Angst) as a "basic state of mind" (M & R's translation; the German is Grundbefindlichkeit), one can experience an anxiety that is manifest in a "state of mind" (Befindlichkeit - note the absence of "basic" [Grund]) that has nothingness itself as its object -- which for H is the essential point, and is exactly what he calls unheimlich.

To cite all of this does not in any way mean that I endorse the view, incidentally.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
those last two somehow got scrambled into reverse order. hope i didn't do something wrong. not good with message boards.
 

tate

Brown Sugar
those last two somehow got scrambled into reverse order. hope i didn't do something wrong. not good with message boards.
No, that was my fault. I meant to edit but hit delete and had to repost, sorry about that. In any case, I didn't mean to suggest that you contradicted S & Z, or even to disagree with you, was just commenting on the German and adding some points.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Actually, I really really like the subtlety there, where Heidegger side-steps Freud's uncanny. That could be a great paper...heh.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
K-punk on nostalgia and the public sphere... http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008552.html and Owen likewise... http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2006/10/hauntology-and-historical-aberration.html

The loss of the public sphere thing--- is there no way in which this sense of public space can be returned to except through the mourning dyschronia of ghost technologies? (if you want a hauntological space for this, then rather than K-punk's Starbucks I would posit modern shopping centres- the literal deterritorialisation of the public space into private hands, reterritorialised with disgusting boulevards of identikit shopping "experiences") I, like Owen was born in 1981, so for me any thought of the 1946-1979 era really IS an imaginary nostalgia, a place that cannot be visited except through manufactured memories, or the particular techno-watermark of aged film stock and yellowing book-papers. There is a distinction between nostalgia/hauntology and retro-culture/post-modernity, true. But inside of nostalgia's method of dealing with loss is an inherent admitting that home is in the past, that we are homesick in the now for that past, and that there was a golden age which can only be recovered as a ghost. This to me is pure anathema, as a betrayal of the very things which made the eras mourned for great. Even if as Simon argued part of hauntology is to manipulate the past into new shapes, both discovering the things hidden from the I-love-the-70s formats, and also to create a virtualised history of "what-ifs?", it remains in the past (albeit the past inside the present). Also, like satire, it ends up appeasing the very thing it attempts to subvert- the dyschronia of our times, albeit in a hyper-self-aware fashion (ie- by turning the "home" of nostalgia into an alien territory it warps the standard nostalgia in new ways, but entirely within the framework of our dyschronic era). This criticism doesn't mean that it cannot have a certain degree of political content (ie- to expose the workings of late capital by foregrounding the inherent dyschronia at the micro-technological-uncanny level and the macro-no-future level).

I was thinking about hauntology in the form of say Burial, with 2step/hardcore , or Ghost Box with post war modernism, questioning what precisely their AIM is, their OBJECTIVE from this activity...? I guess beyond merely mourning the past, as K-punk concludes they perhaps enable us to question the present, the absence-in-the-present. But who that would listen to them has not already done so? Is it not merely indulgent to wallow inside this mourning, the equivalent of Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert? It expresses the inevitability of falling out of time, of the loss of public space, the loss of a future. In other words, what are we gaining to enable us to make music or politics better from these artists, what can be salvaged? What future materials do they leave those who come after?
 
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tate

Brown Sugar
The loss of the public sphere thing--- is there no way in which this sense of public space can be returned to except through the mourning dyschronia of ghost technologies?
What exactly do you have in mind when you use the term 'dyschronia'?
 

swears

preppy-kei
How much more did the state play a part in peoples' lives pre-'79? I understand there were industries that were propped up by public money (private and public sector alike) to keep unemployment down, unions were appeased by governments wary of upsetting unionised voters, higher education was grant-maintained, etc. But to what extent did it feel like the state had a presence in your everyday life?
 
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