What exactly is HAUNTOLOGY to pop music?
- Thread starter Buick6
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Haha. I DID draft a lengthy retort to yr question before, Tate, but my computer crashed halfway through so it was lost in the ether (appropriate eh?). I'll have another go: when I use "Dyschronia" I mean a destabilisation of previously familiar temporal orientation. Dys-chronia as opposed to Ana-chronia? Well that's just the value judgement coming in, I think. A malignant anachronism, perhaps. Strangely one of the methods by which Dyschronia is induced is hyper-historicity, (see the last world cup- "let the memories begin"--- argh.)
Now as you implied before with your follow up question, such a loss of temporal orientation necessarily requires a sense that before time was an orderly, perhaps even linear/cyclical thing, and of course it is not quite as orderly as this... but to suffice to say that in the first half of the 20th Century the stories being told about the past and the future were distinct from those of our present time. The thing I was getting to about capital's deterritorialization of time was exemplified by Fukuyama's end of history, the end of there being difference in time and the beginning of the reterritorialisation by ghost time. The city of ghosts as a Morley-esque city of lists.
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
Could it also be about not forgetting that maybe things were once different, and still could be. Reframing memories of the past before all alternative avenues have been collapsed?
Hmm, but to do so would perhaps require the picking up of a lost thread from the past, and to continue it as if it were present now. Rather than the hauntological technique which is to underline through textural means (the crackle of Burial or the uneven samples/packaging of Ghost Box) that this is very much of the past.
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
gek-opel said:
Of course, because we must first be aware that something has been lost. To continue it as if it were present now would be to fail to acknowledge the loss. I'm not necessarily defending the hauntological project (if there is such a thing), just suggesting what might be part of the impulse behind the creation of these works. I realise it's a bit simplistic, but I do get this sense with Burial and Ghost Box stuff.
One way of looking at it might be that the 20th / 21st century cultural archetype of technological and communications-media progress has in the last 10/20 years been cast more and more in it's negative aspect. Things look bad and there is a felt need to go back and get some perspective. Ghost Box actually make the technological utopianism of the 70s (Radiophonic Workshop ect.) more explicit than it was at the time, when it was a natural product of the prevailing ambience. Burial goes back to the rave dream and asks if there wasn't perhaps something there that has been prematurely dismissed / cauterised as disillusionment set in. I think we can feel that in dubstep in general actually.
Something is happening, big things a gwarn. We need to try and understand the process and guide the culture in a positive direction (otherwise...
). Perhaps that's what these things are about.
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
Are we talking musically, or more generally?
Generally speaking perhaps one of two things: eternal fascism, or the next evolutionary stage in human civilisation, a phase-shift following the present chaos into a higher form of organisation.
It's in the balance, and some of what is going on culturally right now is an attempt not to lose sight of certain possibilties in the face of ruthless opposition. Things like 9/11 and it's aftermath have been such a vicious blow to hope, optimism and general goodness. No wonder artists want to look back at what are felt to be saner times, to touch people with the feeling of what might be lost. While we can still feel it it isn't completely gone. Or maybe these musics are more about feeling those wounds deeply enough that they can heal before we move on.
I wonder how this ties into the attempted (and kind of successful) cultural regeneration of generation Krautrock? Germany had a foretaste of the end of the world, and of how to deal with that kind of collective guilt. I'd say bands like Amon Duul and Cluster were summoning ghosts of earlier eras or mythical times in their music as a way of redefining the present and positing possible futures. Look at Sun Ra too, it's about myth. Better myths. Where did it go wrong, who's story is this? Zoom back camera.
the undisputed truth
Banned
For all the hyperstitious talk I'm just not feeling any of ghost box output and not much of burial or hyperdub. I could probaly buy into the hauntology political thing if their music, which often gets championed within the definition as it applies to pop was any good, but sadly it isn't. (Invoke dissensus law here). It just seems like trying to manufacture a 'scene/genre' around a core of artists as though by talking more about and saying it often enough people will believe it and one might convince themselves of it's worth and inherent self evident truth. Modern myth creating minus the essence of truth at the core which gives substance to the myth. Retro melancholic nostalgia but hardly the next big thing as it's seems too backwards looking.
What I would say though, Undisputed Truth, is that the theorists acknowledge that its more of a free floating approach rather than a genre per se. (see Simon R in The Wire)
Im still definitely feeling Burial tho. His drum programming is fantastic (given that the music is about 60% drums, this is a good thing!). My problems with the Ghost Box stuff, as asides from all the theoretical stuff, lies at the musical level, as much as anything else... Might have another go, maybe try the Eric Zan stuff as it was described as being a bit darker, in a plasticy kind of way...
Im still definitely feeling Burial tho. His drum programming is fantastic (given that the music is about 60% drums, this is a good thing!). My problems with the Ghost Box stuff, as asides from all the theoretical stuff, lies at the musical level, as much as anything else... Might have another go, maybe try the Eric Zan stuff as it was described as being a bit darker, in a plasticy kind of way...
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the undisputed truth
Banned
But surely in defining it so rigourously limits its free floatingness. OK so I haven't read the wire piece so maybe I'm speaking out of turn. The trouble I have with Burial is exactly the drums. Not enough variation in the effecting and hardly any fills. The programming is alright but not to my mind fantastic. Love his hi hats though. The best tunes for me of his are the ones without drums. Night bus and Forgive. I find I have to be in a certain mood to even listen to it these days and even then it jolts me out of that mood pretty snappily.
N
nomadologist
Guest
You might say the dysynchronia is the death of Hegelian dialectical history. I would probably try to pinpoint this within a few seconds of Hitler's suicide. But that's just me.
Edit: I will buy almost all of this "hauntology" stuff, but some people who are talking about it are SEVERELY overinvested in the idea that it manifests primarily sonically. I just don't understand why, say, film isn't just as hauntological. Chris Marker San Soleil, anyone?
Edit: I will buy almost all of this "hauntology" stuff, but some people who are talking about it are SEVERELY overinvested in the idea that it manifests primarily sonically. I just don't understand why, say, film isn't just as hauntological. Chris Marker San Soleil, anyone?
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N
nomadologist
Guest
Funny how for Freud, melancholy is the loss of the cathected object. You could just as easily say that, instead of being dysynchronic and hauntological, Burial, Ghost Box, et. al., are melancholic and mourning the loss of some collective cathexis. This is where "deterritorialization" (and Deleuze) comes in, because without Deleuze/Guattari's entire anti-oedipal dream, there is no room for creative flight, all libido sublimation (aka to Freud as "art") being essentially trapped within the Oedipal triangle, pure narcissism, with no room for hauntology to factor in anywhere.
From Smith and Murphy "Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop!":
[Without the anti-Oedipal at the heart of creative production] Everything new gets cut down to fit the Procrustean bed of universal Oedipal triangulation ("papa-mama-me") and the endless deferral of desire conceived as lack; every action is separated from its practical efficacy to become a pure dramatic signifier of the interminable desire for desire. The psychoanalytic unconscious is a Victorian theater of familial narcissism, a model of dialectical negativity that is incapable of escaping its own constitutive impasses, so Deleuze and Guattari propose instead a productivist unconscious that exceeds the representational model on all sides.
http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume3-Issue1/smithmurphy/smithmurphy5.html
Deleuze/Guattari's solution to this dilemma is "creative flight." Creative flight is the only way to get around (ascend) capital, whose rhetorics and poetics are deeply entrenched in the psychoanalytical (Freudian/Lacanian mostly) model, where desire is always proffered a terminus, which, of course, could never really happen. Sampling, synthesizers, the digital aesthetic are not, in my mind, primarily hauntological. They're new resources that serve our ability to produce outside the "Procrustean bed of Oedipal triangulation." Hip-hop takes this and runs with it (flies with it).
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mistersloane
heavy heavy monster sound
it just seems to me that the hauntology literally being discussed upon this website - the idea of 'no next big thing' - is the primary loss of object, signifier; it is primarily this central loss of focus that is the cathected object. Donna Harraway talks about the concept of pre-cybernetic machines ( read as analogue ) being haunted, and I think it is precisely this loss of analogue that, for example, Burial discuss, especially with regard to radio, and what is being mourned is exactly this transition, from human to Lawnmower Man. And what's next is exactly what D&G discuss, a process of becoming, an interaction with the machine.
N
nomadologist
Guest
For D&G, desire is not predicated on lack, desire is reality production, the production of production, and we are all desiring machines. Desire is molar or molecular, but not hauntological. See, this is why I really think you have to get all Heideggeriontological to believe in hauntology.
Sounds like Jung.
k-punk
Spectres of Mark
ha ha, that's what Zizek says.... http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2006/02/zizek_responds_.html
'an admiration of Jung is Deleuze's corpse in the closet'
k-punk
Spectres of Mark
OK, many interesting things here:
First, I'm pleased that Mordant Music have come up. I suspect that people like Gek who are unpersuaded by Ghost Box might be more diverted by Mordant... Mordant are unplaceable... like a dream of dance music, in which elements from different time streams keep wandering in, as if the memories have started to rot, disintegrate into one another ...
The 'unheimlich' thing.... My idea of an uncanny nostalgia was supposed to play on that... if nostalgia is homesickness (cf Simon's latest http://blissout.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_blissout_archive.html#116232400251316021) then what of a nostalgia for the unhomely?
The lost public sphere... I wouldn't equate the public with the State.... Public space is essentially an abstract concept... a benevolent big Other... the State once genuflected to the 'public good', was required to defend its actions in terms of how they affected the public good... now State institutions refer only to the consumers of services, the users... but you will never produce a public by aggregating up 'individuals and their families'... Take education, for example. The now more or less unquestioned idea is that education should be about what parents and students want: but what of the public good? No-one speaks for that...
First, I'm pleased that Mordant Music have come up. I suspect that people like Gek who are unpersuaded by Ghost Box might be more diverted by Mordant... Mordant are unplaceable... like a dream of dance music, in which elements from different time streams keep wandering in, as if the memories have started to rot, disintegrate into one another ...
The 'unheimlich' thing.... My idea of an uncanny nostalgia was supposed to play on that... if nostalgia is homesickness (cf Simon's latest http://blissout.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_blissout_archive.html#116232400251316021) then what of a nostalgia for the unhomely?
The lost public sphere... I wouldn't equate the public with the State.... Public space is essentially an abstract concept... a benevolent big Other... the State once genuflected to the 'public good', was required to defend its actions in terms of how they affected the public good... now State institutions refer only to the consumers of services, the users... but you will never produce a public by aggregating up 'individuals and their families'... Take education, for example. The now more or less unquestioned idea is that education should be about what parents and students want: but what of the public good? No-one speaks for that...