What exactly is HAUNTOLOGY to pop music?

tate

Brown Sugar
This paragraph from Peter Hallward's Badiou: A subject to truth seem to nail it, as i understand things:

"the obscurantist figure obliterates the present. The original event is all that matters, and its truth can be recovered only by escaping time altogether. The obscurantist is not oriented simply towards the past but toward death pure and simple: death in the present is the price every obscure subject must pay to rejoing his atemporal truth."

This obscurantism is evolving from the "What if there's no next big thing?" fear. A subject resigned.
May I request a page number for the citation? I assume that many people on the board have the book and would prefer to consult the full passage.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
By viewing the character of the ego as an elegiac formation, that is, as "a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes," Freud's later work registers the endlessness of normal grieving; however, it also imports into mourning the violent characteristics of melancholia, the internal acts of moralized aggression waged in an effort to dissolve the internal trace of the other and establish an autonomous identity. Because it is not immediately clear how Freud's text offers a theory of mourning beyond melancholy violence, his account of the elegiac ego is shown here to ultimately undermine the wish for an identity unencumbered by the claims of the lost other and the past, and to suggest the affirmative and ethical aspects of mourning.

T. Clewell, Mourning beyond melancholia: Freud's psychoanalysis of loss.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Excuse me--just looked back and saw that it was Tate who was the Heidegger expert. Still authenticy and origin. Need we?
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
I mean, do you really want to talk about signs and essence in the same breath that you use to say that hauntology is specific to certain pop music but fundamentally can't apply to pop music itself ? That makes no sense. I guess I don't follow Tartarsky.
 
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tate

Brown Sugar
Excuse me--just looked back and saw that it was Tate who was the Heidegger expert. Still authenticy and origin. Need we?
I mean, do you really want to talk about signs and essence in the same breath that you use to say that hauntology is specific to certain pop music but fundamentally can't apply to pop music itself ? That makes no sense. I guess I don't follow Tartarsky.
You lost me there, and I have no idea why you referred to me, or what you are asking. In the post above, I simply asked tatarsky for the page number of the paragraph he quoted from the Halliwell book on Badiou - a reasonable request, given the fact that the book is 467 pages. In any case, I found it myself: top of 159.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Sorry, i see why this is confusing. When I'm saying "do you really want to talk about..." I meant, does "one" want to talk about, and I'm clarifying (or not) what my responding to Tartarksy was supposed to mean.

thanks for the pn. when i can afford that book i'll buy it :)
 

tatarsky

Well-known member
Tate> Apologies for the lack of page number. I'm not sure the context adds much anyhow, although I do find that section to be very useful.

Nomadologist> Woaw, it's dangerous using words like essence isn't it?

To clarify, the previous discussion seems to imply that Derrida's hauntology cannot meaningfuly be applied to a specific category of pop music. A Heideggarian ontology seems to ensure as much, as you indicate. (Your knowledge here trumps mine, but this is what I gather from the discussion so far). But undoubtedly there is something going on with Ghost Box, Burial, etc. which has been labelled hauntology. Shunted into Badiou's ontology, these problems disappear, and a more specific hauntological music (or indeed, any art) seems to gain some clarity.

That dangerous essence, is that which is drawn from the void, emergent from some evental site. E.g. Post-punk's evental site being various barriers between punk, disco, dub, etc.. Such barriers no longer exist (or do they?), so perhaps today's evental site lies in something to do with dyschronia, with a reterritorialization of the past, enacted through mourning, being the Event. This for me, is where a hauntological pop music becomes coherent.

The quote below indicates my fears about what hauntology might become - obscurantist - which would be a terrible outcome.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Yeah, that's why I would usually prefer not to use the word.

The quote below indicates my fears about what hauntology might become - obscurantist - which would be a terrible outcome.

Well, as you saw above, I remember saying I thought "hauntology" was one of Derrida's lazier obscurantisms. So I think we're already there.

Nice how Badiou can completely empty out primary signfication from tricky terms when necessary. I see it happen all the time here. I'd have to read this book you're talking about, but I highly doubt I'd agree with Badiou if what you're saying is true.
 

sanshee_allures

New member
I take it most of us have read the Simon Reynold's piece in Wire.
I don't however find that The Caretaker (you only need the 2nd album - it's truly masterful and rarely reffered to) and Boards of Canada do the same thing in the least.
The Caretaker is based on the idea of a haunted present and less about recollection, whereas B.O.C are far more elliptical, and for me anyway, trigger of those fuzzy memories we have of being children, yet more unnatainable. The tune 'Alpha and Omega', for instance (Geogaddi) reminds me of how the look of old betamax videotapes used to scare the shit out of me as a kid. Probably because of all that 'video nasties' hysteria at the time.
As for Belbury Poly etc, it's all really endearing, and bit spooky, but I think that early Kraftwerk are sonically, quite similar.
The term 'hauntology' is I think, really awful. But I think I know what it stands for.
 
Narratives of Progress

Don't know if I'm barking up the wrong crooked and bare tree here, but I was thinking about how Derrida coined the term as a response to an 'End of History' and perhaps there may be an analogous occurence in music.

Echoing the physical and political breakdown of barriers between East and West circa '89, boundaries between different musics (and corresponding critical narratives) have also broken down. The rise of sampling culture, availibility of such variety of music for free via the internet have all served to shatter the totality of western narratives of progress in music, yet still these narratives haunt the modern musician- http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,2060953,00.html

Haven't clarified thoughts here, but would be interested in feedback.
 

Guybrush

Dittohead
Don't know if I'm barking up the wrong crooked and bare tree here, but I was thinking about how Derrida coined the term as a response to an 'End of History' and perhaps there may be an analogous occurence in music.

Echoing the physical and political breakdown of barriers between East and West circa '89, boundaries between different musics (and corresponding critical narratives) have also broken down. The rise of sampling culture, availibility of such variety of music for free via the internet have all served to shatter the totality of western narratives of progress in music, yet still these narratives haunt the modern musician- http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,2060953,00.html

Haven't clarified thoughts here, but would be interested in feedback.

I think most people in here would agree with that. The article you link to was discussed in this thread.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
hmmm.. i'm reading a book called 'specters of marx' that discusses this hauntology concept at great length, albeit from a deconstructive-post-Marxist perspective. how is derrida's concept related to the music genre?
 

whatever

Well-known member
I was thinking about how Derrida coined the term as a response to an 'End of History'
Oh yeah wanna show me the direct quote? Cos you're full of bull if you think it's as simple as you say. if you want to think about Derrida, gonna hv to do a hell of a lot more than read k-punk's blog, cos he has amply displayed for years that he hasn't the faintest idea what's going on in derrida's thought and texts ...

Echoing the physical and political breakdown of barriers between East and West circa '89, boundaries between different musics (and corresponding critical narratives) have also broken down.
Only if you live by the pages of pop music reviews and ignore, say, what's going on in niches around the world. Boundaries may have broken down in your view, but there are millions of mutations already long underway. D-bags theorizing about 'the end of history' or 'the end of music' or wotever always end up with major egg on the face. We've barely glimpsed what's ahead, and in the last twenty years alone (compared, say, to thousands of years of written 'western' and 'eastern' music) have seen more mutations and changes than any one human being could possibly document if given a lifetime. Serious talk of end of history and end of 'east' and west and end of music is for pedants and imbeciles who haven't the slightest notion of the history of music, or history for that matter.
 

Chris

fractured oscillations
haha, wow.

I kind of respect your total disregard for a lot of the more defeatist attitudes going around. I mean, for all we know, people might be ignoring some promising new developments off fermenting somewhere, perhaps because we're still attached to dated assumptions about innovation or rock n' roll or futurity or whatever (though regardless I'm still pretty enthusiastic even if we don't have a massive, stupidly "meaningful" Pop movement at the moment, maybe that shit was all wrongheaded anyway).


yet... there are reasons why pretty much everyone who is somewhat familiar with music has been less than enthusiastic this decade, but... way to stay.... er... positive. :rolleyes:
 
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