What exactly is HAUNTOLOGY to pop music?

[nomadologist]

Really loved the Zizek, especially this part:

For Heidegger, Event is the ultimate horizon of thought, and it is meaningless to try to think "behind" it and to render thematic the process that generated it—such an attempt equals an ontic account of the ontological horizon. For Deleuze, one cannot reduce the emergence of a new artistic form (film noir, Italian neo-realism, etc.) to its historical circumstances, or account for it in these terms.

This is the distinction I was very shoddily trying to dredge up, and I think it goes to the heart of what I was trying to demonstrate were a couple of divergent notions of hauntology forming within this whole critical discourse that's popping up around it re popular music. There seems to be "hauntology" that is essentialist in that particularly Derridean/Heideggerian way, and the Kpunk way that somehow employs a distinctly Jung-flavored Deleuzian "essentialism" (or "vitalism" per Zizek) vis-a-vis the Real.

If this makes any sense.

 

[k-punk]

O yes, one other thing...

Mourning and melancholia

Nomadologist above equates the two (I've made the same hasty elision in recent comments too)... but of course Freud distinguishes mourning from melancholia...

There's a neat summary of the distinction here:

Mourning indicates a psychic state of recognized loss, a grieving period whereby the subject is able to move forward onto new objects. In contrast, melancholia deals with the unconscious incorporation of the lost object into the libido. In melancholia, the object is not recognized as lost, and there is an incapacity to form new attachments. Self-beratement is indicative of the state of melancholia, a beratement whose target is unconsciously the lost internalized object. The symptomatic distinction between mourning and melancholia is best summed up by Freud’s claim that “in grief the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”

Now, one of Freud's examples of an melancholic is of course --- Hamlet ----

With melancholy, the work of mourning is unable to begin; the official object is lost, but, since it is not acknowledged as lost, it remains, as a revenant, present-in-its-absence. It is this, rather than mourning, which is hauntological...

 

[nomadologist]

yeah, didn't Kristeva write something good about that called "Black Sun"?

 

[tate]

With melancholy, the work of mourning is unable to begin; the official object is lost, but, since it is not acknowledged as lost, it remains, as a revenant, present-in-its-absence. It is this, rather than mourning, which is hauntological...

When you say that it is melancholia rather than mourning which is "hauntological," then how does this go together with (a) your definition of melancholia as "the official object is lost, but is not acknowledged as lost" and (b) the fact that you sometimes refer to "hauntology" as a "project"? In other words, it is my impression that you are very aware that the official object is lost, and also that you are advocating a program for drawing further attention to that loss - loss as originary loss, not merely lost presence in need of technological prosthetics (e.g., erasure of noise, an audiophilia which you characterized as 'rockist' in your blog post). For what it's worth, I've never quite understood why you sometimes describe "hauntology" as if it were a diagnosis or characterization of our age (you said it was the closest thing to a Zeitgeist that we have), and other times describe it as a project. Was curious.

 

[k-punk]

I'm not saying that I've never described hauntology as a project, (even though a google search for 'hauntology' and 'project' only turns up this thread) but I don't recall doing so, and IF I ever did so, it wouldn't be something to which I am committed. I'm happy with the idea that it is a zeitgeist, evidently. I'm not sure that 'I'm advocating a programme' so much as describing a coalition, a set of affinities.

I'm only now working out the relationship of hauntology to melancholia, but...

There is no contradiction between being aware that the object is lost and writing about works which may not have that awareness... More importantly, since the libidinal attachment to the lost object takes place at the level of the unconscious, a conscious 'awareness' is neither here nor there...

Isn't melancholia similar to fetishist disavowal, i.e. it takes the form 'I know perfectly well that the object is lost, but nevertheless...'?

At the limit, the true melancholic insight is that there was no object in the first place, that the loss was originary; the loss of a particular empirical object triggers a feeling that all objects are empty; at the same time, the object cannot be given up.... The depressive/ melancholic's agony consists in the (always, failed attempt) to give up the object... To be or not to be...

 

[nomadologist]

Regarding melancholia and fetishism--everyone else read Agamben's Stanzas? If not, I'd recommend it. He places fetishism, as a sort of method of deferral, of hiding from the (melancholic) insight "that there was no object [for him and Freud, no phallus on mommy] in the first place", squarely within the Oedipal realm.

My next point of confusion: Hauntology can't have much to do with deterritorialization, if it's Zeitgeisty, can it?

 

[Chris]

Does hauntology have to have a spooky/bittersweet/haunted feel to it? How about happy, upbeat hauntology? Childhood memories are pretty happy to me... I ask because I was just thinking that The Go! Team are hauntological in a way; their music is a pastiche of early 80s educational kid shows, action shows like the A-Team, and non-descript early hip hop. I was a young kid in the early 80s, so stuff like this really evokes the feeling of that time for me, especially since a lot of memories of that age come from sitting in front of the TV (sadly). Despite the upbeat nature of this music however, it still comes across as bittersweet without having to overtly try, because I could never again feel the wonder that I felt at that age that these memories remind me of.

Pitchfork actually had a good review that summed up nicely the album and the time it evokes here.

 

[the undisputed truth]

deterritorialization with regards to pop music...is that like taking something out of context and out of place? For instance removing celebrationary african rhythms and reterritorializing it as conscious hiphop ie revolutionary slave chants in America ? or Pinching mideastern qawalli and placing it in Bristols musical underground ?

what about deterrorisation...taking the scary bits of myth and legend and putting them into kids fairy tales for bedtime stroies ?

 

[swears]

I really don't like the sound of Hauntology at all...I would by far prefer to hear something fresh and vital. But I accept that maybe trying to bring back a lot of the old meanings and ideas and power associated with previous forms of music would be futile. We're living in very grim times, so I suppose it's at least apt.

 

[Chris]

My next point of confusion: Hauntology can't have much to do with deterritorialization, if it's Zeitgeisty, can it?

I was thinking the same thing. For instance, say in using a sample you twist it beyond recognition or original cultural or historical context. In that way you are pretty much making something completely new because there is no trace left of it's original... er... memetic associations.

For the use of the sample to be hauntological it would have to, either straightforwardly or creatively, somehow still evoke at least traces of it's historical context.

 

[Chris]

...or were you asking how the current zeitgeist (hauntology, if that's what it is) could be based on deterritorialization (although I'd say a loose form of deterritorialization that defers to the past, instead of reappropriating the old material into something completely new like hip hop did)? A zeitgeist of past zeitgeists. In that case some might say that there is no real distinct spirit to our current decade (at least in any forward looking sense), but a state of cultural limbo where we're living in the shadow of past movements until we figure out what's next.

I'm not sure if I believe this though. There may be seeds all around us of the next new thing that we're not recognizing yet, perhaps because we have our own biased preconceptions of what newness will look or sound like.

 

[nomadologist]

Chris and Swears make interesting points. Chris, I think it's definitely possible for "hauntological" music the way it's being described to have an upbeat, major key sonics at work. I think bands like Crystal Castles and what I've heard of Belbury Poly do this, referring to sounds I (feel like I) remember from video games, cartoons, noisy 80s talking toys, that sort of thing. Actually, that youtube video of "Ghosts" K-punk put up, my first reaction was "wow, this sounds just like the music that was the soundtrack for final battles against villians in super mario, and whooaa especially the ghost houses from super mario 3." That tempered the spookiness a little and any sense of the hauntological was mixed with a positive sort of nostalgia.

That said, the more I think about it, the more I see hauntology and deterritorialization in as an either/or scenario. Hauntology was really Derrida's answer to the charge that history had ended, that the post-modern condition was predicated on the collapse of legitmating narratives. It was really something he meant to offer up as an alternative to Lyotard's apocalypse. What Derrida thought was REALLY saying was that we hadn't gotten beyond Marx and Heideggerian ontology in the West, history was not dead, the metaphysics of presence still had a hegemonic stranglehold on the West. I may be wrong, but didn't he and Deleuze sit at round tables completely bashing each other?

Deterritorialization was offered up as a post-Freudian psychoanalytical model in the service of divesting of the spectral as Derrida saw it, basically calling out what many have called Derrida's latent Jewish mysticism, most evident in Of Grammatology in the text-centric (sorry, "grapheme"-centric) "arche-writing" dream. Deleuze saw this as Derrida falling into same sort of nostalgic pastoralism (for the Jewish scribal tradition, a tradition in which grapheme was privileged over phoneme, which he doesn't acknowledge in his version of the Western as phallogocentric) he'd accused Heidegger of purporting. Deleuze's dream was to set up an anti-theoretical, anti-formal descriptive vocabulary based on an organic model of the Real--smooth and straited space referring to two different types of muscle tissue, rhizomes referring to root systems of certain plants, etc. Vitalism was Deleuze's answer to what he saw as Derrida's stubborn essentialism.

It seems to me, Deleuze wanted to use deterritorialization to undermine everything he saw as the limitations of Derrida and his "hauntology." I think Chris is right and that samples and sampling and the digital recording technologies can be employed in such a way that they are completely wrested from any spectral absence/presence.

 

[dHarry]

Machine in D+G is a structural metaphor, isn't it, rather than a literal machine, a machine is any point at which a flow of some sort enters or leaves a structure.

Not quite! This came up elsewhere around here (Kode 9 discussion I think - "but a dub-plate isn't a machine" or something) and I never got around to answering it. D&G are adamant that this is no metaphor - everything is literally a machine, is machinic. Machines plugging into other machines release flows, whether biological, economic, technological, political, artistic, whatever. There is no natural/artificial opposition involved: e.g. baby's mouth (= sucking machine) - connects to mother's breast (= milk-producing machine) - to cause milk flow and create a new combined mouth-breast machine. A CD is a cultural and sonorous machine. Desire - not the Freudo-Lacanian petit a object-investment-as-lack, but desire as a pure process of the production of the real without external telos/goal - is what animates the machines. Mechanosphere. All quite "vitalist" as Zizek and others like to point out, but this ignores the constructivist aspect which means that for humans desiring-machines are always assembled in a historical-political situation according to what is permissable/required/rejected.

Apologies for slightly derailing a great thread!

 

[gek-opel]

Yes, I know this, I still think its a structural device tho, rather than meaning in a more literal sense (as someone upthread was using it) merely a mechanical or electronic machine...

 

[nomadologist]

I know what you mean when you say "structural", Gek, but I think D&G were always trying to be anti-structural, or at the very least anti-structuralist, where machines were supposed to simply "flow"-- something like fluid mechanics governs machines. (Remember, deterritorialization is a spatial metaphor-- it is "smooth" space. ) The "constructivist" or territorialized element throws a bit of a wrench in the simplicity of the metaphor, and this is where "striated" space comes in. To flesh out (painfully corny pun only half-intended) the metaphor, smooth muscle tissue is found in the uterus, the bladder, and blood vessels, and mostly functions in terms of involutary movement. Cardiac and skeletal muscle tissues are striated, sinewy, hold together the component parts like nuts and bolts do any other machine--sometimes they control involuntary motion, but most importantly, cardiac muscle tissues operate rhythmically. Biorhythms are a huge influence on D&G's model, I've always thought.

Anyhooww, I would say, if you were to try to more pointedly systematize what D&G were getting at in aTP, it would make sense to say "machines" are deeply embedded in their model, they "structurally" reinforce D&G's theoretical model. Rather than themselves being structures. Make sense? Maybe I need some sleep.

 

[the undisputed truth]

am i liking the mordant music cd "dead air." much more interesting and diverse musically,

^echo that

 

[wanx]

Perhaps I'm a bit confused about this concept of hauntology as applied to pop music. What I take away from this conversation, which is quite interesting, is that "hauntological" pop music is that which invokes "spectres" of a bygone, and possibly never-was past. If that's wrong, then what follows will be really stupid...

It seems to me that the concept of "hauntology" cannot really be made into a descriptor of any specific musics--in the sense that it seems to describe the constitutive outside of the present ("hauntology" as the unseen ontology). This seems part of what K-punk was on about earlier: it's the zeitgeist. (and someone else, too, who said that the discussion of "what if there's no next big thing" was a perfect expression of hauntology). This formulation seems moderately useful.

But only moderately so. I mean: when has pop music not been "hauntological?" Perhaps that's what organizes the whole category of pop music for us, eh? That is, what makes it "pop" and not some other type of music is that it is somehow haunted. We identify pop music as such because it is all similarly haunted, and in many cases haunted by a similar spectres. Considering the amount of "spot the influences" that drives a lot of rock writing (or at least, that'll be my convenient straw man here), this doesn't seem like an outrageous claim. I have a hard time finding pop music that isn't somehow haunted. Two of my reference points for pop...Bob Dylan's whole corpus of songs seems lyrically haunted by all manner of ghosts. And now, listening to Lou Reed's "Berlin", I'm hearing some seriously ethereal shit.

I'll admit that my own idiosyncratic knowledge of the posties really makes me lost in aesthetic discussions, and that there might be serious errors in my understanding here. Yet I wonder why this formulation is a helpful descriptor of contemporary pop music, as against past pop musics?

fwiw, this marks my first foray into these here forums...
thanks to everyone here for talking about music the way i think about it

 

[nomadologist]

I think you're exactly right, Wanx.

 

[tatarsky]

I mean: when has pop music not been "hauntological?"

I think this misses the point somewhat. Hauntology is not merely re-presentation, as to say as much is pretty meaningless, as you point out.

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.

The idea that music needs to retrace its steps to find new paths to tread seems reasonable - there is a sense that many deadends have been found. What is vital though, is that there remains expression of the present (and nods to the future), and if hauntology seeks to convey the blandness of our current climate's retrogressive necrophilia by explicitly aging and mourning previous musics, rather than merely glorifying certain signifiers entirely devoid of any essence, then it certainly represents something I'd be interested in hearing more of. Crucial to that is the aspect of mourning, as this roots it in the present, but I'd also like to hear hauntology become more militant, braver in its ambition, forcing a reterritorialisation of the past, rather than a preaching to the converted, and a wallowing in former glories.

 

[nomadologist]

Wait--but what is hauntology, then? Why is one sort of popular music hauntological, while another isn't? If you want to go back to "essence", then it is important to recognize any appeal to the "originary" begs the ontological question. I'm sure I don't need to talk about authenticity here, since you are a very good reader of Heidegger. I don't think Derrida thought hauntology only applied to Kode 9 and Burial.

Mourning does not have its roots in the present. Does it? Really, It has its roots in an originally absent cathexis.