You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

A review by adam_mcphee
Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts by Grafton Tanner

5.0

For now, we live in the mall, but I think it’s closing soon.

Very hauntological.

Some good lines:

SpoilerFor Derrida, no celebration must be had with regards to global capitalism, for it does not spell redemption from political or personal suffering. He illustrates that such belief in the power of capitalism as a freeing institution is foolish, for it will not promise utopia. With more suffering mounting every day in the wake of the newest moment of capitalism, Derrida argues we are nowhere near the “end of history.” Hauntology, therefore, is the artistic mode of realizing this failure of the future that was promised in the past. It is the dismantling of the definitions of past, present, and future and is absolutely political in its critique of capitalism. Hauntology then is unlike Jameson’s pastiche in that it complicates the past (specifically, the past’s image of the future) in order to call attention to capitalism’s destructive nature as a subjugating force that only fools others into thinking it can eradicate “history” – i.e. the ideologies Derrida mentions above.
Thus, hauntological art serves as a political and aesthetic update to Jameson’s and Hutcheon’s theories of postmodernism by erasing any sense of time or space in art and by illustrating the past’s continual reminder of the future’s failure in the form of haunting. This haunting always implies some kind of distance between the specter and that which is haunted (the present).


SpoilerIn addition to dismantling a sense of time, hauntological art breaks down spatial continuity as well. Mark Fisher draws on anthropologist Marc Augé’s idea of the “non-place” as a product of capitalism and a prime site of spatial disintegration. Such “non-places” are “airports, retail parks, and chain stores which resemble one another more than they resemble the particular spaces in which they are located.”23 These locations are signifiers of capitalist consumption in that they serve only to promote the buying and selling of goods. They can be found in multiple places in multiple cities, thus dissolving a sense of place belonging to any one location. Like the Overlook, these areas of consumption seem to lack any spatial tangibility. They are as unreal in nature as Kubrick’s menacing and enigmatic hotel. Art and commerce fuse almost entirely in these “non-places” as rampant consumerism reaches a new peak in the era of global capitalism. A consumer wandering through a typical “non-place,” like a mall for example, should take note of the sounds as well as the images of such a drained structure. It is no coincidence that the shopping mall is a symbol used by multiple vaporwave composers to evoke a place in which their warped music could be heard.


For Jacques Derrida, however, the next turning point occurs with the fall of the Berlin Wall, ushering in the “end of history” and sparking a new era of global capitalism. A grand critique of neoliberalism’s victory with the collapse of the Berlin Wall is at the heart of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, in which he first coins “hauntology” as that which “begins by coming back.”18 For Derrida, the specter is the spirit of Marxism returning and “haunting” as “some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other.”19 We can consider hauntology as the past’s idealized portrait of a brave, new future haunting the present and also as an update to postmodernism’s critique of history.