Hauntology and Retrofuturism

Yeah I mean I think that's a pretty significant part of it. All those memey analyses of how shit and dumb pop culture is (as opposed to Revolution 9, Joy Division, or Talking Heads) seem to skate over the fact that pop culture and it's apparatuses are far less necessary now. There are a load of groups doing stuff at least as inventive as went on in the late 60s, they just don't get radio play.

I think there is another issue though - sure, you can listen to all of these interesting artists in your silo, but where is the collective experience of Jungle, Acid house or Punk? The chances for an Event which leads to a big investment of energy and investigation of its consequences seem significantly lesser. If pop culture is no longer your conduit to innovation and expression, the human demand won't be there to push pop culture into strange places.

Theres an interesting idea with all of this concern about pop culture that seems closer to Latour than others. I've not read much Latour but from what I can gather, he understands the significance of a movement or whatever by its ability to employ other actants, gaining power by gaining followers and interlocutors. I don't think culture will ever work in thay way again. That said, SoundCloud rap is a definite and distinctive trend, is huge, and, to use Fisher's metric, sounds nothing like music from 10 or 20 years ago. So all hail Lil Pump?

Sorry for the ramble, just think it's an interesting issue.

good post

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cringe ass post

>all hail lil pump

christ what a boomer shit thing to say, soundcloud rap isnt even a thing anymore because they all died or went to prison

this thread not mine but it brings an interesting point, is hauntology itself repeating what does he mean by that? I'm a total pleb and just read fiction but I managed to read a bit of fisher. I can understand what there discussing but cant explain without sounding like a brainlet check out for yourselves

>That said, SoundCloud rap is a definite and distinctive trend, is huge, and, to use Fisher's metric, sounds nothing like music from 10 or 20 years ago. So all hail Lil Pump?
SoundCloud rap is actually a prime example for the splintering and isolation I mean, because even though it's a gigantic hit worldwide, I hardly ever heard of it beyond the occasional news of some to me unknown rappers dying due to an overdose or getting shot.

(me)
>seem to skate over the fact that pop culture and it's apparatuses are far less necessary now. There are a load of groups doing stuff at least as inventive as went on in the late 60s, they just don't get radio play.
I think your point and what wrote explains why we may be actually still stuck with 20th century nostalgia for a while.
How exactly are we going to culturally move out of the 20th century when much of 90s and most of 21st century so far has been way too undefinined, short lived and unkown to use as reference for new, future works?

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I love vaporwave, I think it's one of the most philosophically compelling forms of music in a long time. I was a bit disappointed with Babbling Corpse though, it didn't feel as academically rigorous as I would have liked. I want to write a more complete treatment of Vaporwave.

I completely agree with Jameson. I find Pomo authors' treatment of nostalgia would be good. What books would you recommend by Zizek?

Is Vaporwave even a thing anymore?
From what I remember it was already slowly on it's way out back in 2017.

imagine believing that a genre is dead just because the normies stopped memeing it

People still make music labeled "vaporwave" but the intentions of the music are completely different from the initial scene, which is really what I'm interested in. Kind of like how there are "punk" bands today but they're completely removed from the initial thrust of that 70s movement. The form with a different content.

But I feel like that makes it easier to write an analysis of it as a product of its time.

this could be what you're looking for

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The Future of Nostalgia by Boym is pretty relevant here

Hauntology is such a cool concept

Bump

A lot of brainlets in this thread. Hauntolgy is actually a rebellion against nostalgia. It doesnt mine the past for nostalgia, it mines the past for lost futures. Its basically about not giving hope in a stagnant era were it seems there is nothing to look forward to but more capitalism

Sort of like those photos of the middle east from the 70's were they are wearing western clothes

>there is nothing to look forward to but more capitalism
I just don't see new (sub-)cultures forming due to technology, not financial systems.

bumping an interesting thread

I'm actually writing my thesis on this. I don't know why Fisher never made this connection, at least never explicitly, but this whole movement originates with Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street and Arcades Project

> but this whole movement originates with Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street and Arcades Project
Could you elaborate what Benjamin wrote on these topics?

Sure, though it's anything but straightforward, and here I'm skipping a lot of the nuance:
Through his readings of Baudelaire, Proust, Nietzche, Blanqui, Kierkeegard and many others, Benjamin came to the conclusion that the way life is experienced had fundamentally changed with the rise of commodity-capitalism in the 19th century. The "long-experience' [Erfahrung] of previous generations as expressed in the nature of oral history / storytelling had degenerated into "isolated-experience" [Erlebnis] through which we engage with the world via, among other things, Information. Whereas oral history and storytelling imbued itself into the life of its listener (the beginning of every great story, of course, is how the storyteller himself heard it, "thus it bears the trace of the storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter's hand"), [See: The Storyteller] information explains itself away immediately, isolating itself from the actual experience of the listener, coming from nowhere and saying nothing that could actually reflect nor slip-into the subject's consciousness. "Experience [erfahrung] is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective experience as well as private life. It is the product less of facts firmly anchored in memory than of accumulated and frequently unconscious data that flow together in memory." [See: On Some Motifs of Baudelaire]

Erlebnis, isolated-experience, on the other hand, has to do with the "shock"-reality of modernity, wherein day-to-day experiences, like information, do not actually embed themselves into the consciousness of the subject. "Put in Proustian terms, this means what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as isolated experience [Erlebnis], can become a component of memoire involuntaire." The "shock" of modern life has to do in part with the way that commodity capitalism strips an object of, in Fisher's terms, its "lifeworld." It loses its sociocultural specificity and particularity, and can only be approached in terms of ownership and economic value. In turn, modern life, divided up into objective units of time and space, has alienated the subject from experience itself. A quote from Zygmunt Bauman is not alien to this discussion:

"That distance which we are now inclined to call ‘objective’ and to measure by comparing it with the length of the equator, rather than with the size of human bodily parts, corporal dexterity or sympathies/antipathes of its inhabitants, used to be measured by human bodies and human relationships long before the metal rod called the meter, that impersonality and disembodiment incarnate, was deposited at Sevres for everyone to respect and obey"

The "wholeness" and "authenticity" of pre-commodity capitalism experience is discussed in his Work of Art and History of Photography essays, but they both have to do with the singular nature of an item, particularly an art-object, and how its specific place in time and space secured a radically different relationship than the reproductive multiplicity of how we engage with objects today. This is a thing's "aura." This, as a whole, parallels with what Benjamin saw occurring in the increasingly scientific empiricism of history itself. History, time, and physical place (such as in the Arcades of Paris) had systematized individual experience into fragments, measurements, and economic value, fundamentally changing the way we interact with the world. Baudelaire, Blanqui, and Nietzsche talk about this the most, all basically sharing in the opinion that the myth of "Progress" and "the new," actually articulate life as a series of endless repetitions. The time of historicism, which deals in the linear and causal arrangement of dates, articulating history as always "getting better" (from Kant, Hegel, Smith, Voltaire, etc.), actually devalues the particular moment into a grand historical schema that strips the moment of its "Now," and the endless array of potential futures it suggests. This is what Benjamin calls the "homogenized time" of historicism. The time period's particularlity has been stripped away the moment it enters a grander and basically linear schema---the now can no longer stand on its own, or find its natural place as a whole in the lifetime of an individual, but, like an objective hour on a clock, becomes defined by its causal-temporal relations.

Benjamin's task was to figure out a way of doing history that restores each period's particular understanding of itself, and its inherent possibilities. What got him in trouble with Adorno is that Benjamin is actually against the dialectical program of Hegel, as he thinks the thing's individuality get stripped and lost the moment it synthesizes into the progressive Idea. Like Fisher's hauntology, which wants to sniff out lost potentials in past expressions of the future, Benjamin wants to "explode" an event or thing out of the "continuum of history" that it gets subsumed into. He wanted to articulate a productive nostalgia that would seize upon and "spark alight the hope in the past," thereby breaking down linear/progressive understandings of history and time. This is ostensibly what "One-Way Street" and the "Arcades Project" attempted to do by their not making explicit the relations between things: Benjamin wanted to make their tensions as intense as possible so that they could, theorhetically, break out of traditional historical understandings. In my reading, Fisher basically wants to do the same thing, but never really connected it to wider historical/temporal ideologies.

That was messy as fuck, and I'm skipping a lot, but that's the best I could sum it up over 15 mins of writing. I hope I'm at least half coherent. Ask any questions, of course.

amazing write up, thank you

What is this? 2016?

You might be interested in Pscyhogeography, it has pretty similar tendencies

Perhaps

Shit, that fucking finally made the "jetztzeit" shit click for me. Really saw it clearly there for a second. I've always had Benjamin filed away as "I'll figure this shit out later, I guess" but that helped a ton. Thanks user. This all sounds very interesting.

>Really saw it clearly there for a second
It's funny because that exact emotion is almost exactly the point. I read Benjamin as wanting to take that feeling and literally "explode" it into full being.

great stuff

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retrofuturism is a complete realization of what they could only partially create or implement during the 20th century and there's no signs of it happening again as a separate movement in the near future (it will happen again later with what is being imagined today and in the near future). the phenomenon is sort of like gothic revival utilizing far more efficient structural designs with comparatively more grandiose structures.
people create better versions of the past alongside imagined versions of the present/future partially or not implemented at the times.

A bump for this thread

Based, I have the same idea actually, even though the majority of listeners of this genre are dumb teenagers that miss a period they never lived in, you can still find some interesting people in the genre, and if you look into some subgenres, you can find some works with a hauntological approach of vaporwave.

Please share some Yea Forumssic recommendations.

bæmp

an interesting but ultimately sophistic idea.

I can see nothing in the future besides the endless grey concrete and grey people of global capitalism.

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Whats some good philosophically compelling vaporwave? I havent paid attention to the genre or any subgenres since eccojams and floral shoppe.i was really into it

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It's interesting that the left turned to hauntology right around the same period that the right turned to accelerationism

Why sophistic?

What is accelerationist music

probably something like death grips that's extremely experimental and so far removed from anything else being released

Maybe this will help

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interesting observation

Probably something like Bladee/Drain Gang

youtube.com/watch?v=4bQrqmKCREk

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this too

excellent book

thats a gem of a thread
>here for anyone wants to see it:
warosu.org/lit/thread/S12961200#p12961200

top tier paranoid dread

that op was schizo posting in the jp vs zizek threads.

>And doom is nolonger surmised to the future it is a subconcious cultural religion of the now
guess it takes a little crazy to make insights like this

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bumping

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How do I into "Spectres of Marx"

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hate records
lacr

bamb

Maybe I'll make a hauntology reader today

It's not vaporwave but Pye Corner Audio is dope. Black mill tapes vol 1 through 4 are king.

youtube.com/watch?v=Cez-w7fzEP4

Anyone read what remains of Fisher's "Acid Communism"? Because it's brilliant, and no doubt would have been the best work of Critical Theory since Jameson, Marcuse, Benjamin

Rob, is that you?

link??

Check b-ok for the K-punk anthology

Boomp

Internet Club's Redefining the Workplace is a great example of vaporwave's corporate aesthetic: upbeat music that carries the promise of market riches while being so anodyne to make one cynical of these riches before they even materialize.

I like how Luxury Elite and Saint Pepsi's split Late Night Delight explores the convergence of sleep and spectacle. Even when one dreams, or can't discern where they are on the border of sleep and waking, their projected fantasies remain rooted in the commercial mindset. No matter how far your consciousness drifts from its daily reality, you're still dreamin of hamburgers, baby.

I don't think you can get more philosophically pointed than returning to Eccojams, though. Look up Lopatin's interviews if you haven't already--he's well-studied in philosophy and approaches much of his music in theoretical terms. Pay close attention to which phrases are repeated in the jams: Where'd you get that information from? Where'd you get that information from? Where'd you get that information from? Where'd you get that information from?

Overall I wouldn't say that individual works are that philosophically elucidating. I think vaporwave works best as an overall effect: repetitions of visual motifs, artists' names changing so much you don't know who's who, specific world events being endlessly referenced. Vaporwave is created through EXCHANGE; vaporwave exists as a collection of online market principals that the anti-market nature of internet piracy has distorted according to its own logic.

Yeah ive tried to listen to blade banshee and 2814 japanese text and im not sure how i feel. I still just like the classic stuff like eccojams and floral shoppe.

E

Anyone know of any opinions of Adorno x Virillo in respect to music production and the consumerization of professional toolsets within creative spaces? I feel like Adorno misses the mark in regards to the mechanism of culture production and rather points to the output rather than the cause-- I didn't get the sense of Adorno implicitly regarding this thought I had and I wonder if any other anons have pondered this. If any of you work in music or creative/entertainment fields, do you feel as if workflow and style have lost all clear distinction between each other as opportunity cost seems to to be the only thing valued any longer?

As long as Faith supersists in the world, Vaporwave will continue to move and spread beyond its original thematic preconditions. At its core, Vaporwave is an ideology rooted in nostalgia and idealism - it reconciles the optimism of the past with that for the future. Vaporwave is becoming of the person who dwells in the loftiness of dreams/abstractions and unobstructed creativity.

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