Hauntology is a bit of blogging buzz word at present so. not to be left out, I thought I’d set out some reflections of my own.
The word hauntology is a pun, a play on the word ‘ontology‘ which, when spoken in a French accent, sounds exactly like ‘hauntology’.
The late French philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term in his ‘Specters of Marx‘ published in the early 1990s – a book which I suspect is more talked about than read. He used the word to reflect on how traces of the past come back like ghosts to haunt us. This is particularly true of darker events in human history like the holocaust, the Vietnam war or the slave trade, events that reveal the endless capacity of man to do evil on his fellow man. These events cannot be erased from the memory and though the need to ‘move on’ may be understandable there’s little to be gained from denying such events ever happened.
In an ideal world, history should be instructive in highlighting the errors of the past. In reality the notion of Western history with an ongoing momentum towards concepts of “freedom” and “civilization” is actually haunted by the specters of genocide and enslavement. Worse still, these hideous events are repeated like a sickness within humanity that refuses to be cured.
Articulate blogger K-punk (Mark Fisher) is credited with connecting Derrida’s neologism to a style of electronic music that feels and sounds haunted. In particular, ‘hauntology’is used to describe the sound of Burial who has, to date released two albums linked closely with the London sound of Dubstep – an atmospheric combination of ambient chill and dub reggae.
Burial’s brilliant use of voice and sound samples is a key feature of his music which help in giving it a menacing, dystopian, quality. K-punk writes: “The concept of hauntology is deployed particularly to music that employs samples and especially dub reggae techniques that reanimate styles and sounds that hover, suggestively, around the edges of the day to day”.
Other music to which the word is frequently applied is that of the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the appropriately named Ghost Box label. Here, the use of forgotten or abandoned methods is not overtly motivated by any strong sense of nostalgia for a past age but rather from a sense of a disrupted continuum.
Techniques like the use of analogue synthesizers may go out of fashion or be superceded by technological advances but the process by which one leads to another is important to retain, if only on a symbolic level.
I think it is significant that at this point in human history so many people find greater security in the past.
Social, political and environmental crises have led inevitably to a dread as to what the future holds. Mike Davis in ‘Dead Cities’ spoke of the “sheer out of control velocity of the metropolis” that creates an overriding sense of urban anxiety. This is certainly the mood that pervades Burial’s latest album ‘Untrue’.
Although K-punk’s observations are valuable, I don’t think ‘hauntology’ can or should be applied exclusively to electronica or dubstep. It is much too complex a concept to have such a limited frame of reference. I think, for instance, the effect on what Greil Marcus referred to as the “collective memory” of listeners to the ‘forgotten’ culture of what he called the ‘ Old Weird America’ is precisely the type of ghostly world that Derrida was prompted to write about.
This is, above all, a past that did not die but faded from memory merely because it no longer seemed to have any significant bearing on the modern age. Maybe it also raised some uncomfortable demons too as many of the songs on Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology of American Folk Music’ do not exactly present a vison of a nation at ease with itself.
The resurrection of these spirits of the musical past now through the multi-faceted sound of New Weird America is another way in which the haunted past works through to the present day musical scene.
