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1.23.2022
<Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
Hey, welcome back to the Newsletter. I hope you all are staying healthy. Unfortunately, I’ve been feeling a bit sick recently, I don’t know if it’s a combination of getting Boosted or potentially having Covid. At this point, it’s hard to tell what’s a cold, seasonal flu, or the Rona. In any event, I hope you all are staying safe. DECODE is planning to release its first episode of the “Difference and Repetition” Lecture Series; very soon, a new title card will be made along with promotional material, but in the meantime, enjoy this tweet.
New full-length posts are in the works, so please subscribe if you haven’t already.
Last week’s post dove into the central theme in most of my texts; you could say it was a quick and dirty introduction to accelerationism and this Newsletter as a whole.
Now the main topics of this Newsletter will be:
What is Haunticide?
What is its relation to Hauntology?
What does it mean for our place in “Time”?
An Intro to Haunticide
The Weeknd’s latest project, “Dawn FM,” opens up with a track by the same name; the track slowly builds up into a transition with a radio-like voiceover that sets the atmosphere for the album. If the album could be rendered into a single condensed idea, it would be, “It’s the aesthetic of News at 11 made palatable for a commercial pop audience.” Instead, the project is filled to the brim with an overabundance of synthesizers, reverb, and distortion traditionally found in 80s music that Abel has been enthralled with since “Starboy.” This reverb, however, is off. It is not quite the same sonic texture of the over-commercialized and hyper-mixed clean and plastic sound of the 80s. The project’s cover depicts an older Abel, not only alluding to time having passed, perhaps alluding to an artist or sound, not of this time. The album’s sounds are distorted, slowed, and hazed. The sounds would be immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent any time on the internet. These sonic motifs can be found in what some would argue is the internet musical defining genre: Vapor-wave.
It’s important to point this out, not necessarily as a condemnation or a celebration by any means. Hauntology is often attributed to Mark Fisher in the sonic realm. He is often cited as the one who repopularized the term when considering works of music with a particular aesthetic ambiance; an example of this would be music by The Care Taker. Vapor-Wave shares some of its motifs to its Hauntological counterparts that inspired it, given that Vapor-wave is the direct child or logical conclusion of such artistic deviations in a lot of ways. What makes Vapor-wave so important and has already been said is that the genre itself, in many ways, is both a pastiche post-modern abomination and a self-aware self-referential critique of capitalism.
Hauntology could have been or was the necessary catalyzing, corrosive agent behind some of the most self-aware forms of “retro.” And this isn’t to say Hauntology is retro itself, but it’s a particular evolution of a lineage of music that has no sound, a body aimlessly walking with no head. Instead, culture’s stagnation has led to the hyper-deflation of consciousness and an over-reliance on Nostalgia. If it worked before, why not just remix it using shiny new equipment and sell it for new audiences to digest it as if it’s new. Most fans of artists like “The Weeknd” have only enjoyed the 80s and 90s second hand. We are seeing now that Avant guard music movements have been subsumed.
This has been an ongoing cultural trend, where we see a hyper-fetishization of analog technologies, the 80s, and the reemergence of interest in the occult. The perfect example of this is the newest mystery-thriller. “Archive81” on Netflix, the shows revolves around the protagonist “Dan.”, who restores old tapes for living, uncovering a hidden past that unravels with every tape that is restored. I won’t go into the full synopsis or analysis of the show, as that would dive into spoilers for those who haven’t seen it. But, ultimately, it’s unnecessary to show any more evidence for this diagnosis of culture as there are many more shows and other forms of media that follow in this aesthetic.
If we were to describe our current state, it wouldn’t be too dissimilar to a somnambulist state, marching forward with no sense of direction. But, if the past is hyper-present, engulfing us and corroding the future, what is there to do?
There are different types of eradication; when one kills their deity or god, it is called Deicide; there’s even a word for the mass eradication of a group of people - Genocide - so what would it mean to kill our past to produce new conditions for the possibility of newness? One would naturally conclude that what’s being alluded to here is Haunticide, the killing of the past in some sense, but this is particularly too limiting, as Deleuze would put it in his formalization of Nietczhe’s Eternal return or Amor fati, and that is that this eternal return is the return of difference, the return for the conditions of neogenesis. So Haunticide isn’t to eradicate the past but instead to dismantle the past from the future. The past is virtual always in flux, we must cut ourselves from it, but this cut is only a means to contextualize the present and affirm difference.
Haunticide is critical of nostalgia in an age where nostalgia seems ever-present. But this weariness of nostalgia should not be confused with adversity; as mentioned, it should be nostalgia for the return of difference, a return for what is to come and what is possible.
To be continued
~Links~
-Julie Mehretu
“In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.”
― Baruch de Spinoza
As always, I would love to thank all of you who are subscribed to this Newsletter. If you are viewing this directly from a browser or link, please consider subscribing.
I would also like to send a special thank you to my Patrons:
James McGlade (Patreon name)
My Patreon is connected to the podcast I co-host with @YAgamben.
We recently opened up a Patreon to help support the expenses to keep some of these operations running, including hosting and things of that nature.
We strictly want to follow a “buy me a cup of coffee” model, so any “donation” for any period of time is welcome. If you would like to support any of the work we put out, consider becoming a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/Decodecast.
-C.N.
Song of the Week: A good song matching the theme of hyper-retroism