‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’
‘There’s no time here, not any more’
The final image of the British television series Sapphire and Steel seemed designed to haunt the adolescent mind. The two lead characters, played by Joanna Lumley and David McCallum, find themselves in what seems to be a 1940s roadside café. The radio is playing a simulation of Glenn Miller-style smooth Big Band jazz. Another couple, a man and a woman dressed in 1940s clothes, are sitting at an adjacent table. The woman rises, saying: ‘This is the trap. This is nowhere, and it’s forever.’ She and her companion then disappear, leaving spectral outlines, then nothingness. Sapphire and Steel panic. They rifle through the few objects in the café, looking for something they can use to escape. There is nothing, and when they pull back the curtains, there is only a black starry void beyond the window. The café, it seems, is some kind of capsule floating in deep space.
Watching this extraordinary final sequence now, the juxtaposition of
the café with the cosmos is likely to put in mind some combination of Edward Hopper and René Magritte. Neither of those references were available to me at the time; in fact, when I later encountered Hopper and Magritte, I no doubt thought of Sapphire and Steel. It was August 1982 and I had just turned 15 years old. It would be more than 20 years later before I would see these images again. By then, thanks to VHS, DVD and YouTube, it seemed that practically everything was available for re- watching. In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost.
The passage of 30 years has only made the series appear even stranger than it did at the time. This was science fiction with none of the traditional trappings of the genre, no spaceships, no ray guns, no anthropomorphic foes: only the unraveling fabric of the corridor of time, along which malevolent entities would crawl, exploiting and expanding gaps and fissures in temporal continuity. All we knew about Sapphire and Steel was that they were ‘detectives’ of a peculiar kind, probably not human, sent from a mysterious ‘agency’ to repair these breaks in time.
‘The basis of Sapphire and Steel,’ the series’s creator P. J. Hammond explained, ‘came from my desire to write a detective story, into which I wanted to incorporate Time. I’ve always been interested in Time, particularly the ideas of J. B. Priestley and H. G. Wells, but I wanted to take a different approach to the subject. So instead of having them go backwards and forwards in Time, it was about Time breaking in, and having set the precedent I realised the potential that it offered with two people whose job it was to stop the break-ins.’ (Steve O’Brien, ‘The Story Behind Sapphire & Steel’, The Fan Can, http://www.thefancan.com/fancandy/features/tvfeatures/steel.html)
Hammond had previously worked as a writer on police dramas such as The Gentle Touch and Hunter’s Walk and on children’s fantasy shows like Ace of Wands and Dramarama. With Sapphire and Steel, he attained a kind of auteurship that he would never manage to repeat. The conditions for this kind of visionary public broadcasting would disappear during the 1980s, as the British media became taken over by what another television auteur, Dennis Potter, would call the ‘occupying powers’ of neoliberalism. The result of that occupation is that it is now hard to believe that such a programme could ever have been transmitted on prime-time television, still less on what was then Britain’s sole commercial network, ITV. There were only three television channels in Britain then: BBC1, BBC2 and ITV; Channel 4 would make its first broadcast only a few months later.
By comparison with the expectations created by Star Wars, Sapphire and Steel came off as very cheap and cheerful. Even in 1982, the chroma- key special effects looked unconvincing. The fact that the stage sets were minimal, and the cast small (most of the ‘assignments’ only featured Lumley and McCallum and a couple of others), gave the impression of a theatre production. Yet there was none of the homeliness of kitchen sink naturalism; Sapphire and Steel had more in common with the enigmatic oppressiveness of Harold Pinter, whose plays were frequently broadcast on BBC television during the 1970s.
A number of things about the series are particularly striking from the perspective of the 21st century. The first is its absolute refusal to ‘meet the audience halfway’ in the way that we’ve come to expect. This is partly a conceptual matter: Sapphire and Steel was cryptic, its stories and its world never fully disclosed, still less explained. The series was much
closer to something like the BBC’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s Smiley novels – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had been broadcast in 1979; its sequel Smiley’s People would begin transmission a month after Sapphire and Steel ended – than it was to Star Wars. It was also a question of emotional tenor: the series and its two lead characters are lacking in the warmth and wisecracking humour that is now so much a taken-for-granted feature of entertainment media. McCallum’s Steel had a technician’s indifference towards the lives in which he became reluctantly enmeshed; although he never loses his sense of duty, he is testy and impatient, frequently exasperated by the way humans ‘clutter their lives’. If Lumley’s Sapphire appeared more sympathetic, there was always the suspicion that her apparent affection towards humans was something like an owner’s benign fascination for her pets. The emotional austerity that had characterised the series from the start assumes a more explicitly pessimistic quality in this final assignment. The Le Carré parallels are reinforced by the strong suspicion that, just as in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the lead characters have been betrayed by their own side.
Then there was Cyril Ornadel’s incidental music. As Nick Edwards explained in a 2009 blog post, this was ‘[a]rranged for a small ensemble of musicians (predominantly woodwind) with liberal use of electronic treatments (ring modulation, echo/delay) to intensify the drama and suggestion of horror, Ornadel’s cues are far more powerfully chilling and evocative than anything you’re likely hear in the mainstream media today.’ (‘Sapphire and Steel’, gutterbreakz.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/sapphire-steel.html)
One aim of Sapphire and Steel was to transpose ghost stories out of the Victorian context and into contemporary places, the still inhabited or the recently abandoned. In the final assignment, Sapphire and Steel arrive at a small service station. Corporate logos – Access, 7 Up, Castrol GTX, LV – are pasted on the windows and the walls of the garage and the adjoining café. This ‘halfway place’ is a prototype version of what the anthropologist Marc Augé will call in a 1995 book of the same title, ‘non-places’ – the generic zones of transit (retail parks, airports) which will come to increasingly dominate the spaces of late capitalism. In truth, the modest service station in Sapphire and Steel is quaintly idiosyncratic compared to the cloned generic monoliths which will proliferate besides motorways over the coming 30 years.
The problem that Sapphire and Steel have come to solve is, as ever, to do with time. At the service station, there is temporal bleed-through from earlier periods: images and figures from 1925 and 1948 keep appearing, so that, as Sapphire and Steel’s colleague Silver puts it ‘time just got mixed, jumbled up, together, making no sort of sense’. Anachronism, the slippage of discrete time periods into one another, was throughout the series the major symptom of time breaking down. In one of the earlier assignments, Steel complains that these temporal anomalies are triggered by human beings’ predilection for the mixing of artefacts from different eras. In this final assignment, the anachronism has led to stasis: time has stopped. The service station is in ‘a pocket, a vacuum’. There’s ‘still traffic, but it’s not going anywhere’: the sound of cars is locked into a looped drone. Silver says, ‘there is no time here, not any more’. It’s as if the whole scenario is a literalisation of the lines in Pinter’s No Man’s Land: ‘No man’s land, which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, which remains forever icy and silent.’ Hammond said that he had not necessarily intended the series to end there. He had thought that it would be rested, to return at some point in the future. There would be no return – at least, not on network television. In 2004, Sapphire and Steel would come back for a series of audio adventures; though Hammond, McCallum and Lumley were not involved, and by then the audience was not the television-viewing public, but the kind of special interest niche easily catered for in digital culture. Eternally suspended, never to be freed, their plight – and indeed their provenance – never to be fully explained, Sapphire and Steel’s internment in this café from nowhere is prophetic for a general condition: in which life continues, but time has somehow stopped.
It is the contention of this book that 21st-century culture is marked by the same anachronism and inertia which afflicted Sapphire and Steel in their final adventure. But this stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of ‘newness’, of perpetual movement. The ‘jumbling up of time’, the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so prevalent that is no longer even noticed.
In his book After The Future, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi refers to the ‘the
slow cancellation of the future [that] got underway in the 1970s and 1980s.’ ‘But when I say “future”’, he elaborates,
I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegel-Marxist mythology of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encom-passing power of scientific knowledge; and so on.
My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it, and look at reality without this kind of temporal lens. I’ll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. (After The Future, AK Books, 2011, pp18-19)
Bifo is a generation older than me, but he and I are on the same side of a temporal split here. I, too, will never be able to adjust to the paradoxes of this new situation. The immediate temptation here is to fit what I’m saying into a wearily familiar narrative: it is a matter of the old failing to come to terms with the new, saying it was better in their day. Yet it is just this picture – with its assumption that the young are automatically at the leading edge of cultural change – that is now out of date.
Rather than the old recoiling from the ‘new’ in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in popular music culture. It was through the mutations of popular music that many of those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the passage of cultural time. But faced with 21st-century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared. This is quickly established by
performing a simple thought experiment. Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be. While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century, just as Sapphire and Steel were incarcerated in their roadside café.
The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those 30 years have been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalisation, ubiquitous computerisation and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last 10 to 15 years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile
telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate any more.
Consider the fate of the concept of ‘futuristic’ music. The ‘futuristic’ in music has long since ceased to refer to any future that we expect to be different; it has become an established style, much like a particular typographical font. Invited to think of the futuristic, we will still come up with something like the music of Kraftwerk, even though this is now as antique as Glenn Miller’s big band jazz was when the German group began experimenting with synthesizers in the early 1970s.
Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk? If Kraftwerk’s music came out of a casual intolerance of the already-established, then the present moment is marked by its extraordinary accommodation towards the past. More than that, the very distinction between past and present is breaking down. In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.
Two examples will suffice to introduce this peculiar temporality. When I first saw the video for the Arctic Monkeys’ 2005 single ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’, I genuinely believed that it was some lost artifact from circa 1980. Everything in the video – the lighting, the haircuts, the clothes – had been assembled to give the impression that this was a performance on BBC2’s ‘serious rock show’ The Old Grey Whistle Test. Furthermore, there was no discordance between the look and the sound. At least to a casual listen, this could quite easily have been a postpunk group from the early 1980s. Certainly, if one performs a version of the thought experiment I described above, it’s easy to imagine ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ being broadcast on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1980, and producing no sense of disorientation in the audience. Like me, they might have imagined that the references to ‘1984’ in the lyrics referred to the future.
There ought to be something astonishing about this. Count back 25 years from 1980, and you are at the beginning of rock and roll. A record that sounded like Buddy Holly or Elvis in 1980 would have sounded out
of time. Of course, such records were released in 1980, but they were marketed as retro. If the Arctic Monkeys weren’t positioned as a ‘retro’ group, it is partly because, by 2005, there was no ‘now’ with which to contrast their retrospection. In the 1990s, it was possible to hold something like Britpop revivalism to account by comparing it to the experimentalism happening on the UK dance underground or in US R&B. By 2005, the rates of innovation in both these areas had enormously slackened. UK dance music remains much more vibrant than rock, but the changes that happen there are tiny, incremental, and detectable largely only by initiates – there is none of the dislocation of sensation that you heard in the shift from Rave to Jungle and from Jungle to Garage in the 1990s. As I write this, one of the dominant sounds in pop (the globalised club music that has supplanted R&B) resembles nothing more than Eurotrance, a particularly bland European 1990s cocktail made from some of the most flavourless components of House and Techno.
Second example. I first heard Amy Winehouse’s version of ‘Valerie’ while walking through a shopping mall, perhaps the perfect venue for consuming it. Up until then, I had believed that ‘Valerie’ was first recorded by indie plodders the Zutons. But, for a moment, the record’s antiqued 1960s soul sound and the vocal (which on a casual listen I didn’t at first recognise as Winehouse) made me temporarily revise this belief: surely the Zutons’ version of the track was a cover of this apparently ‘older’ track, which I had not heard until now? Naturally, it didn’t take me long to realise that the ‘60s soul sound’ was actually a simulation; this was indeed a cover of the Zutons’ track, done in the souped-up retro style in which the record’s producer, Mark Ronson, has specialised.
Ronson’s productions might have been designed to illustrate what Fredric Jameson called the ‘nostalgia mode’. Jameson identifies this tendency in his remarkably prescient writings on postmodernism, beginning in the 1980s. What makes ‘Valerie’ and the Arctic Monkeys typical of postmodern retro is the way in which they perform anachronism. While they are sufficiently ‘historical’–sounding to pass on first listen as belonging to the period which they ape – there is something not quite right about them. Discrepancies in texture – the results of modern studio and recording techniques – mean that they
belong neither to the present nor to the past but to some implied ‘timeless’ era, an eternal 1960s or an eternal 80s. The ‘classic’ sound, its elements now serenely liberated from the pressures of historical becoming, can now be periodically buffed up by new technology.
It is important to be clear about what Jameson means by the ‘nostalgia mode’. He is not referring to psychological nostalgia – indeed, the nostalgia mode as Jameson theorises it might be said to preclude psychological nostalgia, since it arises only when a coherent sense of historical time breaks down. The kind of figure capable of exhibiting and expressing a yearning for the past belongs, actually, to a paradigmatically modernist moment – think, for instance, of Proust’s and Joyce’s ingenious exercises in recovering lost time. Jameson’s nostalgia mode is better understood in terms of a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary experience. Jameson’s example is Lawrence Kasdan’s now half-forgotten film Body Heat (1981), which, although it was officially set in the 1980s, feels as if it belongs to the 30s. ‘Body Heat is technically not a nostalgia film,’ Jameson writes,
since it takes place in a contemporary setting, in a little Florida village near Miami. On the other hand, this technical contemporaneity is most ambiguous indeed…Technically,…its objects (its cars, for instance) are 1980s products, but everything in the film conspires to blur that immediate contemporary reference and to make it possible to receive this too as nostalgia work – as a narrative set in some indefinable nostalgic past, an eternal 1930s, say, beyond history. It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings, as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we had become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself – or, at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history. (‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in The Cultural Turn: Selected
Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, Verso, 1998, pp9-10.)
What blocks Body Heat from being a period piece or a nostalgia picture in any straightforward way is its disavowal of any explicit reference to the past. The result is anachronism, and the paradox is that this ‘blurring of official contemporaneity’, this ‘waning of historicity’ is increasingly typical of our experience of cultural products. Another of Jameson’s examples of the nostalgia mode is Star Wars:
one of the most important cultural experiences of the generations that grew up from the 1930s to the 1950s was the Saturday afternoon series of the Buck Rogers type – alien villains, true American heroes, heroines in distress, the death ray or the doomsday box, and the cliff- hanger at the end whose miraculous solution was to be witnessed next Saturday afternoon. Star Wars reinvents this experience in the form of a pastiche; there is no point to a parody of such series, since they are long extinct. Far from being a pointless satire of such dead forms, Star Wars satisfies a deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them again: it is a complex object in which on some first level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artefacts through once again. (‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, p8)
There is no nostalgia for a historical period here (or if there is, it is only indirect): the longing of which Jameson writes is a yearning for a form. Star Wars is a particularly resonant example of postmodern anachronism, because of the way it used technology to obfuscate its archaic form. Belying its origins in these fusty adventure series forms, Star Wars could appear new because its then unprecedented special effects relied upon the latest technology. If, in a paradigmatically modernist way, Kraftwerk used technology to allow new forms to emerge, the nostalgia mode subordinated technology to the task of refurbishing the old. The effect was to disguise the disappearance of the future as its opposite.
The future didn’t disappear overnight. Berardi’s phrase ‘the slow
cancellation of the future’ is so apt because it captures the gradual yet relentless way in which the future has been eroded over the last 30 years. If the late 1970s and early 80s were the moment when the current crisis of cultural temporality could first be felt, it was only during the first decade of the 21st century that what Simon Reynolds calls ‘dyschronia’ has become endemic. This dyschronia, this temporal disjuncture, ought to feel uncanny, yet the predominance of what Reynolds calls ‘retro-mania’ means that it has lost any unheimlich charge: anachronism is now taken for granted. Jameson’s postmodernism – with its tendencies towards retrospection and pastiche – has been naturalised. Take someone like the stupendously successful Adele: although her music is not marketed as retro, there is nothing that marks out her records as belonging to the 21st century either. Like so much contemporary cultural production, Adele’s recordings are saturated with a vague but persistent feeling of the past without recalling any specific historical moment.
Jameson equates the postmodern ‘waning of historicity’ with the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, but he says little about why the two are synonymous. Why did the arrival of neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism lead to a culture of retrospection and pastiche? Perhaps we can venture a couple of provisional conjectures here. The first concerns consumption. Could it be that neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and security brought about a compensatory hungering for the well- established and the familiar? Paul Virilio has written of a ‘polar inertia’ that is a kind of effect of and counterweight to the massive speeding up of communication. Virilio’s example is Howard Hughes, living in one hotel room for 15 years, endlessly rewatching Ice Station Zebra. Hughes, once a pioneer in aeronautics, became an early explorer of the existential terrain that cyberspace will open up, where it is no longer necessary to physically move in order to access the whole history of culture. Or, as Berardi has argued, the intensity and precariousness of late capitalist work culture leaves people in a state where they are simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated. The combination of precarious work and digital communications leads to a besieging of attention. In this insomniac, inundated state, Berardi claims, culture becomes de-eroticised. The art of seduction takes too much time, and, according to Berardi, something like Viagra answers not to a biological
but to a cultural deficit: desperately short of time, energy and attention, we demand quick fixes. Like another of Berardi’s examples, pornography, retro offers the quick and easy promise of a minimal variation on an already familiar satisfaction.
The other explanation for the link between late capitalism and retrospection centres on production. Despite all its rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new. In the UK, the postwar welfare state and higher education maintenance grants constituted an indirect source of funding for most of the experiments in popular culture between the 1960s and the 80s. The subsequent ideological and practical attack on public services meant that one of the spaces where artists could be sheltered from the pressure to produce something that was immediately successful was severely circumscribed. As public service broadcasting became ‘marketised’, there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful. The result of all of this is that the social time
available for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural
production drastically declined. If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages. It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities. Since then, the decline of social housing, the attacks on squatting, and the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished. But perhaps it was only with the arrival of digital communicative capitalism that this reached terminal crisis point. Naturally, the besieging of attention described by Berardi applies to producers as much as consumers. Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal – from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms – but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before. Or, as Simon Reynolds so pithily put it, in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down.
No matter what the causes for this temporal pathology are, it is clear that no area of Western culture is immune from them. The former redoubts of futurism, such as electronic music, no longer offer escape from formal nostalgia. Music culture is in many ways paradigmatic of the fate of culture under post-Fordist capitalism. At the level of form, music is locked into pastiche and repetition. But its infrastructure has been subject to massive, unpredictable change: the old paradigms of consumption, retail and distribution are disintegrating, with downloading eclipsing the physical object, record shops closing and cover art disappearing.
What has the concept of hauntology to do with all this? It was in fact with some reluctance that hauntology started to be applied to the electronic music of the middle of the last decade. I’d generally found Jacques Derrida, the inventor of the term, a frustrating thinker. As soon as it was established in certain areas of the academy, deconstruction, the philosophical project which Derrida founded, installed itself as a pious cult of indeterminacy, which at its worst made a lawyerly virtue of avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of scepticism, which induced hedging, infirmity of purpose and compulsory doubt in its followers. It elevated particular modes of academic practice
– Heidegger’s priestly opacity, literary theory’s emphasis on the ultimate instability of any interpretation – into quasi-theological imperatives. Derrida’s circumlocutions seemed like a disintensifying influence.
It’s by no means irrelevant to point out here that my first encounter with Derrida took place in what is now a vanished milieu. It came in the pages of the New Musical Express in the 1980s, where Derrida’s name would be mentioned by the most exciting writers. (And, actually, part of my frustration with Derrida’s work came out of disappointment. The enthusiasm of NME writers like Ian Penman and Mark Sinker for Derrida, and the formal and conceptual inventiveness it seemed to provoke in their writing, created expectations which Derrida’s own work couldn’t meet when I eventually came to read it.) It’s hard to believe this now but, along with public service broadcasting, the NME constituted a kind of supplementary-informal education system, in which theory
acquired a strange, lustrous glamour. I had also seen Derrida in Ken McMullen’s film Ghost Dance, shown late at night on Channel 4 in the early days of the network, at a time before we had a VCR, when I had to
resort to washing my face with cold water to try to keep myself awake.
Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’ in his Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. ‘To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept,’ he wrote. (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Routledge, 1994, p202) Hauntology was this concept, or puncept. The pun was on the philosophical concept of ontology, the philosophical study of what can be said to exist. Hauntology was the successor to previous concepts of Derrida’s such as the trace and différance; like those earlier terms, it referred to the way in which nothing enjoys a purely positive existence. Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede and surround it, allowing it to possess such consistency and intelligibility that it does. In the famous example, any particular linguistic term gains its meaning not from its own positive qualities but from its difference from other terms. Hence Derrida’s ingenious deconstructions of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and ‘phonocentrism’, which expose the way in which particular dominant forms of thought had (incoherently) privileged the voice over writing.
But hauntology explicitly brings into play the question of time in a way that had not quite been the case with the trace or différance. One of the repeated phrases in Specters of Marx is from Hamlet, ‘the time is out of joint’ and in his recent Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Martin Hägglund argues that it is possible to see all of Derrida’s work in relation to this concept of broken time. ‘Derrida’s aim,’ Hägglund argues, ‘is to formulate a general ‘hauntology’ (hantologie), in contrast to the traditional ‘ontology’ that thinks being in terms of self-identical presence. What is important about the figure of the specter, then, is that it cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet’ (Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford University Press, 2008, p82)
Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is it just a figure of speech? The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to
think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing. The great thinkers of modernity, Freud as well as Marx, had discovered different modes of this spectral causality. The late capitalist world, governed by the abstractions of finance, is very clearly a world in which virtualities are effective, and perhaps the most ominous ‘spectre of Marx’ is capital itself. But as Derrida underlines in his interviews in the Ghost Dance film, psychoanalysis is also a ‘science of ghosts’, a study of how reverberant events in the psyche become revenants.
Referring back to Hägglund’s distinction between the no longer and the not yet, we can provisionally distinguish two directions in hauntology. The first refers to that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat’, a fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour). The ‘spectre of communism’ that Marx and Engels had warned of in the first lines of the Communist Manifesto was just this kind of ghost: a virtuality whose threatened coming was already playing a part in undermining the present state of things.
In addition to being another moment in Derrida’s own philosophical project of deconstruction, Specters of Marx was also a specific engagement with the immediate historical context provided by the disintegration of the Soviet empire. Or rather, it was an engagement with the alleged disappearance of history trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last Man. What would happen now that actually existing socialism had collapsed, and capitalism could assume full spectrum dominance, its claims to global dominion were thwarted not any longer by the existence of a whole other bloc, but by small islands of resistance such as Cuba and North Korea? The era of what I have called ‘capitalist realism’ – the widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism – has been haunted not by the apparition of the spectre of communism, but by its disappearance. As Derrida wrote:
There is today in the world a dominant discourse…This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work. The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself, it holds forth and holds to formulas, like any animistic magic. To the rhythm of a cadenced march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism! (Specters of Marx, p64)
Specters of Marx was also a series of speculations about the media (or post-media) technologies that capital had installed on its now global territory. In this sense, hauntology was by no means something rarefied; it was endemic in the time of ‘techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele- iconicity’ ‘simulacra’ and ‘synthetic images’. This discussion of the ‘tele-’ shows that hauntology concerns a crisis of space as well as time. As theorists such as Virilio and Jean Baudrillard had long acknowledged – and Specters of Marx can also be read as Derrida settling his account with these thinkers – ‘tele-technologies’ collapse both space and time. Events that are spatially distant become available to an audience instantaneously. Neither Baudrillard nor Derrida would live to see the full effects – no doubt I should say the full effects so far – of the ‘tele- technology’ that has most radically contracted space and time, cyberspace. But here we have a first reason why the concept of hauntology should have become attached to popular culture in the first decade of the 21st century. For it was at this moment when cyberspace enjoyed unprecedented dominion over the reception, distribution and consumption of culture – especially music culture.
When it was applied to music culture – in my own writing, and in that of other critics such as Simon Reynolds and Joseph Stannard – hauntology first of all named a confluence of artists. The word confluence is crucial here. For these artists – William Basinski, the Ghost Box label, The Caretaker, Burial, Mordant Music, Philip Jeck, amongst others – had converged on a certain terrain without actually influencing one another. What they shared was not a sound so much as a sensibility, an existential orientation. The artists that came to be labelled
hauntological were suffused with an overwhelming melancholy; and they were preoccupied with the way in which technology materialised memory – hence a fascination with television, vinyl records, audiotape, and with the sounds of these technologies breaking down. This fixation on materialised memory led to what is perhaps the principal sonic signature of hauntology: the use of crackle, the surface noise made by vinyl. Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence. It reverses the normal order of listening according to which, as Ian Penman put it, we are habituated to the ‘re’ of recording being repressed. We aren’t only made aware that the sounds we are hearing are recorded, we are also made conscious of the playback systems we use to access the recordings. And hovering behind much sonic hauntology is the difference between analogue and digital: so many hauntological tracks have been about revisiting the physicality of analogue media in the era of digital ether. MP3 files remain material, of course, but their materiality is occulted from us, by contrast with the tactile materiality of vinyl records and even compact discs.
No doubt a yearning for this older regime of materiality plays a part in the melancholia that saturates hauntological music. As to the deeper causes of this melancholia, we need look no further than the title of Leyland Kirby’s album: Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was. In hauntological music there is an implicit acknowledgement that the hopes created by postwar electronica or by the euphoric dance music of the 1990s have evaporated – not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible. Yet at the same time, the music constitutes a refusal to give up on the desire for the future. This refusal gives the melancholia a political dimension, because it amounts to a failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism.
In Freud’s terms, both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawal of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared. For mourning to properly begin, Derrida says in Specters of Marx, the dead must be conjured away: ‘the conjuration has to make sure that the
dead will not come back: quick, do whatever is needed to keep the cadaver localised, in a safe place, decomposing right where it was inhumed, or even embalmed as they liked to do in Moscow’ (Specters of Marx, p120) But there are those who refuse to allow the body to be interred, just as there is a danger of (over)killing something to such an extent that it becomes a spectre, a pure virtuality. ‘Capitalist societies,’ Derrida writes, ‘can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost. They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.’ (Specters of Marx, p123)
Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or – and this can sometimes amount to the same thing – the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/ for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.
What’s at stake in 21st century hauntology is not the disappearance of a particular object. What has vanished is a tendency, a virtual trajectory. One name for this tendency is popular modernism. The cultural ecology that I referred to above – the music press and the more challenging parts of public service broadcasting – were part of a UK popular modernism, as were postpunk, brutalist architecture, Penguin paperbacks and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In popular modernism, the elitist project of modernism was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist. Particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the present moment was taken up and renewed. Which is to say that, although of course I didn’t realise
it at the time, the culture which shaped most of my early expectations
was essentially popular modernist, and the writing that has been collected in Ghosts Of My Life is about coming to terms with the disappearance of the conditions which allowed it to exist.
It’s worth pausing a moment here to distinguish the haunto-logical melancholia I’m talking about from two other kinds of melancholia. The first is what Wendy Brown calls ‘left melancholy’. On the face of it, what I’ve said risks being heard as a kind of leftist melancholic resignation: although they weren’t perfect, the institutions of social democracy were much
better than anything we can hope for now, perhaps the best we can ever hope for…In her essay ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, Brown attacks ‘a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing.’ (Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, boundary 2 26:3, 1999, p26). Yet much of what makes the melancholy Brown analyses so pernicious is its disavowed quality. Brown’s left melancholic is a depressive who believes he is realistic; someone who no longer has any expectation that his desire for radical transformation could be achieved, but who doesn’t recognise that he has given up. In her discussion of Brown’s essay in The Communist Horizon, Jodi Dean refers to Lacan’s formula: ‘the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire’ and the shift that Brown describes – from a left that confidently assumed the future belonged to it, to a left that makes a virtue of its own incapacity to act – seems to exemplify the transition from desire (which in Lacanian terms is the desire to desire) to drive (an enjoyment through failure). The kind of melancholia I’m talking about, by contrast, consists not in giving up on desire but in refusing to yield. It consists, that is to say, in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call ‘reality’ – even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time…
The second kind of melancholia that hauntological melancholia must be distinguished from is what Paul Gilroy calls ‘postcolonial melancholia’. Gilroy defines this melancholia in terms of an avoidance; it is about evading ‘the painful obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history and to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness.’ (Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, Columbia University Press, 2005, p99) It comes out of a ‘loss of a fantasy of omnipotence’. Like Brown’s left melancholy, then, postcolonial melancholia is a disavowed form of melancholia: its
‘signature combination’, Gilroy writes, is that of ‘manic elation with misery, self-loathing, and ambivalence.’ (Postcolonial Melancholia, p104) The postcolonial melancholic doesn’t (just) refuse to accept change; at some level, he refuses to accept that change has happened at all. He incoherently holds on to the fantasy of omnipotence by experiencing change only as decline and failure, for which, naturally, the immigrant other must be blamed (the incoherence here is obvious: if the postcolonial melancholic were really omnipotent, how could he be harmed by the immigrant?). At first sight, it might be possible to see hauntological melancholia as a variant of postcolonial melancholia: another example of white boy whingeing over lost privileges…Yet this would be to grasp what has been lost only in the terms of the worst kind of resentment ressentiment, or in terms of what Alex Williams has called negative solidarity, in which we are invited to celebrate, not an increase in liberation, but the fact that another group has now been immiserated; and this is especially sad when the group in question was predominantly working class.
This raises the question of nostalgia again: is hauntology, as many of its critics have maintained, simply a name for nostalgia? Is it about pining for social democracy and its institutions? Given the ubiquity of the formal nostalgia I described above, the question has to be, nostalgia compared to what? It seems strange to have to argue that comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not automatically nostalgic in any culpable way, but such is the power of the dehistoricising pressures of populism and PR that the claim has to be explicitly made. PR and populism propagate the relativistic illusion that intensity and innovation are equally distributed throughout all cultural periods. It is the tendency to falsely overestimate the past that makes nostalgia egregious: but, one of the lessons of Andy Beckett’s history of Britain in the 1970s, When The Lights Went Out is that, in many ways, we falsely underestimate a period like the 70s – Beckett in effect shows that capitalist realism was built on a myth-monstering of the decade. Conversely, we are induced by ubiquitous PR into falsely overestimating the present, and those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them
forever.
If the 1970s were in many respects better than neoliberalism wants us to remember them, we must also recognise the extent to which the capitalist dystopia of 21st-century culture is not something that was simply imposed on us – it was built out of our captured desires. ‘Almost everything I was afraid of happening over the past 30 years has happened,’ Jeremy Gilbert has observed. ‘Everything my political mentors warned might happen, since I was a boy growing up on a poor council estate (that’s a housing project, if you’re American) in the North of England in the early 80s, or a high–school student reading denunciations of Thatcherism in the left press a few years later, has turned out just as badly as they said it would. And yet I don’t wish I was living 40 years ago. The point seems to be: this is the world we were all afraid of; but it’s also sort of the world we wanted.’ (Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Moving on from the Market Society: Culture (and Cultural Studies) in a Post-Democratic Age’,
But we shouldn’t have to choose between, say, the internet and social security. One way of thinking about hauntology is that its lost futures do not force such false choices; instead, what haunts is the spectre of a world in which all the marvels of communicative technology could be combined with a sense of solidarity much stronger than anything social democracy could muster.
Popular modernism was by no means a completed project, some pristine zenith that needed no further improvement. In the 1970s, certainly, culture was opened up to working-class inventiveness in a way that is now scarcely imaginable to us; but this was also a time when casual racism, sexism and homophobia were routine features of the mainstream. Needless to say, the struggles against racism and (hetero)sexism have not in the meantime been won, but they have made significant hegemonic advances, even as neoliberalism has corroded the social democratic infrastructure which allowed increased working class participation in cultural production. The disarticulation of class from race, gender and sexuality has in fact been central to the success of the neoliberal project – making it seem, grotesquely, as if neoliberalism were in some way a precondition of the gains made in anti-racist, anti-sexist
and anti-heterosexist struggles.
What is being longed for in hauntology is not a particular period, but the resumption of the processes of democratisation and pluralism for which Gilroy calls. Perhaps it’s useful to remind ourselves here that social democracy has only become a resolved totality in retrospect; at the time, it was a compromise formation, which those on the left saw as a temporary bridgehead from which further gains could be won. What should haunt us is not the no longer of actually existing social democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialised. These spectres – the spectres of lost futures – reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world.
Music culture was central to the projection of the futures which have been lost. The term music culture is crucial here, because it is the culture constellated around music (fashion, discourse, cover art) that has been as important as the music itself in conjuring seductively unfamiliar worlds. The destranging of music culture in the 21st century – the ghastly return of industry moguls and boys next door to mainstream pop; the premium put on ‘reality’ in popular entertainment; the increased tendency of those in music culture to dress and look like digitally and surgically enhanced versions of regular folk; the emphasis placed on gymnastic emoting in singing – has played a major role in conditioning us to accept consumer capitalism’s model of ordinariness. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are right when they say that the revolutionary take on race, gender and sexuality struggles goes far beyond the demand that different identities be recognised. Ultimately, it is about the dismantling of identity. The ‘revolutionary process of the abolition of identity, we should keep in mind, is monstrous, violent, and traumatic. Don’t try to save yourself—in fact, your self has, to be sacrificed! This does not mean that liberation casts us into an indifferent sea with no objects of identification, but rather the existing identities will no longer serve as anchors.’ (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Harvard University Press, 2011, p339) While Hardt and Negri are correct to warn of the traumatic dimensions of this transformation, as they are also aware, it also has its joyful aspects. Throughout the 20th century, music culture was a probe that played a major role in preparing the population to enjoy a future that was no longer white, male or heterosexual, a future
in which the relinquishing of identities that were in any case poor fictions would be a blessed relief. In the 21st century, by contrast – and the fusion of pop with reality TV is absolutely indicative of this – popular music culture has been reduced to being a mirror held up to late capitalist subjectivity.
By now, it should already be very clear that there are different senses of the word hauntology at play in Ghosts Of My Life. There is the specific sense in which it has been applied to music culture, and a more general sense, where it refers to persistences, repetitions, prefigurations. There are also more or less benign versions of hauntology. Ghosts Of My Life will move amongst these different uses of the term.
The book is about the ghosts of my life, so there is necessarily a personal dimension to what follows. Yet my take on the old phrase ‘the personal is political’ has been to look for the (cultural, structural, political) conditions of subjectivity. The most productive way of reading the ‘personal is political’ is to interpret it as saying: the personal is impersonal. It’s miserable for anyone at all to be themselves (still more, to be forced to sell themselves). Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves.
Such insights have been hard won. Depression is the most malign spectre that has dogged my life – and I use the term depression to distinguish the dreary solipsism of the condition from the more lyrical (and collective) desolations of haunto-logical melancholia. I started blogging in 2003 whilst still in such a state of depression that I found everyday life scarcely bearable. Some of these writings were part of the working through of the condition, and it’s no accident that my (so far successful) escape from depression coincided with a certain externalisation of negativity: the problem wasn’t (just) me but the culture around me. It’s clear to me that now the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised – not in the far distant future, but very soon – as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s. To say that the culture was desolate is not to say that there weren’t traces of
other possibilities. Ghosts Of My Life is an attempt to engage with some
of these traces.