A post by Borna Šućurović
Introduction
On February 29th, 2016 a video entitled S U N D A Y S C H O O L was uploaded to YouTube and quickly became known as one of the first examples of what has since been dubbed simpsonwave. The video follows Bart Simpson's time spent going to Sunday school and getting to know Jessica, the daughter of reverend Lovejoy with whom he falls unhappily in love. While these events are taking place, the song Teen Pregnancy by Blank Banshee – in which an androgynous voice repeats the phrases "I'm just a kid" and "It was just a little mistake" over the beats of synthesizer-infused music – is playing in the background. A VHS filter is present throughout the entire duration of the video, giving off the impression that the footage was saved from a video cassette from the mid-1990s and subsequently digitized.
The aforementioned simpsonwave is one of the most well-known micro-genres within vaporwave, a subgenre of electronic music and visual art that exists almost exclusively on the Internet. Its characteristics were briefly touched on in the previous paragraph; the collaging of different pop-cultural elements that evoke a sense of nostalgia – like old episodes of The Simpsons, dial-up internet connections, etc. – with electronic sounds that take inspiration from lounge music and corporate jingles of the 1980s.
The most famous vaporwave track – which is at the same time an amazing example of all of the genre's aesthetic components – is undoubtedly リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュ(risafuranku 420/gendai no konpyu) by Ramona Xavier, better known under the alias Macintosh Plus. The visual identity of Floral Shoppe – the album on which the track is found – consists of a bust of the Greek god Helios behind which is a screensaver taken from an old model of Apple's Macintosh computers. The primary colors of the background are magenta and sage green, unmistakable communicators of the visual identity of late-night advertisements and low-budget films of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the song samples the track It's Your Move by Diana Ross as a basis for Xavier's sonic experimentation, which serves as further proof of the importance of pastiche and collage to vaporwave's aesthetic identity.
At the time of writing this, S U N D A Y S C H O O L stands at an impressive 18 million views on YouTube, while the most viewed upload of リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュ(risafuranku 420/gendai no konpyu) has a total of 24 million views. How might we explain the fact that so many viewers and listeners have such an interest in this kind of art? To begin answering this question we need to contend with a phenomenon which I shall call phantom nostalgia. By phantom nostalgia, I am denoting a type of nostalgia whose object is an unlived experience, an indeterminate feeling of longing that is indeterminate precisely because the object for which one longs – an event, an experience, or a context of a cultural artifact – has never been immediately experienced and, as such, cannot be made present to the longing subject.
Let us clarify using an example. Since we have here a genre that exists almost exclusively on the Internet – meaning that there aren't any music festivals, concerts, or similar real-world events where one might experience such music – it can be readily assumed that the average vaporwave listener is a young person who knows how to skillfully navigate the Internet. Taking into account the age of this proposed person, we can assume that they did not experience adolescence during the 1980s – the period from which vaporwave takes most of its aesthetic elements – but were in some way exposed to the cultural impact of this decade. Although the average vaporwave listener wasn't watching the premiere of Dirty Dancing in real time or waiting in line at the record store to buy Thriller, these cultural artifacts disseminated themselves into the listeners' lives as objects of nostalgia; something that was listened to in my father's car during long trips or my mother's favorite movie. Fragments of 1980s pop culture managed to spill over into the first decades of the twenty-first century as fragments of a more carefree world that became inaccessible due to political and social changes. This inaccessibility of the world of the 1980s makes it an object of longing and nostalgia, the fundamental building blocks of vaporwave's audio-visual language.
It is this yearning at the heart of the genre that leads us to hauntology, a type of cultural analysis founded by Jacques Derrida in his work Specters of Marx, and further developed by Mark Fisher. A key postulate of any hauntological analysis is that the world we live in is affected by specters of past times and events that do not exist within the same temporal plane as the one we move through. Derrida's specters are parts of an inaccessible past that commissions us and solicits certain actions from us, while Fisher sees ghosts as lost futures, unrealized developments of events that haunt us. In this text, I will go through both hauntological positions and highlight the ways in which they relate to vaporwave.
Derrida's specters: inaccessibility, commissioning, mourning
The quote that serves as an introduction to Derrida's Specters of Marx is "Time is out of joint" (Derrida 2006, xxi) taken from William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Shakespeare 2003, 52). This choice is by no means arbitrary; it is quite clear that, in referring to one of the most famous depictions of specters in the history of literature, Derrida is attempting to highlight some of the key characteristics of spectral entities. However, before we touch on these characteristics, it is necessary to offer a more exhaustive description of the specter and explain where it stands in relation to other theoretical concepts.
There are several places in the text where Derrida alternates between the names 'spirit' (l'esprit) and 'spectre' (spectre/revenant) when discussing spectral entities. He does this for at least two reasons. Firstly, by underlining the non-identity of these two names, he is attempting to distance hauntology from any totalizing theoretical system in which the concept of spirit might be used as a locus of unification, as is the case with authors such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Hegel 2010). This is a necessary step because, as Derrida writes, the specter is a "paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit." (Derrida 2006, 5, my emphasis). Spectral entities are irrevocably tethered to incorporation, sensuous cognition, and materiality. With this being the case, hauntology – along with any other approach that wishes to approach specters appropriately – must avoid the temptations of metaphysical totalization and systematization, which can only be done by always keeping in mind the aforementioned paradoxical phenomenality.
The second reason for Derrida's distinction between l'esprit and spectre/revenant is that unlike spirit – in the Hegelian or any other sense of the term – the spectre immediately acts upon that which it haunts. To clarify, let us return to Hegel. Although he explains the dialectical development of Geist from the subjective to the objective and finally the absolute level meticulously, there is no trace of corporeality to be found within this development (Hegel 2010). It would be ridiculous to assume that Hegel, when writing about the three aspects of absolute spirit – art, religion, and philosophy – is engaged in describing the path of some ethereal cloud or shadowy silhouette from the canvas of the Mona Lisa to the walls of a religious institution and finally to the pages of a philosophical work. The comedy of this illustration clearly shows us that, unlike specters, the spirit does not haunt.
While the presented confusion in distinguishing between specter and spirit seems justifiably amusing, saying that by listening to a piece of music I hear the echo of a lost, no-longer-existent time does not sound comical at all. Derrida lends further credence to the validity of this kind of aesthetic experience in the reiteration of his initial thesis:
"[W)hat distinguishes the specter or the revenant from the spirit, including the spirit in the sense of the ghost in general, is doubtless a supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality, the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible, or an invisibility of a visible X." (Derrida 2006, 6)
We can conclude, therefore, that specters possess two paradoxical determinants. On the one hand, they are spectral, in-visible, and transparent, but on the other hand, they are available to our senses, contained within the phenomena they haunt and, indeed, inseparable from them. A phrase Derrida uses that perhaps best describes the 'essence' of spectral entities is "this being-there of an absent or departed one" (Derrida 2006, 5). It is that which remains of something that no longer is within something that still is, a remnant or trace of a past presence contained within a present one.
Let us return to our initial question, namely that of the fundamental characteristics of specters. In Specters of Marx, we find three of them: the visor effect, commissioning, and the relationship of mourning. Let's touch on the visor effect first. In a way, this spectral property was already shown through the explication of paradoxical phenomenality, but Derrida's description is even more nuanced and significant for hauntological analysis. The description reads as follows:
"This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts all specularity here. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us." (Derrida 2006, 6)
In a word, the visor effect denotes a state in which the object of a gaze does not see the one who is looking at it. The essence of 'spectral asymmetry' is slowly becoming clearer. The addressee of the specter feels its gaze, and as a result of this being-seen they get the impression of discontinuity between the spaces in which they move and the space haunted by spectral entities.
We are getting closer to the temporal ruptures that Derrida anticipates by quoting from Hamlet and will come even closer through the second fundamental spectral characteristic, commissioning. Derrida's account of commissioning stems directly from his description of the visor effect when he writes that "[t]o feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law." (Derrida 2006, 7, my emphasis) It seems that the visor effect is the voucher for the ability of spectral addresses to experience the word of the specter as a law or an order. Derrida expands on this conclusion in the following passages:
"Since we do not see the one who sees us, and who makes the law, who delivers the injunction, (...) since we do not see the one who orders "swear", we cannot identify it in all certainty, we must fall back on its voice. The one who says "I am thy Fathers Spirit" can only be taken at his word. An essentially blind submission to his secret, to the secret of his origin: this is a first obedience to the injunction." (Derrida 2006, 7)
The commissioning property and the capacity of specters to deliver injunctions to their addressees seem to suggest that, along with an absent present, spectral entities possess a capacity to actively influence the world they haunt. Derrida embraces this notion, writing how "the thing works, whether it transforms or transforms itself, poses or decomposes itself: the spirit, the "spirit of the spirit" is work." (Derrida 2006, 9)
It seems that the specter's addressee is, to a certain extent at least, condemned to obey its command. Since they cannot establish a reciprocal relationship with it – one must not forget that Prince Hamlet unsuccessfully orders his father's ghost to speak three times before it willingly addresses him – the object of the spectral gaze and the addressee of its injunction has no choice but to expose himself to the specter's speech and commands. However, the question remains as to what the specter's commands are, as well as the problem of motivation. What do specters want from their addressees and how might the addressees come to know this?
We aim to illuminate this question by analyzing the final spectral characteristic, the relationship of mourning. Although it appears strange to postulate a relationship as a characteristic of a phenomenon partly defined by non-reciprocity, I nevertheless maintain it is necessary to better understand specters as a whole. One of the reasons why I hold this to be the case is the fact that Derrida's entire hauntological project has Sigmund Freud's writings on mourning and melancholia as one of its central sources.
As Freud writes in his text Mourning and Melancholia, "[m]ourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on." (Freud SE XIV, 243)" It is quite clear that prince Hamlet is marked by such emotions of loss, just as the audio-visual language of vaporwave is informed by the sensations of yearning and nostalgia.
However, we have only grazed the surface of Freud's work on mourning here. It is crucial to notice that he opposes the accepted association of mourning with passivity. Already in the first pages of the text Freud writes on the work of grieving, an active process of attempting to dismantle the libidinal connections with the lost object. As he writes, "[r]eality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object." (Freud SE XIV, 244)
In other words, mourning requires a reconfiguration of the libido. Again we are brought to Derrida's postulation of the activity of specters; by encouraging the work of mourning in their adressees, they attempt to mobilize them towards the reorganization of their self or ego. Nevertheless, the active work of mourning can easily turn into melancholic paralysis and passivity if the subject turns far away enough from their ego. Freud is very aware of this when he writes the following passages:
"This demand arouses understandable opposition – it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is beckoning to them. This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." (Freud SE XIV, 244)
As opposed to mourning, melancholia seems to be a pathological phenomenon, a kind of mutilation of the ego and its deformation due to the impossibility of establishing new libidinal connections. Later in the text Freud reiterates this claim, writing how in mourning "it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself." (Freud, 246)
This is precisely why Derrida holds the work of mourning to be the sole relationship within spectral encounters. Specters are the bearers of the call for the establishment of new relationships, the proclaimers of the command to break the connection with the lost object, and the initiators of the transformation of the addressee's self. Consequently, they transform the world which they do not and cannot inhabit in the empirical sense. The addressee's position, which seemed so dire and grim due to the inaccessibility of the spectral entities issuing orders to them, is now revealed as open, transformative, and active.
**This comprises the first section of the article; please proceed to the latter section. Also provided there is the bibliography for this article.
Source this post as:
Šućurović, B. (2024, March 21). (1/2) Specters in the Computer: A Hauntological Interpretation of Vaporwave. The Chiaroscuro. https://chiaroscuroreflections.blogspot.com/2024/03/12-specters-in-computer-hauntological.html
Personal links
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6419-9405
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E-mail: borna.sucurovic@gmail.com
Previous publications
“Making Oneself Known: Frantz Fanon’s Radical Phenomenology of Race” in Perspectives: UCD Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 10 (Winter 2023), Special Issue: Race, Gender and Identity (Dublin 2023), pg. 71–91 available on: https://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/t4media/Perspectives%20Vol%2010%20COMPLETE%20ISSUU.pdf
“The Work of Concepts: On the Metaphilosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari” (only in Croatian) in Nous: Svezak I, broj 1 (Zagreb 2023), pg. 21–37, available on: https://pdfhost.io/v/A5QlgwTzZ_Nous_svI_br1
“The Master–Slave Dialectic in the Context of Postcolonial Studies” (only in Croatian) in Povijest, revolucionarna dijalektika i filozofski sistem: Zbornik povodom 250. godišnjice rođenja Hegela (Zagreb 2023), pg. 226–242, available on: https://filoz.ffzg.unizg.hr/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/HEGEL-ZBORNIK.pdf
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