A post by Borna Šućurović
**This is the latter part of the article; the former comes before.
Fisher's Intervention: Lost Futures and the Spectral Not Yet
Before we bring Derrida's hauntology in connection with vaporwave it is important to note two additional points, the first of which has to do with terminology. Throughout the French original of the Specters of Marx Derrida uses two 'names' for specters: la spectre and le revenant. While the former tries to express at once all of the properties explained in the previous chapter, the latter places particular emphasis on the reversible function of spectral existents. Le revenant – in both French and English languages – denotes a 'returning ghost', one who returns from somewhere. By using this name Derrida is attempting to show how specters return into temporal planes they do not belong to and within which certain forms of the work of mourning are already underway. As Merlin Coverley writes in the third chapter of his Hauntology;
"The ghost, the revenant, the spectre, these exist both inside and outside of time, both of and beyond history, and so to say we are haunted by Marx's ideas, or by history itself, is to suggest that neither can be said truly to have a beginning or "end", for 'a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back." (Coverley 2020, 281–2)
Coverley's emphasis on history is by no means accidental. It is at the core of another important aspect of hauntology that solicits our attention; the fact that Derrida's Specters of Marx emerges as a response to the supposed end of history espoused by authors such as Francis Fukuyama after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (Derrida 2006, 16). The specter of communism that haunts Europe, just like the ghost of King Hamlet, does not lose its activity and transformative potential due to the loss of its apparent presence. It remains in-visible, commanding "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!" (Marx and Engels 1969, 34) to all those who participate in the hopelessly melancholic existence of neoliberal capitalism marked by perennial crises and institutional violence.
Let us finally return to vaporwave. It does not appear difficult to connect numerous parts of Derrida's hauntology with the poetics of the genre. We have pointed out repeatedly that the poetic language of vaporwave is essentially characterized by feelings of nostalgia, longing, and melancholia. But is this melancholia – and the associated sensations – equivalent to the paralyzing mutilation of the ego that Freud describes? I would argue that this is not the case for two reasons.
Firstly, Freud's concept of melancholia – like most of his psychoanalytic work – is informed by his clinical practice and is therefore difficult to apply to individuals who stand outside the epistemological context of the clinic, which implies both the treatment and the disciplining of the hospitalized (Foucault 1988). Secondly, and more importantly for present purposes, melancholy is not only a process of ego mutilation but also a consequence of the failed work of mourning. As Mark Fisher writes in Ghosts of My Life;
"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." (Fisher 2014, 46–7)
Fisher's writings thus signal a critical distance from strict Freudianism when writing on melancholia. It seems that it is more appropriate to understand it as a link between the specter and its addressee. In Fisher melancholia seems to take on the meaning of a type of relationship established both by the addressee's inability to relieve the experiences they are longing for and by the ghostly command by which the specter compels them to the work of mourning. The work of mourning is thus given a new dimension in Fisher, becoming the substrate of the spectral encounter, the stratum of cultural artifacts that emerge from the relationship of melancholy.
But what exactly is vaporwave mourning for? What, in Freudian terms, is its lost object? Fisher believes that all hauntological music – from compositions by the likes of The Caretaker and Burial to the countless vaporwave compilations by authors known only through their Internet usernames – is the product of lost hopes and pining for a future heralded by the advent of electronic music. As he writes,
"In hauntological music there is an implicit acknowledgment 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." (Fisher 2014, 45)
The concept of capitalist realism is of critical importance here. Although the term has a narrower and more precise definition in Fisher (Fisher 2009), for present purposes it is sufficient to say that he uses it as a means of simultaneously signifying the influence of neoliberalism on the organization of market life as well as the influence of post-Fordist industrial production on the organization and perception of work and leisure time. Fisher's crucial point is that capitalist realism paralyzes cultural life, depriving it of all futural horizons. It does this through the transformation of two essential steps of the production process, consumption and production. As Fisher writes, explicitly influenced by Franco Berardi,
"(...) [T]he 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 (...) culture becomes de-eroticised. The art of seduction takes too much time, (...) [and] desperately short of time, energy and attention, we demand quick fixes." (Fisher 2014, 35)
Much of the same holds for production, on which Fisher writes the following:
"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." (Fisher 2014, 35–6)
In a word, the structural changes in the production process led to the utopian–anticipatory function of art being almost entirely erased and the imposition of a profit imperative onto it. However, we have seen that hauntological music resists this tendency. It refuses to submit to the horizons of capitalist realism and longs for the future anyway, but due to the structural inability for an image of the future to be formulated, it falls into melancholia over past images of the or content that calms the anxiety experienced in the present, as is the case with simpsonwave.
It would be easy to dismiss Fisher's thought as overly pessimistic and totalizing, and such a dismissal wouldn't be groundless. However, his concept of lost futures would be overlooked if one criticized his work too hastily. Namely, the name 'lost' can indeed signify something that can no longer be found or imagined, but it can also signify something that cannot yet be found. This distinction is at the core of what I hold to be Fisher's most valuable contribution to hauntology, the distinction between the no more and the not yet of hauntological time. As he writes, informed this time by Martin Hägglund,
"(...) [W]e 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)." (Fisher 2014, 41)
The fundamental task of hauntological theory and art in Fisher becomes the shift of perspective from the spectral no longer to the not yet. In the language of Derrida and Freud, its function is to direct the work of mourning towards the horizon of the future, to reconfigure the libido towards an unknown, unidentified X whose form we cannot anticipate, but which we refuse to give up. Vaporwave, it seems, is attempting to do just that. Bogged down by the used-up images of the past and the weight of lost futures, it nevertheless persists in its production of sensations that respond to consumer mania with hypnotic peace and wistful contemplation.
On Repetition: Will there Yet be a Future?
Fisher's additions to hauntology have proven invaluable not only for bringing to light the bi- directionality of the temporal discontinuity between the specter and its addressee but also for the detailed exposition of the social conditions that enable the work of mourning to begin. However, even though Fisher's faith in the emancipatory power of hauntological art is by no means tacit or hidden, his thought offers no prescriptive guidelines. We don't know exactly what kind of future we should be haunted by, and although Fisher speaks 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" (Fisher 2014, 52), the picture of a desirable future defined by novelty and progress remains to us obscure.
Nevertheless, it could be the case that a desirable future need not be necessarily linked to novelty and innovation. Perhaps this is also a symptom of capitalist realism woven into the mental life of the neoliberal subject. The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, especially his work Difference and Repetition, invites us to reconsider the discomfort and distaste we feel towards repetition and critically examine the unconditional affirmation of novelty and progress to which we have become so accustomed.
There exists a tendency to see repetition and difference as binarily opposite concepts. What is different is, of course, that which is not the same, and if something is repeated it seems to follow that it is the same as that which is being repeated. Deleuze protests against such understanding of repetition, arguing that it is in fact "the return of the differential genetic condition of real experience each time there is an individuation of a concrete entity." (Smith, Protevi, and Voss 2022) In a word, repetition creates difference. It is an active faculty by which entities can acquire differentiation precisely because it enables the re-establishment of their individuation.
Let us attempt to clarify using an example of the mass rite. When the congregation responds to the priest, it does so in a precisely prescribed manner with precisely prescribed words. This could lead one to the hasty conclusion that all masses are the same, which is by no means the case because no mass rite can be identical to another. Even if the rite always takes place at the same time and place with no participant absent – a tall order in its own right – there are other factors responsible for the rites being non-identical. The sermon, for example, is always different. The same priest may preach it, but the words he uses will certainly never be verbatim the ones he used on the previous occasion, with each inflection and accent at exactly the same place. Even though each mass rite follows the same order established by church etiquette, small disparities are always at work muddying up their supposed identity and endowing each one with a myriad of idiosyncrasies.
This non-identity, Deleuze maintains, is not the consequence of mere coincidence, but a reflection of the actual structure of reality. As he writes in Difference and Repetition:
"(...) [G]enerality belongs to the order of laws. However, law determines only the resemblance of the subjects ruled by it along with their equivalence to terms which it designates. Far from grounding repetition, law shows, rather, how repetition would remain impossible for pure subjects of the law – particulars. It condemns them to change. As an empty form of difference, an invariable form of variation, a law compels its subjects to illustrate it only at the cost of their own change." (Deleuze 1995, 2)
According to Deleuze, reality can be divided into laws – such as the laws of natural science and logic – and the exceptions to those laws. Each law has as its subjects pure particulars, separate self-differentiated components of compounds. However, since everything that exists in reality – from animal bodies to human societies – is already a complex made up of divisible components, the law is exposed as an empty generality doomed to be broken unless it compels the disparate singularities it governs to 'resemblance' and 'equivalence to terms which it designates'.
Furthermore, repetition can only take place within a framework of a generality. The congregation's answers to the priest cannot be repeated sans the congregation, the priest, or the context of the mass rite. The law as generality and conformity itself creates the condition within which repetition as the emergence of non-identity can occur.
What does this undoubtedly complex thought have to do with vaporwave and lost futures? The following quote offers insight into a possible answer;
"Hume takes as an example the repetition of cases of the type AB, AB, AB, A.... Each case or objective sequence AB is independent of the others. The repetition (...) changes nothing in the object or the state of affairs AB. On the other hand, a change is produced in the mind which contemplates: a difference, something new in the mind. Whenever A appears, I expect the appearance of B. (...) Does not the paradox of repetition lie in the fact that one can speak of repetition only by virtue of the change or difference that it introduces into the mind which contemplates it? By virtue of a difference that the mind draws from repetition?" (Deleuze 1995, 70)
Once again we see how repetition creates difference, but now it is also becoming clear how this happens within the process of cognition. Repetition creates associative connections and leads to inferences regarding the unfolding of certain events or states of affairs. Simply put, it enables the creation of the representations of objects within the perceiver as well as the development of a sense of expectation. Deleuze goes on to point out that, as a result of this conclusion, "[t]he past is then no longer the immediate past of retention but the reflexive past of representation, of reflected and reproduced particularity. Correlatively, the future also ceases to be the immediate future of anticipation to become the reflexive future of prediction, the reflected generality of the understanding." (Deleuze 1995, 71)
It appears that repetition, in the way Deleuze understands it, offers us a path that, inspired by Fisher, we might follow in hauntological conceptions of the future. If we understand the repetitions of experiences and phantasies emitted by vaporwave in this way, we become capable of seeing it as an attempt at orienting toward the prediction of a new future. With its need to reiterate the audio-visual identity of past decades, vaporwave seeks to make predictions and sensations fueled by the affects of those eras experienceable again.
The auditory distortions employed by the genre communicate the omnipresence of artificiality and the synthetic character of the experiences it attempts to make accessible, but the affects it aspires to create are anything but artificial. The authentic melancholy emanating from vaporwave is certainly a product of lost futures and temporal discontinuity, but what should be strived for in experiencing it is the establishment of new sets of affects and predictions, new strategies of imagining the future coupled with the paths towards achieving it. As Fisher writes;
"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 materialized. These spectres – the spectres of lost futures – reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world." (Fisher 2014, 53–4)
Conclusion
Secondly, the complexity of the aesthetic experience offered by vaporwave surpasses digital space. It is difficult to escape the impression that the compositions within this genre – no matter how hidden their authors are under various pseudonyms and usernames – are extremely intimate and personal. They communicate an affective state that affects not only the Internet – a means of the production of information and ideological content – but the entire structure of life within neoliberal capitalism.
Example of vaporwave-inspired digital artwork
Vaporwave is filled to the brim with specters. The melancholic nature of these ghosts may lead us to characterize it simply as a musical embodiment of nostalgia, but we have shown that it is much more than that. This half-existing genre communicates at once the utopian-anticipatory function of art as well as the structure of feeling within late capitalism. Most importantly, it shows that in addition to human subjects, there exists a myriad of spectral entities that haunt the history of world-time and that the worn-out, spent logic of capitalist realism is not the only one capable of determining the course of history.
Source this post as:
Šućurović, B. (2024, March 21). (2/2) Specters in the Computer: A Hauntological Interpretation of Vaporwave. The Chiaroscuro. https://chiaroscuroreflections.blogspot.com/2024/03/22-specters-in-computer-hauntological.html
Bio
I obtained my MA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. After this I was accepted into the Philosophy PhD program at University College Dublin (UCD), where I am currently based. In addition to my research, focusing primarily on contemporary French philosophy (Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze, etc.), I am also a member of the editorial board of Perspectives, UCD’s postgraduate philosophy journal.
In addition to academic work, I spent my time in Croatia playing drums for various local bands in Zagreb and engaging with the alternative music scene. While philosophical research is my primary focus at the moment, I am always actively seeking out opportunities to write about my other interests, such as music, video games and Internet culture. If any of your current or upcoming projects deal with these fields and welcome contributions from a philosophical point of view, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Personal links
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6419-9405
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ivo_drobic/
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
Bibliography
Coverley, Merlin. Hauntology: Ghosts of Future Past. 2020. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. 1995. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. 2006. New York/London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx: l'état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. 1993. Paris: Éditions Galilée.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? 2009. Winchester/Washington: Zero Books.
Fisher, Mark. 'The Slow Cancellation of the Future' in Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. 2014. Winchester/Washington: Zero Books.
Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia (1916) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916), London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Available on: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf- library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. 1988. New York: Vintage Books.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part 1, Science of Logic. 2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1969. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Available on: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/ Manifesto.pdf
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. 2003. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Smith, Daniel, John Protevi, Daniela Voss. Gilles Deleuze in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2022/entries/deleuze/>
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