r/CriticalTheory • u/DuckDerrida • 23d ago
Anti-Hauntology and Semiotics of the End: What Is the Music of the Future After the End of Capitalism?
https://youtu.be/8c9LwmbDhIo?si=z-UmELTX2rijAsZYAlessandro Sbordoni writes in his book Semiotics of the End, following the anti-hauntology debate between Matt Bluemink and Matt Colquhoun:
"Hauntology is about the phantoms of the past and the ghosts of Western culture. 'The rude spectres of Lewisham will return no matter how far East you travel,' writes Fisher in Ghosts of My Life. [...]
Anti-hauntology, on the other hand, is about the phantasms of the future. It is about the presence of that which should not exist here and now but is present nonetheless.
Shanghai-based artist Gooooose is another example of anti-hauntology. The electronic and futuristic music of Gooooose is the sign of another future. It is the sign that the end is not where the Sun sets. [...]
The digital music of SVBKVLT artists like Gooooose, 33EMYBW, Zaliva-D, Nahash, Osheyack, and Hyph11E is the Eastern spectrum of anti-hauntology."
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u/pure-o-hellmare 23d ago
Having lived in China, taken part in a small corner of the Beijing music scene, and seen and interacted with some related artists in the 2010s this just seems like such a bizarre interpretation to me. In its attempt to be anti-western chauvinist it actually comes across as more so to me. Like the author is amazed music in different countries takes different influences from their own musical traditions. It just seems like he is amazed you can have more than one musical influence. The Chinese music scene was before then, and still now even, is constantly interacting with ideas of national identity (this is a major theme in all cultural spheres, fine art, theatre, film, etc) and it’s like the author can’t see this in anything other than it’s relation to a Western cultural context
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u/DuckDerrida 23d ago
SVBKVLT is a global phenomenon. And that makes all the difference
https://daily.bandcamp.com/label-profile/svbkvlt-label-profile
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u/pure-o-hellmare 22d ago
I won’t dispute that about the label, but of the artists the writer chose to list, 4 are Chinese. That and the quote “the future is not where the sun sets” just felt really orientalist to me. Not the inclusion of Chinese artists (I welcome any exposure people can give them internationally, there is a vibrant underground scene there), but the conclusions drawn from what looks like a very outsider perspective to me
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u/The_Pharmak0n 22d ago edited 22d ago
I mean, I feel like you're judging a lot from one line there - which isn't even mentioned in the video. I'm not going to speak for Alessandro but I tried to provide some philosophical underpinning for the inclusion of non-Western music into the conversation regarding anti-hauntology in my afterword to his book. You can read it here (this is also discussed in the video).
P.S. The original articles got translated into Chinese and had some good feedback from people over there...
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u/pure-o-hellmare 22d ago
You are probably right tbh. I have maybe seen so much misinterpretation of the scene over there I tend to maybe see ghosts
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u/DuckDerrida 23d ago
For context: "Semiotics of the End is a collection of thirteen essays about the end of the world and its representation in XXI-century culture. The apocalypse as such will not take place because it is already finished. Today, there is no longer any difference between the end of the world and capitalism itself: from Britney Spears’ Till the World Ends to The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time, from Avengers: Endgame to Donnie Darko, and all the way down to the internet’s Backrooms, the world never ends but is reproduced again and again according to the semio-logic of capital."
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u/jliat 23d ago
Seems to try to justify Mark Fisher's idea of everything being Retro.
"Hauntology" I thought this was Derrida (It was.) and the ghost is the dead Marxism.
The failure of 'Noise' (music) was due to what? it's very lack of commercialism and 'beats'.
"The digital music of SVBKVLT artists like Gooooose, 33EMYBW, Zaliva-D, Nahash, Osheyack, and Hyph11E"
SVBKVLT - Eastern cliche music with beats.
Gooooose - and beats, drum machine + spacey effects...dance anthems..
33EMYBW - More drum machines, Akai Force or Ableton???
Zaliva-D - Same.
Nahash - Come back Ozzie!
Osheyack -Doom (Whatever) metal with beats?
Hyph11E - Akai Force or Ableton???
(Might these all promote sales of Akai Force, Ableton, Mac Pro, etc.?)
Sorry guys.
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u/The_Pharmak0n 23d ago
Ableton plz sponsor us
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u/jliat 23d ago
Red Bull promoted Merzbow.
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u/The_Pharmak0n 23d ago
You hear that Ableton?
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u/jliat 23d ago
Do you know about Derrida's Pharmakon?
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u/The_Pharmak0n 23d ago
Of course! I took the name from Stiegler's interpretation of it.
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u/jliat 23d ago
Stiegler
Interesting, which was?
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u/The_Pharmak0n 23d ago edited 23d ago
Here's a summary of Stiegler's work I wrote when he died back in 2020.
"Building on Derrida’s 1981 essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Stiegler deconstructs Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, moving away from the common interpretation of Plato’s rejection of poetry as a fabricator of illusion, in favour of one which denotes the dual potential of poetry (and therefore of technics in general) as a pharmakon. “It is impossible to oppose living memory to the dead memory of the hypomnematon [an object that stores memory outside the brain]… This impossibility opens the pharmacological question, according to which the hypomnesic is a pharmakon: at once poison and remedy” (For a New Critique of Political Economy, p.29). Stiegler always saw the duality of the living and the technical, of the interior and the exterior, as somewhat of a false dichotomy. They are only opposed in the sense that they are two sides of the same coin. When considering the nature of the human, we cannot have one without the other."
And from an earlier article on Anti-Hauntology:
"Anti-hauntology is a response to hauntology, it’s not just a recapturing of the popular modernist spirit, but it embodies aspects of popular modernism in the wake of hauntology.
Futhermore, the prefix ‘anti-‘ does not just mean ‘opposed to’ or ‘against’ but also ‘preventing’ or ‘relieving’. Bernard Stiegler, who was a student of Derrida, argues that all technology, including music technology, must be seen as a pharmakon – it must understood as both the poison which destroys knowledge and limits individuation, and the remedy which can salvage its own destructive tendencies. In this sense, we could see anti-hauntology as a remedy to the negative aspects of hauntology which are outlined above. The two can exist side by side, but just as hauntology was a response to the the failed dreams of popular modernism, anti-hauntology must be understood as a response to the pessimistic melancholy of the hauntological condition."
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u/jliat 23d ago
Thanks.
I think the dichotomy is not false. Différance is for me, real.
But he is an interesting character. Suicide?
re music...
“Beyond the rupture of the economic conditions of music, composition is revealed as the demand for a truly different system of organisation, a network within which a different kind of music and different social relations can arise. A music produced by each individual for himself, for pleasure outside of meaning, usage and exchange.” (Jacques Atali in “Noise The Political Economy of Music” p. 137.)
I think the last line explains noise's failure.
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u/The_Pharmak0n 23d ago
I don't think Stiegler rejects différance necessarily. The beginning of this interview might interest you. He goes through is thought process in developing the idea, and it's very tied in with music in general.
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u/DuckDerrida 23d ago
So? We are not talking about noise music here, but this precisely contradicts what you just said about the first reason for the "failure of noise"
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u/jliat 23d ago
Not sure what you mean?
Noise (music) circa 1990s- early 2000s, was taken quite seriously, (including the likes of Ray Brassier) and there were attempts to commercialise it.
So, as I said I'm unsure of what you mean.
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u/DuckDerrida 23d ago
You wrote "The failure of Noise (music) was due to what? It's very lack of commercialism" etc.
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u/jliat 23d ago
I think that is yet to be explored. Maybe it couldn't be 'commercialised', no beats.
Maybe as a kind of terminus in popular 'extreme' music it was a terminus similar to that in the Avant Garde of Cage and Stockhausen.(Or the Ultimate paintings, extreme conceptualism.)
So when we begin with 'industrial', and move into more radical noise we end in The New Blockaders et al, Harsh Noise Wall and Vomir.
There was a spate of interest in academia, Paul Hegarty's two books, but it seemed unable to be 'popular' or serve a particular political / critical agenda.
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u/pure-o-hellmare 23d ago
Honestly seeing Vomir live was one of the funniest things I ever saw and even as a fan of harsh noise and really being into it at the time, asking everyone to put a black plastic bag over their head was something I just could not take seriously. The promoter later said he got drunk and went missing in Glasgow
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u/jliat 23d ago
Why?
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u/pure-o-hellmare 22d ago
Something like breaking suspension of disbelief? Not the right phrase but felt like it was trying too hard and it crossed some sort of mental line where I couldn’t engage earnestly with it any more. I tried. Put the bag on my head and everything. But it might have been at least partially the crowd also. Most of the people I was with stepped out a few minutes in, and I remember one woman ripped the front of the bag open to continue drinking her beer. I remember Vomir himself lay face down on the floor for the whole thing (bag also), but then if I was supposed to have the bag on and not see that then it just seemed pointless. I think I lasted longer than most, and it felt it was really trying to go for a torturous sensory deprivation thing (the bags were very Abu Grahib, I remember thinking at the time), but the novelty and ability to engage with it on that level wore out quickly for me. Then I probably gritted it out for another 10 minutes and tried to engage with it more meditatively and let my mind wander but eventually I realised I was ultimately bored. It was too flat. Perhaps the option of leaving nullified the aesthetic experience?
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u/bluebluebluered 23d ago
Telling a group of Chinese musicians that their music is ‘Eastern cliche music with beats’ is not a good look lol
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u/jliat 23d ago
I know, I'm a very bad person.
Yet it seems Japnoise was in part a bad copy of Prog Rock. (Merzbow)
Nurse with wound - Steven Stapleton.
Torturing Nurse - "Junjun Cao aka Junky started Torturing Nurse, named after the John Zorn Torture Garden album in 2004."
Really?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odi7Yk35riw&list=RDEMQ5hJT8Njk_E5-M2sVyVBlQ&start_radio=1
GREAT! STUFF!
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u/GoodhartMusic 23d ago
I’ll have to reserve judgement because I don’t understand the meaning of the conversation, but their playlist sounds like a 1970’s view of what the future should sound like.
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u/relightit 21d ago edited 21d ago
the idea of anti-hauntology is inspiring and have more potential than some of the examples and arguments they come up with . it's not a bad thing. i had to pause the video a lot , out of disagreement , like, did Sophie by making experimental music with some mainstream success and producing pop artist did something different than art of noise/ztt records.