Thinking beyond the oppositions of presence and non-presence, life and non-life, Derrida invoked a semantics of illusion (gespenst) to reimagine the actors of history in terms of the ghosts, phantoms and simulacra who inhabit the present without residing in it or, in other words, those who influence our world without ever actualising their own presence. While Francis Fukuyama was celebrating the defeat of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ at the hands of liberal democracy, Derrida insisted that such ideologies could continue to enact on the present as a spectral agency operating outside of traditional ontological boundaries, much like the ‘spectre of communism’ haunting Europe in the opening of The Communist Manifesto (1848). Jacques Derrida’s compounding of ‘haunting’ and ‘ontology’ was formulated as a response to the burgeoning presence of leftist ideology in Europe following the fall of Communism in 1989. An exploration of Burial’s music through a selection of its constituent samples highlights the intricate networks and structures present in sample-based electronic music, with ‘sonic hauntologies’ being only one of many possible conceptual lenses through which to discuss samples and their sonic exchanges. The work of British producer William Emmanuel Bevan (aka Burial), in particular, relies on a distinct use of sampling to conjure emotive and evocative-but most importantly, ghostly-associations with a confluence of underground dance music cultures including jungle, rave, drum ‘n’ bass, UK garage, 2-step, grime and dubstep, or what Simon Reynolds has broadly conceptualised as the ‘hardcore continuum’. However, these applications of hauntology can be extended to address how the act of sampling within electronic music creates and upholds what might be called ‘sonic hauntologies’: sounding relationships with historicised sound-worlds, cultures and media. Demos’s diagnosis of ‘colonial spectres’ present in contemporary art-its use in popular music discourse has remained firmly rooted to a specific ‘spatio-temporal imaginary’: Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. While the concept of hauntology has found currency across various domains of (sub)cultural theory-as in k-punk’s (Mark Fisher’s) psycho-historical reading/viewing of The Shining or T. The concept served as a useful critical tool in diagnosing the cultural stagnation brought about by late capitalism, symptoms of which included the imitation of ‘dead’ styles, the reuse of obsolete formats and technologies, and a reimagining of the past. In the mid-2000s a number of popular music critics began employing the term ‘hauntology’ in relation to a diverse collection of electronic music producers whose aesthetic was marked by a sense of nostalgia, melancholia, or the uncanny. Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |