Heavy Friends
Saturday July 15th, 2023 with Heavy Ben
Hauntology: nostalgia for a future that never came to pass

There’s a real joy in submerging yourself in nostalgic bliss. Who cares if it's your nostalgia or not? "Hauntology" is originally a philosophical concept, a portmanteau of the terms "haunt" and "ontology" coined by Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (born on this date in 1930) as a representation of "the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive", in reference to Karl Marx's influence. Hauntology as a musical genre designator took hold in the early 2000s, elucidated by British journalists Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher. It relies on the intersections of memories and how we are haunted by the past – a past that anticipated a future that never occurred. Fisher suggests that the artists that fall under the umbrella of hauntology are “haunted by a paradoxical nostalgia”. The musical ecosystem that bloomed from this concept became the sonic representation of a haunted past in a hopeless future. Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial déjà vu, where you are duped into thinking that what you are hearing has its origin somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s: not false, but simulated, memory. The spectres in Ghost Box’s hauntology are the lost contexts which, we imagine, must have prompted the sounds we are hearing: forgotten programmes, uncommissioned series, pilots that were never followed-up. At a time of political reaction and restoration, when cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards, when "power operates predictively as much as retrospectively", one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond postmodernity's terminal time. When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology_(music) Mark Fisher - Ghosts of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures https://tinyurl.com/yvrz6bdn Mark Fisher - The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology https://tinyurl.com/2v5azr3f Andrew Gallix (The Guardian) - Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation https://tinyurl.com/432x9735 Spencer Slayton (UCLA) - Cultural Ghosts: Hauntology and The Caretaker https://tinyurl.com/ypw2azmf (to embiggen the show icon, right-click and choose "Open image in new tab")