Non-Time and Hauntology

[crikkett]

Please educate me, because I don't understand the premise behind "hauntology" at all.

The availability of everything means that particular works of pop music lose “symbolic efficiency” to use (and possibly misuse) a term from Žižek. Nothing successfully connotes the zeitgeist; everything invokes a desire to one-up with a better reference or a new meme or detournement of the contemporary. We are too knowing and skeptical to accept anything as unproblematically representative of the now.

I don't see how this stands true, when is other current threads we discussed the "anthem of UBL's death" (what is it, "Party in the USA"?) and Alice shared the music of the Egyptian uprising.

So music made now would not be at all disruptive, he argues, if someone living in 1979 heard it.

Team America's lyrics notwithstanding? Seriously, though, this is impossible to prove.

There would be no retroactive future shock. It doesn’t sound like the future; the future that should be occurring now has been thwarted, lost, effaced. The sense of cultural teleology is gone, vanished, perhaps, in the now pervasive relativism that regards all culture product as potentially valuable.

How the heck is someone supposed to know what the future sounds like?

IMO 'the future' of music for now, is remixes, if only because synthesizers and gigantic libraries of music have never been immediately available to everyone before, but largely because traditional music education is so undervalued that not as many kids know how to play "real" instruments, much less compose music.

But there must be something I'm missing.
edited to fix link

[brainpanhandler]

in nontime, one can feel transcendent and immortal, one can permanently defer adulthood.

Social media are where we go to protect our experience of nontime, which is threatened by the Real, by historicity, by death.

The world would be a different place if those of us living so well and securely that our own mortality is a distant abstraction became fully cognizant that we will die and maybe tomorrow.

A culture that could ask itself what non-time it was when all sense of teleology had vanished from it wouldn't be capable of fully recognizing its own mortality if it were already dead, I feel that it's axiomatically safe to say.

Speaking both literally and non-literally, yes. It took me a while to figure out the isomorphism of the phrase "wouldn't be capable of fully recognizing its own mortality if it were already dead" to "wouldn't be able to recognize the truth if it poked him in the eye", which is different than just saying if one is dead then all cognition has stopped, obviously.

Of course a culture can't ask itself anything, let alone what non-time it is.

Thanks for making this easier. You could have just asked me how the world would be different if we all recognized our own mortality.

Personal teleology is an illusion based on mistaking substantially chance events as somehow intentional and meaningful. Of course we are what we are now as a result of our personal experience, our history. But nothing that happened to make you who you are that was not of design need be considered anything other than the way things were. I mean I sure as hell don't know what I'm aiming for and my past has been a Huckelberry-finnian trip down the mississippi. There's a beginning, a middle and an end, and I'm gathering experience and insight along the way, but the itinerary was not very well known or planned in advance.

If, however, we consider what we are aiming for as a culture based on our trajectory to this point one could make the argument that we are seeking to transcend the bounds of the merely mortal at the same time that we seem intent on snuffing ourselves out. We cannot be very far away from producing an omniscient, immortal creature. A god of sorts, a superman. We were just here to help with the birthing process.

If time really is just the measure of material change then you might argue that immortality is the ultimate non-time.

However, by the same token, if all sense of teleology had really vanished from it, it wouldn't be asking.

By definition.

Cognition and mortality would be two parallel rather than two convergent lines if the presence of one didn't equate to the absence of the other.***

________________

*** I mean "as I see it." But that's axiomatic, right?

Yes, death and cognition are mutually exclusive, so far as we know.

Here's to muddying the waters even further. I'm such a grieviously flawed creature.

What was your point again?

[barracuda]

As a love of film, can you recommend some movies you feel perfectly embody the feeling or themes evoked in the above post and other posts?

That's a toughie. Although the critical community seems to consider the French New Wave to embody many of these aspects in film, I'd have to recommend the masterworks of Frank Tashlin for their demonstration of extreme cinematic self-reference: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and Artists and Models. Especially interesting when viewed in the light of Jacques Derrida.

[compared2what?]

What was your point again?

Your post spoke to me, but my response to it came out all soggy and emotional. So I deleted it and was just blankly sitting there being a failure when (much to my surprise) the tangled axiomatic formulation that I posted presented itself to me unbidden and copy-ready. One thing led to another, basically.

I did have a point, though. It just wasn't any place where you could have read it. Unless it was in the spaces in-between the words I posted instead of it, silently reproaching me. In the event that it still is, I guess I'd like to take this opportunity to tell it to quit wasting its time and yours. Because it's just going to have to go get in the same line as all my other misdeeds and fuck-ups sooner or later anyhow. Sorry. But first come, first served.

[justdrew]

the gearbox of culture does seem to be in neutral, I've long said (as in over the last 20 years), "there's been nothing new in over a generation" (I don't mean just music or culture. see my sig) - all we're getting is refinement. I think there's a term from music history to describe such periods, where the past is worked over, refined, remixed, etc... but new forms are not yet developed. (totally escapes me, it might start with an "r" anyone?)

here's a good place to start getting an idea on the meaning of the term,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology

here's someone else worth us all knowing about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_epistemology



c2w - I think the mass culture can be dead without members of it being dead; and since the mass culture doesn't think with a mind of it's own, us members can perceive things about it. Such as it's largely non-fecund state.

This whole idea goes back well before Derrida, one place, (I'm looking for the quote but it's going to take awhile to find) is in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, in I think book 2 maybe 3, there's a part describing one of the cultures as being devolved to a purely backward looking state, rewriting, ever new critiques, but no new books, etc.

as for movies representing in some way this vibe, ok... Heartbeeps

[Joe Hillshoist]

[compared2what?]

c2w - I think the mass culture can be dead without members of it being dead; and since the mass culture doesn't think with a mind of it's own, us members can perceive things about it. Such as it's largely non-fecund state.

I concur. I was mostly just having wordplay. The fecundity of the kind of massculture that's under consideration is and should be determined primarily by the kids, imo. And irrespective of that view's validity, I'm just not qualified to address it at this particular stage of the game. These aren't very fecund times for this culture overall, so it wouldn't surprise me if a general malaise was affecting massculture.

Beyond that, there's not all that much I could really say about that specific prong of the hypothesis that would be worth saying. FWIW, though, this certainly isn't the first time in my life I've heard or read pretty much the exact same argument being made. Because it's been coming up like clockwork about every ten years or so since before I was born. And if you counted loosely analogous claims too, you could make a pretty decent case for it being pretty much be as old as the first means of mass-produced culture. (I think. Um....That would be the printing-press, right?)

Despite which, imo, it's always right, always important, and (unfortunately) always as excruciatingly painful as really grief for a real loss inevitably is. Whatever rocking tomorrows lie still yet ahead will rise in part from the ashes of that, eventually, I don't doubt. But that's pretty cold comfort when they're not yet even a spark in anyone's eye, I do realize. If it's even that.

[8bitagent]

395,000 years BC--------------------------------industrial revolution---- sept 11th 2001 *end point* ------> the fog period

The bus stopped a while ago, yet we're still on it....and we're all on a greyhound heading toward Winnipeg

[justdrew]

[IanEye]

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Hauntology: the Past inside the Present



The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator

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[JackRiddler]

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The Matrix? More than 10 percent of all film history has passed since that was in the theaters.

The original Star Wars? Now closer in time to World War II than to this year's Egyptian revolution.

Talking Heads? Their debut album was 34 years ago.

(I do that compulsively, for some reason, which is not always a popularity booster.)

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[Canadian_watcher]

Joe! Yay! Nice to see you again!

I like "And She Was" as well.

[justdrew]

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The Matrix? More than 10 percent of all film history has passed since that was in the theaters.

The original Star Wars? Now closer in time to World War II than to this year's Egyptian revolution.

Talking Heads? Their debut album was 34 years ago.

(I do that compulsively, for some reason, which is not always a popularity booster.)

.

YEAH, BUT THAT'S THE POINT

(gawd damn, that really makes me think maybe it's about time to stow-away on a viking funeral barge)

[Joe Hillshoist]

Yeah what drew said.


(Hi C_W hows it going? Psycho Chicken is probably my fave talking heads song, but its not really them.)

[marycarnival]

as for movies representing in some way this vibe, ok... Heartbeeps

Does that mean you took my dare and watched it?