Non-Time and Hauntology

[justdrew]

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

Does that mean you took my dare and watched it?

yeah it's worth seeing

[marycarnival]

As much shit as I talk about this movie, I do kinda love it...

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Vague abstract bullshit. Onanism.

We are REAL specific groups of people.
Abused by REAL specific groups of people, many in REAL military-industrial groups with NAMES.

Pull head out of ass and fight back.

[gnosticheresy_2]

Vague abstract bullshit. Onanism.

We are REAL specific groups of people.
Abused by REAL specific groups of people, many in REAL military-industrial groups with NAMES.

Pull head out of ass and fight back.

yes because culture doesn't exist outside the CIA's psy-ops department and even if it did we're forbidden to talk about it!

[crikkett]

Vague abstract bullshit. Onanism.

We are REAL specific groups of people.
Abused by REAL specific groups of people, many in REAL military-industrial groups with NAMES.

Pull head out of ass and fight back.

yes because culture doesn't exist outside the CIA's psy-ops department and even if it did we're forbidden to talk about it!

I still don't understand what this is about. Hauntology = kvetching?

[brainpanhandler]

Onanism.

You've been reading Harper's, haven't you?

[gnosticheresy_2]

Vague abstract bullshit. Onanism.

We are REAL specific groups of people.
Abused by REAL specific groups of people, many in REAL military-industrial groups with NAMES.

Pull head out of ass and fight back.

yes because culture doesn't exist outside the CIA's psy-ops department and even if it did we're forbidden to talk about it!

I still don't understand what this is about. Hauntology = kvetching?

From my point of view all this arose from discussions on some UK based mainly dance focussed music blogs and forums about 5 years ago, although the term "hauntology" (and the original concept) is from Derrida and from far earlier but basically was appropriated and used as a description and has now stuck and from the OP is now being applied to lots of different wider cultural bits and pieces.

The original discussions were around the explosion of rave culture in the UK in the early nineties and with it the acceleration of electronic music development. I mean literally it was like entire new genres of music were getting invented every few months at one point, but after a while the pace of innovation began to slow until eventually things slowed down or even stopped and what had seemed an unstoppable rush into "the future" turned into a walk, then a dawdle and then a nice sit down. Almost as though "the future" finally arrived because we caught up with it and because it's here and now there is no real "future" anymore to wonder about. All that's now left to do is look back with a sort of wistful nostalgia to the culture of the last 30 years, not innovating (cos "it's all been done") just taking bits and pieces of music genres from the past and rearranging them to try and squeeze some last sense of forward progression out of it all.

Fisher links the idea of a “missing future” with the disappearance of negativity and criticality in contemporary pop culture, which (as I interpret it) has no space for anything oppositional or which transforms oppositional gestures into postures that circulate only as signifiers of personal identity.

You can't dress to shock any more, you can't make any music so bad that it won't be ironically reabsorbed, regurgitated and sold back to you five minutes later.

It reminds me of Douglas Haddow’s “Hipsters are the dead-end of Western culture” argument:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

Burial gets mentioned a lot, he makes melancholy, downbeat electronic music that's like a tribute to his old memories of raving back in the day. Except:

I’ve never been to a festival. Never been to a rave in a field. Never been to a big warehouse, never been to an illegal party, just clubs and playing tunes indoors or whatever. I heard about it, dreamed about it.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/347/

He's too young to have been into all that, so it's he's nostalgic for a past he didn't have. A past where the future still meant something. Nostalgic for the future.

So looking out in a wider (musical) context...do you think there'll ever be another punk? What about another hip hop?

As everything changes rapidly around us, we as music fans in many ways still think we’re living in a Def Leppard world, where winning a Grammy means you’ve arrived, and going to No. 1 on the charts makes you a pop star. In reality, we live in a culture where the terms “mainstream” and “underground” have become virtually meaningless, as practically every song by every band ever is equally accessible, frequently at no cost, to anyone with an Internet connection and the interest to seek it out ... It’s clear that music rarely unites us under the banner of mass-accepted artists anymore; even in a concert audience, we’re all just a bunch of individuals, with little connecting us to one another beyond a shared interest in the artist onstage—one artist among hundreds on our abundantly stocked iPods. Sounds lonely, doesn’t it? Sometimes I yearn for the old world, the one I grew up in, a place where dinosaurs like Hysteria stomped around pop culture for months, if not years, leaving sizable impressions in the hearts of a generation, whether they liked it or not.

What Mark Fisher is doing is linking all this to wider

Neoliberalism/post-fordism/late capitalism

culture in general. This state of affairs is the logical outcome of our political/ economic system. Someone like Hugh might think if only we could break the stranglehold of the CIA on our media and let the truth about CD come out everything will be hunky dory. But the malaise goes much deeper than that. I just hope complete collapse isn't the way we get out of it.

tl:dr - western culture ate itself

[JackRiddler]

.

I invite everyone reading this to watch the following video. Bear with me, there is an important point to be made related to the subject of this thread.

First let's introduce the maker of the original film.

William Hollingsworth "Holly" Whyte (1917 - 12 January 1999) was an American urbanist, organizational analyst, journalist and people-watcher. Whyte was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1917 and died in New York City in 1999. An early graduate of St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware, he graduated from Princeton University and then served in Marine Corps. In 1946 he joined Fortune magazine. Whyte wrote a 1956 bestseller titled The Organization Man after Fortune Magazine sponsored him to do extensive interviews on the CEOs of corporations such as General Electric and Ford.

While working with the New York City Planning Commission in 1969, Whyte began to use direct observation to describe behavior in urban settings. With research assistants wielding still cameras, movie cameras, and notebooks, Whyte described the substance of urban public life in an objective and measurable way. These observations developed into the "Street Life Project", an ongoing study of pedestrian behavior and city dynamics, and eventually to Whyte's book called City: Rediscovering the Center (1988).

Not mentioned is that this work also resulted in a classic 1970s film study, "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces," which is not available on the Web and would cost you $200 to buy (as it's still used for university classes).

The linked 3-minute video is, appropriately given the present thread, a mash-up of key moments from Whyte's film.

Please watch it. You should spot one enormous change in the observable daily behavior of urban humans that has occurred since the original film was made. Prize goes to whoever posts first to make this totally obvious observation.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Qnkq6nIwA

[Canadian_watcher]

*
could it be the absence of my inanimate nemesis the cell phone ?

(still don't have one)

[JackRiddler]

*
could it be the absence of my inanimate nemesis the cell phone ?

(still don't have one)

Very close, related. Now link it to Prof. Whyte's primary observation.

.

[justdrew]

*
could it be the absence of my inanimate nemesis the cell phone ?

(still don't have one)

Very close, related. Now link it to Prof. Whyte's primary observation.

.

"people looking at other people"

has been replaced with people looking at their tiny screens?

[IanEye]

I spend a lot of time wandering around London, I always have. Sometimes it’s because I’ve got somewhere to go, sometimes it’s because I haven't got anywhere to go. So I’d be wandering endlessly, getting in places. Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people, you let it in, you’re more open to it. Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you. In London, there’s a kind of atmosphere that everyone knows about but if you talk about it, it just sort of disappears. London’s part of me, I'm proud of it but it can be dark, sometimes recently I don't even recognize it. - Burial

If I had my way I’d never cross the river. London’s weird, it’s home, but sometimes you’re walking along and it’s deserted. You can turn a corner and there’s no one. Sometimes you’re in a place where it’s not even designed for people: you’ll be standing in the middle of a fucking motorway and there’s not even a pavement, and then you get across and there’s a fence that you can’t get past. You’ll find yourself in a weird car park with no cars in it, where there’s no way out, nothing. It’s odd. - Burial

Vague abstract bullshit. Onanism.

what's the matter, Hugh? the topic of Hauntology not "spooky" enough for you?

perhaps these notes on the (art) activism of psychedelia better suit your mood.

[Canadian_watcher]

*
could it be the absence of my inanimate nemesis the cell phone ?

(still don't have one)

Very close, related. Now link it to Prof. Whyte's primary observation.

.

"people looking at other people"

has been replaced with people looking at their tiny screens?

Drives me right 'round the bend. I really can't describe how much I loathe what texting and cell phones in general have done to my experience of the world and the people in it.

[justdrew]

*
could it be the absence of my inanimate nemesis the cell phone ?

(still don't have one)

Very close, related. Now link it to Prof. Whyte's primary observation.

.

"people looking at other people"

has been replaced with people looking at their tiny screens?

Drives me right 'round the bend. I really can't describe how much I loathe what texting and cell phones in general have done to my experience of the world and the people in it.

yeah. I don't much care for it either. They're spending upwards of $500 on a good smartphone (or less on the crappy ones lot's of people have) and upwards of $100 a month or more for their phone/data plan. and when exactly is it that this is to be used? Sitting on the bus? but most people don't ride the bus. While driving? that would be crazy. At the office? You have a computer in front of you. At home? you have a laptop or computer there. I just don't see the need for it, and the cost is sufficient to buy something like 20 magazines a month with, if you really need causal reading; or bring a book. Jeez, it's such a waste of money and where that money goes is a joke... The carriers prices are OUTRAGEOUSLY inflated, unnecessarily high, CLEARLY they are all colluding because there is zero real price competition. I do think it's going to be recognized as the fad it is soon enough.

[JackRiddler]

*
could it be the absence of my inanimate nemesis the cell phone ?

(still don't have one)

Very close, related. Now link it to Prof. Whyte's primary observation.

.

"people looking at other people"

has been replaced with people looking at their tiny screens?

Joint winners.

I think it's a momentous and unprecedented shift.

.