Non-Time and Hauntology

[kelley]

yes

[Luther Blissett]

Anyone want to start a Hauntology Museum of Art with me? I’m ready.

How would it work? What are your ideas? Also, good to see you.

Good to see you too.

Huge collection of photos of liminal spaces
Ghost signage salvaged from old signs and bricks
Brutalist architecture
Separate rooms for photos and illustrations and video re-enactments, one called “Encounters” and the other “Experiences”
Paintings from dreams and nightmares (perhaps curated selections of dream pop play in that room)
Photos and paintings of drive-in movie theaters
The psychedelic natural world
Pulp book covers
The crossroads
Out-of-context, single-panel excerpts of ancient comic books
Moonscapes
A wing on Late Stage Capitalism
Anachronisms
Americana

To start. Feel free to add.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Lana Del Ray music piped thru the place yeah?

[Luther Blissett]

Lana Del Ray music piped thru the place yeah?

I guess as long as we can press it to 78 and only play it from behind a distant wall in a large steel room.

[MacCruiskeen]

Abandoned Spaces: Gunkanjima ("Battleship Island"):



viewtopic.php?p=442135#p442135

Many other departed souls and occasional revenants left traces at that thread.

[MacCruiskeen]

Let It Go

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
........The more things happen to you the more you can't
................Tell or remember even what they were.

The contradictions cover such a range.
........The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
................You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.


-- William Empson

[Luther Blissett]

The portal in the pine barrens is active, and time reactive. Anyone with a mind to can open an active portal. What makes a portal time reactive is the connection made when the portal opener "gets through the splitscreen.”…

Wish I knew where this was.

[Luther Blissett]

Trends Used to Come Back Round Every 20 Years. Not Anymore.
Every style, every era, happening all at once. How did we get here, and at what cost?

By Hannah Ewens

December 14, 2022, 4:00am


For more end of year essays and analysis on VICE, check out 2022 in Review.

If you looked around today on any high street in Britain – or on social media – you might find it difficult to place which decade we’re in. The only clue would be that… it’s literally all happening. Every trend, every era, every reference is happening everywhere all at once. Colours, fabrics, cuts, themes, energy. We’ve been edging this way since 2020, but never has this been truer than in 2022, the first full and proper year out post-coronavirus lockdowns, the couple of years that altered our collective psyche.

Since the pandemic, microtrends have organically popped up on TikTok, with users describing grouped looks or aesthetics – bimbocore, Catholic chic – that might most accurately be described as “vibes” or “a mood”. Most of them exist for people to showcase specific fashion, interiors, films and behaviours that are matched together: the modern Pinterest board. There were enough of these mini-trends that we got fatigued enough by the media writing news blogs about them that we went “post-trendcore”, the media then declaring that the trends had gone too far and so had the blogs about them.

Elsewhere, fashion has drawn from every subculture under the sun (pop punk, alternative, indie, Y2K, goth, lolita). Music is no longer safely in the pop and hip-hop dominant era of the 2010s. To describe what’s going on today you could point to the aftermath of Machine Gun Kelly leading a pop punk revival. Or The 1975 doing a stripped back traditional Album album (11 tracks, a band in a room, each song recorded in only one or two takes). Or pop and rock artists like Rina Sawayama and Paramore referencing 00s British indie. Regardless, it’s disorientating and fragmented, while also providing – and I say this tentatively – refreshing space for every genre of music to thrive and every music fan to get what they want. To put it simply: What the hell is going on?

In his 2010 book Retromania, music critic Simon Reynolds described how contemporary pop culture in the 00s was “dominated by the re- prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes and re-enactments”, rather than the millennium “being the threshold to the future”. There has, he argues, “never been a society in human history so obsessed with the cultural artefacts of its own immediate past”. It’s strange to consider that in itself – why are we constantly revisiting the past in music, fashion and pop culture? How did we get trapped in a self-imposed time capsule machine? Whatever the answer, the pace of the nostalgia trip has gotten so fast its tripping over itself.

Previously, the 20-year cycle meant that pop culture trends came and went every 20 years. It needed to be that long: Any shorter and a trend would just be naff, corny or passé, rather than retro, inherently nostalgic and cool. That rule has rapidly been made obsolete. Now it’s more like five, 10 years. It’s not a reach to say that currently most decades are being referenced most of the time. How else did we reach a year in which pop punk, cowboy boots, sweatpants, diamanté jewellery, Regency-inspired outfits and drill music co-existed?

It feels as though two things are happening: These trends are disorientating and everywhere. Within this miasma of ideas and references, micro-trends are also coming in and out. The traditional life cycle of a fashion trend consists of five stages: introduction, rise, peak, decline and obsolescence. Where even a few years ago, a trend would last for a year or two, this whole cycle currently runs through from start to finish in months or even weeks.

It makes sense that this is happening now. The 00s babies are reaching adulthood and have only lived in this new retro-world Reynolds describes. They never experienced the 90s pop mania or the 80s or the 70s with all its uniqueness and difference. This melting pot of culture is all Gen Z have known and the amount of time they spend online with all of culture history a click or scroll away has flattened time – our entire past is there to be accessed and referenced.

This instant accessibility means that each trend is divorced from much of its original context. Regency-core fashion items don’t have anything to do with going to the opera, having a manor house or living without technology. Wearing alt-adjacent clothing doesn’t automatically mean you are into rock music, play guitar and skateboard. They’re sort of empty signifiers devoid of their fuller past meaning.

There are so many of these trends that it’s hard to tell which are actually real. Take indie sleaze, for example. If all was to be believed a year ago, this would be the year in which indie would take over again by way of Gen Z. Articles in Vogue, the Guardian and GQ proclaimed that girls would be swanning around looking like Kate Moss, white boys in bands would be the height of relevancy once more, skinny jeans would be an acceptable daily form of suffering and we’d all be taking high-flash photography on our nights out. This never happened.

Where 00s indie was somewhat revived was through the creations of millennials: the aforementioned Paramore and Rina Sawayama, both artists who lived through that era and wanted to pay homage to it. In April this year, i-D ran a piece headlined “Fashion has reached peak trendcore and we’re all tired”. Though it’s critical of how important these trends actually are, the writer ends on a positive note, suggesting that: “What this actually speaks to is a fascinating amalgamation of aesthetics that is blurring the lines of set style guidelines and expectations, which shouldn’t be taken too seriously. And while some folks might take offence at their precious subcultural symbols being co-opted by people outside of their cliques, most people truly don’t care.” It’s true that most don’t genuinely don’t: It’s washing over us like the wave of references it is.

The dark side of the trend cycle being shortened is that it’s inarguably happening, at least in part, because of fast fashion. Though we know of its devastating environmental impact, we are still buying cheap garments online. Instead of fashion being dominated by a couple of seasons and collections a year, companies push new clothes all year around and fuel our obsession with faster and faster micro-trends. As we’ve seen this year, as soon as something is coined on TikTok, it’ll be available to buy online.

What does all of this say about us? It’s reflective, of course, of the real information age. The fact we spent two years inside stuck to our screens. At the risk of being Charlie Brooker about it, it speaks to the lack of meaning and nihilism inherent in our lives now. We’re knowingly entering the final and irreversible stages of climate change and the end of the world feels imminent – that is the stage for this pop culture mess. We’re running through the greatest hits or Top 100 of the past few hundred years. It’s hard to make anything entirely different when we can’t imagine what the world might look like in five, ten years. Why, when we can just revisit specific and vibrant and weird and nostalgic times, would we even make anything new?

@hannahrosewens

[Harvey]

Suggests a yearning for something old, perhaps timeless.

[Luther Blissett]

I should note that I used to not believe the thesis that culture is slowing (what was that other thread called? I think 82_28 might have started it) based on direct observations of weirder youth subcultures that I am not a part of, but the piece above makes a pretty good point. The demographic that always drives subculture does not know pre-internet time, a time before indirect access to all subcultural history. Makes sense that the subcultures they create reference all things from all time.

Let me just say my attempt to narrow down my list of favorite music released this year to just 50 songs is incredibly difficult.

[JackRiddler]

That's not up to the generation driving change. That's the development of the society they find themselves in. Always has been. Context. First of all, late baroque can last a long time, and that's not the fault of the young who find themselves in it. Culture has been smashed, bled of money for creators (was never so great in the first place), balkanized on the ground, centralized into corporate IP monopolies at the top, and transformed into an often repressive statist-capitalist panopticon, all at once. Accelerated, but forced into faster repetitions as each new platform/technology runs through ever shorter cycles into obsolescence and replacement.

[semper occultus]

its got a fair amount to do with demographics when you consider you need a certain number of charged particles all bouncing off each other to create the fast-moving cultural fission you saw in the 60-80's

[JackRiddler]

semper:

It's a point, but the absolute number of people under 25 is higher than in 1968. So the difference would be a matter of lower proportion and thus relative weight in the culture.

Another difference is in the ways that youth culture is more fragmented than ever, a collection of subculture tribes. Of course most of these tribes are no longer really tribes, but stable only for shorter and shorter periods. Really atomization is reaching a kind of end or threshold stage: everyone alone with their phone, and none more so than those in the teens and 20s.

It's also in the upbringing, increasingly standardized in its forms (not as much in its "contents") by the means of wraparound media technology to which the young now have been exposed from birth, even as their parents have adopted the same bubble for themselves. The young don't know anything else.

And it's also in the breakdown in all old forms of community and public, and their replacement, not by liberation and autonomy, but by zombie or avatar forms, now mainly online (this has really long roots and stages though). Again, simulated temporary unstable "tribes".

Add the generalized inchoate anxiety-precarity, the helplessness and sense of unknown disaster coming (do I have to argue for this emotional tendency as getting near to a universal?).

Is it true also that the culture is oriented to ever-older people who hold increasingly concentrated wealth and who live so damn long, and therefore endlessly repeating what they like, albeit as the "content" within the new tech forms? Yes. Has the society, culture and politics ever been more aggressively gerontocratic?

Is it also true that the motor of repetition is increasingly an automated remix run by search engines that swallow, sort and reprocess all forms of culture ever created and digitized? (These were recently renamed "AI," by the way, and I'm not trivializing that the term also signifies further thresholds being crossed.)

Is it not also true that what Guy Debord termed the Spectacle in 1968 paradoxically remains a central factor, bigger than ever and much more homogenous on a global level. Same stars, same gossip, same product and movie roll-outs, same briefly considered tragedies, same bullshit stories and tropes are put out simultaneously everywhere to an extent hitherto unknown. We are covered with a meme-being now millions of square miles in area and an inch shallow, but STICKY.

All this is true to varying degrees, I would say, paradoxically and with a lot of tensions between the factors. Weird times. Fast times. Today I caught myself being nostalgic for the long bygone era of... Twenty Fucking Fifteen. Not the Seventies (usual default for nostalgia, for obvious reasons with people at roughly the age of RI members) but 2-0-1-5!

*

By the way, tangential, these demographics tell us that there is going to be skyrocketing "excess death" in the developed countries in the next decade unrelated to any factor other than that (to lift a TIME cliche) death, as it must come to all, comes to each.

Which is not at all to deny other forms of excess death, but the peak baby boom year (1948) is hitting 75 and gross population-wide numbers from this point will say very little without age correction and breakdowns.

[kelley]

happy new year RI

thanks to Jack for bumping this thread

and a shout out to Luther re: the role of trends

this essay at The Cut argues less for hauntology than the rise of a Dark Age dating to 2017:


https://www.thecut.com/2022/12/state-of ... 1537880973


and therein is mentioned Ventakesh Rao's Ribbonfarm which is very, very interesting given these topics at hand:


https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/08/04/a-dreaming-world/


"premium mediocre" is a concept which definitely needs more eyeballs on it

best wishes readers

my resolution is to be a better contributor here in 2023

ahahahaha

super

[kelley]

When I recall reading Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" sometime around 2010, it also brings back to mind the writing of Franco Berardi. Bifo's precariat was an amorphous class of stragglers beached on distant shores when the New Economy ship sailed. The concept wasn't quite a metaphor, as these were real people with real problems, but Bifo tended toward a rapturous abstraction which Fisher usually ignored in his blunt analyses. Nonetheless, at the time, their respective socioeconomic pictures felt unfinished, or incomplete.

Venkatesh Rao paints an incredible work in this essay:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/t ... illennial/

While his prose may at moments seem glib, it is deeply incisive, and based in observation of realities which evaded Fisher and Berardi, partially because Rao has the advantage of writing from a different temporal perspective. While his comprehensive rendering of the "premium mediocre" puts a subtle gloss on how ghastly the world has become, Rao is direct in his pronouncements without becoming sanctimonious or condescending. What's shocking, I suppose, is this: Rao writes with true compassion. His essential kindness shines in this piece.

While the essay comes after the Orange Revolution of 2005 and before the 2022 war in Ukraine-- with that conflict acting not so much as a dealbreaker, but as the global substrate upon which anything truly new will either learn to walk, or be buried beneath-- Rao's writing offers a glimmer of potential in how it understands complexity, and communicates clear ideas about a confusing world. I mean, it is in its way rather encouraging, in that it's the heir of Fisher's realism and Berardi's abstraction.