A "nostalgia for lost futures"

👻 Hauntology. Dreaming of a future which would feel and sound like some era from the past?

‘Hauntology’ (a wordplay between haunted and ontology). An ‘other worldly’ condition central to what Jacques Derrida articulated as the emerging future. The word itself pointing to a “ghost” or spirit embedded within dominant culture, within machines, which steps out in his seminal book Specters of Marx (1993).

Hauntology refers to an age of temporality, which has “ontological disjunction embedded into the system”. The apparent presence of ‘being’ is replaced by a broken “non-origin”. Our view of reality replaced by "the figure of the ghost, which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive." Living in the past? Dreaming of a future which would feel and sound like some era in the past? Yet a past that you and I were never a part of. “The vision of the future, in our age is experienced as a haunting: as a ‘virtuality’ that impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating most cultural production.” (Mark Fisher, K-Punk Blog)

The book is mostly forgotten, yet Derrida’s Hauntology can be felt across spaces, heard across popular music, within digital animation, AI, video games, advertising, Hollywood etc. The ‘temporal disjunction’ leads to a yearning, a throw-back in time. A"nostalgia for lost futures” (inspired from Time Is Out Of Joints, Philip K Dick).

Well past it’s apex, mid-2000 electronic music from Europe and North America would veer towards a 'retro-futurist' mode and market that did not exist earlier. The “nostalgia for lost futures” would play into the sound, it’s corresponding technology and a wide range of interfaces. Inexpensive software and hardware steadily proliferated across the world (1990-2005) touched upon in greater numbers by a new generation of artists, bands, producers and DJs. 20 years on, we are playing instruments and applying processes that emulate the past. We are wiring sound like the pioneers of the past. Thousand of music producers revere something called “vintage warmth”. Thousands more desire a sonic “purity” that existed in the 60s and 70s. We make up genres (sometimes bogus) based on tides which crashed long ago in the 80s, 70s, 60s. Modelling and emulating the past, almost like an imposed spirit, yet invisible within hardware and software.

Synthwave also referred as outrun, retrowave, vaporwave and futuresynth is a successive outcome of past music genres (before 1990s). The aesthetics inspired, re-arranged, re-sampled from 60s 70s Sci-Fi film soundtracks, late night BBC shows, video games and 80s ‘new wave’ music. 2002-2004, Synthwave compositions were audible within niche communities on the internet, initially steered by artists like David Grellier (College), Kavinsky, Com Truise and Laserhawk. Synthwave music is like a transition to the past emulated via futurist technology, very vehicular, white, male, while being characteristic to chasing the “ghost” in Hauntology. Throw back to Derrida, making sense of the experience as: "we envision the future with a given idea (real or false) from the past, plucked from historic transients of culture, consequently referring to the present as an outcome, a product of the two forces."

Audio and visual technology followed suite to effectively provide ever new goodies to this emerging market (2000-2010). The identity based on sound was replaced by wired cultural logic. In that aspect, Synthwave is sustained by two opposites. One trying to revive the past, while the other projecting an image and sound which is supposed to be futuristic. The genre is perhaps an extension of “retro-futurism” defined as a “desire” to blend the modern with the nostalgic and spiritual. Earlier breakthrough in electronic music, such as Techno, Acid House, Drum & Bass etc also contained elements of retro-futurism, however made with simpler machines and less processing power, convinced that newness was infinitely available. Was it infinite?

Derrida’s Hauntology as a theory did not claim that culture would loose the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Yet the idea presents us with the landscape upon which the concept of ‘futuristic’ music increasingly appears like a hoax, similar to other unrequited dreams of late capitalism. But, nostalgia plays up today, not so differently as it did in the 80s for a generation haunted by the music of a bygone era (The Caretaker - Everywhere At The End Of Time. Stages 1-6). Or the millennials who relive their brand of nostalgia, as outlined by Mark Fisher in 2011: “haunted by that which no longer exists, and by that which may never manifest outside one’s imagination”. Fisher was referring to an abandonment he witnessed, documenting the exhausted status of electronic music in London (2005).

Insisting upon the “ghostly presence” of earlier movements fragmented inside “haunted landscapes that contain audible remains of the past in indivisible ways…” Truly felt with the lights dimmed out, listening to Burial’s ‘Untrue’ (2007). Sound of an old, rotten, wounded mega-city “populated by ecstasy casualties on day release from psychiatric units”. Mark Fisher committed suicide, at home in Felixstowe on 13 January 2017 age 48, shortly before the publication of his book The Weird and the Eerie.

Figures capable of exhibiting and expressing a yearning for the past, a missing sense of belonging, can seamlessly work their way into modernist, futurist, doomer and dystopian imagination. Check out for instance, Umami And The Interface. A home-grown animation / music project. A post-doom world, hopelessly nostalgic, trapped within metaphors, starring mutant self-serving protagonists. The artist provides the entire package, in terms of content, animation, music and online tutorials. In his critically acclaimed book, Ghosts Of My Life, Fisher outlines the above output and state as “anticipated futures predicated within late capitalism.. economies of doom, cyberspace time fantasy, perversion, propaganda directed at shaping our experiences and what feeds into public imagination…”.

Predating Derrida’s theory, in “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977-78) provide the groundwork to understand that “artistic tendencies and anomalies” can be captured and capitalized, by emerging technology and mass media. Based on that history, Delueze and Guattari proposed that society can be confined into a permanent state, almost like a “dream of a tranquilized and conflict-free existence…” based on images, video, sound, animation etc, distributed continuously by enormous mass media networks. All this was before anyone could foresee the internet.

Contrary to the propaganda of mainstream futurism, electronic music no longer offers the escape it once did, from formal nostalgia, nor is currently able to conjure future prototypes. The apparent presence of ‘being’ is replaced by a broken “non-origin”. But the market is flooded with thousands of synthesizers, real or virtual, retro-fit sample libraries, cheap codified emulations of 70s and 80s mixing desks, compressors, delays, echoes and reverb washed up from the past. Pastiche, acquisition and repetition? “The no longer and the not yet” coexist, in the fascination with television, vinyl records, audiotape, lo-fi and with the sounds of these technologies in decay. Defined as “materialized memory” (by Fredric Jameson) is perhaps the presence of hauntology within genres of electronic music, especially audible post 2000.

A deflation of expectations? Or have we given up on the spirit, of amazing inventions, accidents and breakthrough moments of 20th century electronic music? For almost a decade now, the fetish for the ‘analog and retro’ has amplified globally, almost as a regime. Where can we hear the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk or Prodigy? Nowhere as of now. Instead, we are told to pick up affordable clones of the once legendary 808, 909, 101, 303 machines or a range of boutique synthesizers containing vintage circuits or even a staggering range of software synths still emulating aesthetics of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Is technology copied ad-infinitum detrimental to newness and breakthrough? With such abundance, the element of future shock itself disappeared 👻 “Taking the audio from the Rave to the grave, if you like”

Jean Baudrillard nor Jacques Derrida, both of whom envisioned and theorized the"nostalgia for lost futures" would live to see the full effects of, and I should say the full effects so far. Derrida's theory of Hauntology stretches into a subconscious level as well. Many times, while we are listening to music.

Imagine hearing a melody that you can recall instantly. If we were to just hear one (any) note of the melody, we would be unable to juxtapose or recall the melody in it's entirety. Only one of the notes is fully present. The only way to make sense of the melody in it’s complete form is to ‘negotiate’ the notes from the past with the forthcoming notes. Like one word leading to the next. A very curious process occurs inside our mind, constantly assimilating the present note, with the notes that have passed and the one's yet to come. Hence a melody, however simple or complex, slow or fast, is linear and guided by a spirit 👻 that is blending the past, present and future.