Congratulations are in order for Matt Bluemink, who has recently published a new book, The Future is Not Lost: On Music, Technology & the Creation of New Worlds. Thanks are in order too; Bluemink is kind enough to note how the book partly grew out of a conversation he and I had way back in 2021, and he engages with my work at length throughout.
Back in 2021, Bluemink and I came into contact after he suggested that an artist like SOPHIE, who had then recently passed away, was a representative of a kind of “anti-hauntology“, as a retort to Mark Fisher’s enduring writings on the slow cancellation of the future. But for me, “anti-hauntology” was just another word for “accelerationism”, and it allowed me to go back to my favourite bugbear about how most contemporary critics are still lagging behind where Fisher was at in the 2010s.
It was actually a nice disagreement to have; a cordial and productive one — a very rare thing online, even more so now than then. Frankly, it seems clear that neither of us has ever stopped thinking about all of the ideas that came out of that conversation. In fact, as I told Bluemink recently, when he offered to send me a copy of the book, our 2021 conversation was the unsuspecting catalyst that led me to meet my partner Juno, who wrote their own response to it in 2024, which first got us talking.
Suffice it to say, I owe a great deal to that conversation, but what’s most interesting right now, in reading Bluemink’s new exploration of some of these shared ideas, is that I can still see the same contradictions at work within it, which triggered our blogospheric back-and-forth last time. In fact, it is a contradiction that is all the more heightened in Bluemink’s new book. It has to do with the work of mourning.
What I never really understood about Bluemink’s argument is how an artist like SOPHIE could be held up as an antidote to “hauntology”, especially after her death. “In order to truly break free of the constraints of hauntology we must look at SOPHIE as changing the rules of the game from within”, he writes in the new book, referring to the ‘game’ of our retromanic pop-industrial complex perhaps. But if that is the aim, then how come Bluemink’s relationship to SOPHIE remains so achingly mournful?
“If it hadn’t been for her tragic death, who is to say that she may not have become the next Madonna?” Bluemink asks. (Perish the thought!) “Or rather something else entirely: a totally new kind of pop culture icon? In some ways, she already has.” And I’d agree, but this totemising of SOPHIE, to my mind, remains the most hauntological approach we could possibly take towards the pop she left behind. Far from signifying a shift away from Fisher’s sense of the hauntological, Bluemink’s deferrals to SOPHIE epitomise it for me.
That’s not to say that Bluemink is starting from a dead end, however. He’s not. The point is that neither was Fisher. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any of this, but the lack of self-awareness is often telling. Fisher becomes a strawman and the distinctions that Bluemink attempts to make between Fisher’s thought and his own feel largely superficial to me.
What I think this highlights is the entanglement of hauntology and accelerationism that I tried to make the case for back in 2021. We’re five years on from that moment, of course, and my thinking has both changed and deepened since then. To be honest, I reckon I’ve got a book in me about all of this as well. This post is bordering on turning into one… It’s a proper ramble, of the sort I haven’t undertaken in quite a long time… So buckle the fuck up, I suppose.
Postmodernism versus Hauntology
Critics of Mark Fisher still don’t really understand the context that “hauntology” emerged from. I tried to rectify this in the introduction to the reissue of Ghosts of My Life from 2022. I wrote about this last year as well, after reading Liam Inscoe-Jones’ similarly poptimistic Songs in the Key of MP3, and again in issue #500 of The Wire.
I thought these essays were clear enough, but they were still misread, or perhaps they haven’t been read that widely at all. To be honest, I feel like people just can’t let go of the caricature of Fisher that haunts cultural criticism to this day. He’s too useful as a scapegoat and strawman. It’s regrettable.
Ultimately, to reduce Fisher’s argument to simply being the “pessimistic” idea that contemporary culture constantly reiterates the past is woefully inaccurate, but it is nonetheless the popular understanding that has stuck and is now trotted out constantly. It unfortunately makes an appearance in Bluemink’s new book as well.
What was Fisher’s position, which no one seems to acknowledge? He was fated to constantly repeat it, as am I. He insisted in 2010 that his work
isn’t pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life – it is what Zizek would call the “spontaneous unreflective ideology” of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity).
Fisher’s position is therefore more nuanced than he is given credit for. I have previously compared it to the “salvagepunk” modality of Evan Calder Williams and China Miéville, for example, which I think is a better way of framing the hauntology/accelerationism couplet. Fisher continues:
The terrain – the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects – is there to be fought over. And I believe that it can be seized by those who have been most deeply cooked in neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, not the French immobilisers, the nostaglic 68ers, the hay bale agragrians, or anyone else resigned to playing Canute to the rising tide of Capital. We can only win if we reclaim modernization.
This was Fisher’s position, and it is one reflected in the work of someone like SOPHIE. She too sought a (trans) reclamation of modernity. Fisher’s argument, then, wasn’t that there’s nothing new under the sun. Nor did he think the past should be off limits to us. Rather, what he thought was that we have been largely subordinated to a spectacle that is reiterative. Not wholesale; not entirely. But this is a major component of contemporary capitalist hegemony. AI is obviously exacerbating this right now especially. But that’s not hauntology! On the contrary, that’s postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, as Fredric Jameson referred to it. Against this, what we need to do is take the past and make it new!
Fisher’s infamous example of how not to ‘make it new’ was the Arctic Monkeys’ “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”, where what was weird about the past — an episode of the Old Grey Whistle Test, in the Monkeys’ example — is made familiar through nostalgia and so exists within the present without producing any sort of tension with it.
That lack of tension between past and present was a core element of postmodernity for Jameson and Baudrillard. Hauntology, for Fisher, was something else. “Postmodernism is, of course, the dead end from which hauntology starts”, he wrote in 2008, “but one of its role[s] is to denaturalise what postmodernism has taken for granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the sense of a sickness.” Hauntology was an antidote — we will return to this suggestion later.
More specifically, in the context of mid-00s music cultures, hauntology referred to a swell of invention and innovation that wasn’t simply the return of or a return to the past, but rather a name for a particular socio-technological moment that was inadvertently inventing new ways to inhabit the past and also inventing new pasts to inhabit. This wasn’t altogether intentional. It was a quality of a specific post-Y2K moment; a sort of cybergothic tendency (digital ghosts) noticed by a network of writers, who found that the Internet was changing our relationship to the past and thus unsettling a neoliberal sense of (end-of-)historicity.
Just as popular culture — particularly the terrible ‘indie’ cultures in orbit of 2005 — demonstrated a moribund postmodernism that lacked futureshock and innovation, this was coupled with the observation that new technologies were making our relationship to the past newly participative as well. What disappointed Fisher wasn’t that no one was engaging in new modes of cultural participation, undermining subordination to the Spectacle, but rather that it has been left only to an avant-garde that did not have the same sort of impact on popular culture that he had become accustomed to as a member of the post-punk generation.
There were exceptions — there always are. In fact, Burial was one! His 2007 album Untrue was nominated for the following year’s Mercury Prize, after all. My first contact with Burial was on 2008’s official Mercury Prize compilation, and it massively stood out alongside the likes of The Last Shadow Puppets, Laura Marling, Elbow, even Radiohead.
As a cross-section of the year’s “best” British music, a lot of the tracks are notably mournful. “These are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you”, Laura Marling sings on “Ghosts”. “You can’t take it with you”, sings Thom Yorke on Radiohead’s “Reckoner”. “There’s a hole in my neighbourhood / Down which of late I cannot help but fall”, sings Guy Garvey on Elbow’s “Grounds for Divorce”, from their album The Seldom Seen Kid, which would ultimately win that year’s top prize.
There was something in the air; something in the water. But Burial’s “Ghost Hardware” hit different amongst this showcase of bittersweetness. An interesting choice to include — “Archangel” is the track from Untrue that has since become ubiquitous — it felt like a commentary on the compilation itself. It features a vocal sample from Andy C talking about the Metalheadz label: “That record, that record, this mix / You know, it all clicks together“. So did most of the tracks on the Mercury Prize comp, and Burial seemed to be the only one to see that coalescence, which he took a scalpel to.
The mournful qualities of “Ghost Hardware” thus functioned as a sort of black mirror set against all these other tracks, synthesising their collective atmosphere and turning it in on itself. It was the only track that actually connected to a past since eclipsed and thus shone a light on why these wistful songs were having such a moment. Indeed, “Ghost Hardware” took all these feelings and newly located them in a post-rave material context, whereas everyone else seemed oddly cleft from whatever had come before, showing instead how the ghosts and holes weren’t simply in hearts or down streets, but were built into the system’s hardware. This is what made Burial’s Untrue a kind of exorcism for the ghosts in the Y2K machine. It doesn’t have lyrics as explicit as the indie fodder, but for that reason it stirred up a structure of feeling far more effectively.
Things didn’t stay this way. The ‘hauntological moment’ can only really be contained to the years 2003-2008, before then have a revenant return from 2011-2014, when the Occupy movement failed to bear any fruit. (The release of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica and The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, both in 2011, encapsulated this for me at the time; the publication of Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life in 2014 was a bookend to all of it, not an origin point, as he had already fully embraced accelerationism by that time.)
Nevertheless, after the financial crash, something changed. The difficulty of naming that change isn’t hauntology’s fault, of course, but our constant deferral back to a moment that most of hauntology’s engineers moved on from suggests that, at the very least, we’re not totally cleft from the problems they first identified.
My position remains the same as it ever was in that regard. It’s not simply the case that “hauntology” named a condition we’ve yet to cure, but rather that we’ve woefully misunderstood what it meant and intended to do. We’ve failed hauntology; it hasn’t failed us. Indeed, the fact that we’ve reduced “hauntology” to the thing it first set out to critique, whilst continuing to reiterate the same arguments to the contrary that Fisher and others made twenty years ago, should be far more damning of contemporary critique’s impotence than many can bring themselves to accept.
For example, if Bluemink’s position differs from “hauntology”, it is in the way similar to that of Alex Williams, who first argued back in 2008 that:
Set against [hauntology] we might posit an explicitly nihilist aesthetics of pop music, which whilst in some senses would operate in a similar manner, would be crucially bereft of the quality of mourning.
This, it seems to me, is what Bluemink wants to pursue also — an aesthetics crucially bereft of the quality of mourning. But Bluemink isn’t nihilistic about anything — in the sense of trying to unsettle all contemporary values, as Ray Brassier did with regards to sonic culture in “Genre is Obsolete”. Instead, he proposes an explicitly positivistic aesthetics of pop music (which is why he defers to Bernard Stiegler over Derrida, more on whom later).
The problem as I see it is that, in still struggling against an inaccurate definition of hauntology, his work ends up being more mournful that it intends to be. But there’s nothing wrong with that. The work of mourning is essential. I just think we must face up to it rather than disavow it whilst doing it anyway.
In that sense, the grief that underlies hauntology — and most critiques of hauntology — is stuck in its own stage of denial. If we really want to overcome it, it’s necessary we expand on all this, so let’s once again return to the moment of hauntology’s emergence in order to better understand what it hoped to do and what it was up against. In particular, we need to better appreciate how “hauntology” wasn’t an impotent reflection on post-Y2K grief, but was rather a participative mode that engaged with this mid-00s structure of feeling far more productively than it is often given credit for.
Ghost Box and the library record paradox
It is not for nothing that “hauntology” was christened after the inauguration of the Ghost Box record label. Founded in 2005 by Julian House and Jim Jupp, the pair began releasing would-be soundtracks to lost media under their respective aliases, The Focus Group and Belbury Poly.
Much of their output looked like newly unearthed library records previously lost to time. For the unfamiliar, library records were albums and compilations of tracks created specifically for film and television studios, which developed in-house record libraries featuring all genres of music, which they then used to soundtrack their various productions. Although ubiquitous, this typically wasn’t music you could buy in shops.
Nevertheless, you’d hear it everywhere. You might not have been able to name song titles or artists, but you’d almost certainly heard plenty of library music regardless. And you knew it, because a lot of it was weird. Delia Derbyshire’s BBC Radiophonic Workshop remains the best example of how this kind of muzak was weird and experimental — and she also bucks the trend of anonymity that most library record producers operated under. As a result, Will Pritchard argues that library music “embodies something of a paradox: it is functional music, churned out to satisfy faceless briefs, yet still regarded as some of the most authentically creative and expressive sounds committed to record.” As such, library records later became collector’s items in their own right.
Since library records had been made redundant in the age of popular music licensing, Ghost Box became a multimedia project imagining an alternative universe where the tradition persisted, albeit inverting Pritchard’s paradox, such that what was once strictly functional was now functionless, and newly advertised not to film and TV studios but to the masses. The result was a library music capable of
conjuring another world (Britain of the sixties and seventies as imagined by Thomas Pynchon perhaps) where a socialist bureaucracy undertook a version of situationist psychogeography.
This was how Fisher described Ghost Box’s output in January 2006. In fact, Fisher had been one of the first to take an interest in the label, as he saw them as kindred spirits to the British blogosphere at that time.
The blogosphere was, of course, constituted by a loose network of writers all with their own personal websites, writing about whatever they pleased. Although this is arguably the most common use of the Internet today, since social media is nothing but a network of microblogs, early contributors to the blogosphere were among some of the first to use the Internet in this way. Prior to the homogenising ascendency of the big social-media platforms, these writers all shared a fascination with the Internet as a new space for DIY cultural production, and were particularly enamoured by the web’s potential utility as a vast archive, where all the ephemera of cultures past could be uploaded and afforded a radically new accessibility.
Case in point: DIY forms of cultural production — which were previously synonymous with the most basic materials and championed for requiring little skill to join in with, like zine-making — had been quietly revolutionised by the Internet. This wasn’t lost on anybody at that time. Speaking personally, I was doing an A Level in Media Studies in 2008, and I was already an active blogger. My “coursework” amounted to producing a “digital zine” — a PDF circulated on a blog, which reflexively looked at how the Internet was changing zine culture. As it became increasingly more likely that people would have access to a home computer rather than a home Xerox machine, this meant that the cyberpunk (or digipunk) world Fisher and Ccru dreamt of wasn’t an outlier or a hyperstitious future dream any longer, but a pervasive reality.
If I parenthetically quibble with the word “cyberpunk” here, it is to acknowledge Fisher’s attempts to distance himself from it also. Bluemink writes about cyberpunk as a dystopian literary genre that Fisher remains associated with from his Ccru days, and this is used to emphasise his pessimism, but he wasn’t so interested in its dystopic sensibilities. As he wrote in 2005:
The term k-punk came out of Ccru. ‘k’ was used as a libidinally preferable substitution for the California / Wired captured ‘cyber’ (the word cybernetics having its origins in the Greek, Kuber). Ccru understood cyberpunk not as a (once trendy) literary genre, but as a distributive cultural tendency facilitated by new technologies. In the same way, ‘punk’ doesn’t designate a particular musical genre, but a confluence outside legitimate(d) space: fanzines were more significant than the music in that they allowed and produced a whole other mode of contagious activity which destroyed the need for centralized control.
Ghost Box fit in well alongside these newly networked developments. Fisher recognised, for instance, “that Ghost Box is about a positive amateurism, where amateurism doesn’t designate a failure to be professional so much as a deliberate deviation from how things are supposed to be done.” It was this attitude in particular that the blogosphere naturally aligned with, not simply because its denizens were sentimental about aesthetic forms synonymous with the past, but because the Internet presented a new way of engaging with older modes of pop-cultural and subcultural production.
Fisher also noted how this was a quality previously associated with television (for his generation at least):
The classic serials of the seventies produced a world you felt a part of, a sense of inclusion to which ‘wobbly sets’ somehow contributed. The professionalism and glossiness of current TV, by contrast, locks you out, subordinates you to Spectacle.
Web 1.0 – ‘wobbly’ in its own right – rekindled an interest in this amateurism. The blogosphere recognised just how different a more contemporary technological landscape now was by comparison, but with forgotten pasts resurging to find new footing in the present, owing to the flourishing of an online ‘archive fever’, Ghost Box became a fitting vehicle through which their generation could interrogate the present’s various points of tension — its various continuities and discontinuities — with the recent past.
This focus on participation is important. It is a core aspect of deterritorialization, after all. In Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, they write that to ‘deterritorialize’ is
to participate in a movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold [into] a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs.
This is what Ghost Box was doing with twentieth-century audio-visual culture. Their “library music” was deterritorialized from libraries and TV shows alike, allowing the form to come undone from its prior associations, whilst nonetheless continuing to evoke what made library records so special and weird. Even the label’s name was fascinating in this regard. It transformed a ubiquitous modern medium into something newly paranormal. As Fisher wrote in 2005: “At one level, the Ghost Box is television itself, or a television that has disappeared, itself become a ghost, a conduit to the Other Side, now only remembered by those of us of a certain age.”
Sure enough, in also recognising themselves as part of the Ghost Box generation, many of Fisher’s peers felt similarly about the aptly named label’s output. Simon Reynolds soon joined in with the adulation for the label as well, writing:
this is serious audio-madeleine bizniz, flashing back to a bygone England that was at once shabbier and seedier than the present one, but also more glamorous and strange.
Their relationship to memory was Proustian in this regard; not simply nostalgic. The Ghost Boxers — producers and listeners alike — were semiological apprentices, and the “deterritorialized flux” that arose as a result was effectuated by Ghost Box’s soundtracks to non-existent media, to screen memories. In undoing the library function, Ghost Box represented a deterritorialized approach to audio-visual culture.
Bluemink talks about this function of deterritorialization in his new book as well, using a definition from Manuel DeLanda that is very similar to Deleuze-Guattari’s own. This, Bluemink writes,
is what happens when cultural forms, especially in relation to music, are pushed to their limits. Perhaps that is exactly the point that certain commentators [*waves*] are making when comparing anti-hauntology to accelerationism. However, I wouldn’t consider the artists I’m discussing to be inherently accelerationist (although there are surely parallels). What producers like Arca are doing is taking, morphing, shifting, and reconnecting disparate aesthetic elements together in creative ways that escape the kind of hauntological spectres of the past that Fisher was wary of.
But again, if that isn’t hauntology — since the spectres have supposedly (and inexplicably) been exorcised — then that is accelerationism. But the question sidestepped is: which spectres being escaped here? Fisher and SOPHIE’s spectres certainly haven’t been circumvented. But spectres are not simply images of or from the past either; our futures can appear spectral as well. This was the tension at the heart of hauntology — a pseudo-scientific name for a sort of digital communion with so many ghosts. The hauntologists were all scientists of sound, tinkering with spectrograms to reveal that is otherwise hidden within the present. They rallied behind Ghost Box; they might as well have rallied behind the likes of Drexciya, as Kodwo Eshun did.
Point being, spectralization and speculation are perhaps two perspectives on the same issue here. Speculation is opposed to predication; ghosts are themselves images no longer predicated on a materiality. Ghost Box, then, was also speculative, precisely because its records were shorn of their predication upon an ultimate destination or utility. They were also “taking, morphing, shifting, and reconnecting disparate aesthetic elements together in creative ways”. In fact, that’s arguably the definition of speculation as well, at least as someone like Hegel would have it.
The New Weird America
Let’s stick with this tension between spectralization and speculation a little longer, by considering how other ’00s sonic currents were dealing with their uneasy entanglement.
Consider, for example, how this unsettled “nostalgia” for past forms of media wasn’t a strictly English phenomenon; it had its American counterparts too. In 2006, Mike Powell highlighted Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti as an example, whose sound on his 2002 album House Arrest “is solely that of a degraded ideal”, or else “a mold, a footprint, a negative, a series of suggestions that function independent of the ideal.”
For decades, pop music had kept pace with the latest advances in recording technology. Undergoing its own industrial revolution, as the studio became a utopic enclave of future-sound cultivation from the 1960s onwards, pop was increasingly associated with a flawless sonic polish that always strove to epitomise the present, and as such, had come to increasingly homogenise it as a non-participative spectacle. The blogosphere had no issue with this in principle – at least in the sense that this perspective might be seen as old men grumbling reactionarily at clouds – but they took note of pop music’s newly deformed mode of the popular, which had shifted from the accessibility of its production to the accessibility of its consumption.
By contrast, Ariel Pink’s sound imagined a world where the accessibility of pop music’s production had continued; where the likes of Daniel Johnston or R. Stevie Moore, in thrall to the contradictory lo-fi maximalism of the Beach Boys or the Beatles, were not outsider artists but megastars, writing infectious pop hits in bedrooms, recorded to 4-track tape. In continuing this style of music into the twenty-first century, Ariel Pink highlighted in negative how this kind of lo-fi pop was even stranger now than it previously had been, retooling past potentials as another way to escape the capitalist present. (Enrico Monacelli’s book on lo-fi remains the best examination of this tendency for my money.)
This was, in Ariel Pink’s own words, “hardcore pop”. Alternatively, a few years later, David Keenan would dub this approach “hypnagogic pop” – a “pop music refracted through the memory of a memory”. Emerging in the 1990s and left somewhat shellshocked by the new millennium, it was a kind of garage pop that fetishized “the outmoded media of its infancy”, often being released on cassette tape in the age of CDs and digital downloads. It also demonstrated a “combination of innocence and experience”:
its drive is to restore the circumstances of early youthful epiphanies while reframing them as present realities, possible futures.
It is worth noting that Ariel Pink has since become associated with the more reactionary potentials of this mid-00s modernism. It is important to note because this more American current was also of a different order to its English cousin, so forgive the detour as we parcel this out a little further.
In passing, Powell later compares the affective degradation of Ariel Pink’s tape deck sound to William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. Basinski’s album famously consists of short tape loops, set in motion for sometimes an hour or more, recorded in such a way that he was able to sonically capture the process of the tape’s own disintegration.
Passing through his reel-to-reel machine, the magnetic tape that encompassed each dusty and near-forgotten recording (as it was duplicated and presumably digitised) began to flake and fall apart. The music produced was thus a long meditation on short refrains decomposing in real time, like snippets of Satie’s “furniture music“, except this furniture had since sunk down into a new terrain, like The Backrooms.
Already deeply moving in its own right, Basinski’s project was further mythologised by the urban legend that he had first listened back to the results whilst watching the World Trade Centre collapse on 11th September 2001. A decade later, Basinski recalled that moment as follows:
This was the end of the world … and we were literally sitting up on the roof all day and into night watching without believing as NYC burned, and listening to the heartbreaking Disintegration Loops … I thought … it’s the soundtrack to the end of the world … I had been assigned the job without knowing the details, it was done, and here we are … The Greatest Show on Earth, Armageddon. We were all literally losing our minds in terror, each person looping onto what holds him or her together … clinging to that which could provide some kind of release or explanation … just as each of the individual melodies in the Disintegration Loops did … at their own pace, seeming to hold onto that which made the melody unique, while letting go of the unimportant sustains or gently adding rests incrementally before the downbeat … it really blew my mind.
Although Powell’s comparison is fleeting, it is nonetheless a telling one. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, America’s avant-garde was beset by a freak-folkish ‘return to innocence’. Basinski is an important corollary here; he captured the moment of disintegration from which this new innocence would emerge. Although Basinski and Ariel Pink are stylistically very different, it is important to note how other bands in their orbits emerged from America’s various noise scenes, each taking on a newly psychedelic approach to pop motifs in post-9/11 America. The likes of Grouper (an occasional tourmate of Basinski’s), Animal Collective, or Joanna Newsom even broke through to achieve relative mainstream success.
Other musicians, like Bradford Cox, known for his projects Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, were notably also bloggers, sharing bedroom demoes and studio notes on personal websites scattered across a democratised Internet. I was especially obsessed with Cox’s blog in the late 2000s, and his haunting track “Children’s Hospital”, whilst drawn from very real experiences, still resonates with America’s more generally disturbing relationship to its own sense of pop-cultural “childhood”.
The respective styles of all of these musicians differed greatly, but even what was shared – an aesthetic naiveite or innocence, in particular – was markedly different to what was shared by their British contemporaries. This was no doubt because, following 9/11, there was a very clear reason why white America especially was pining for an imagined and more idyllic past, which was nonetheless viewed through the geopolitical corruptions of the present.
Things were different, as they often are, for the black music of the mid-2000s. Consider J Dilla’s 2006 album Donuts: its similarly fetishistic relationship to the seven-inch “donuts” that Dilla sourced many of his samples from; his fascination with the library records of Raymond Scott. That record related to the past-futurism of corporate America in a way far more comparable to the approach of the Ghost Box label than anything made by America’s hypnagogic popists.
Nevertheless, the hypnagogic qualities of the ’00s freak-folk scene remain interesting. They represented the new sound of America’s ‘invisible republic’, albeit temporally disjointed. It was the sound of a ‘new, weird America’, which Greil Marcus had previously associated with Bob Dylan and his Basement Tapes – recordings made throughout the 1960s in a secluded basement studio in Woodstock with The Band, which were mythologised in a way that allowed this archive of demoes take on a similar sort of “library” quality.
Later (officially) released to the public, a decade after they were initially recorded, Marcus compared the sprawling collection of rehearsal and demo tapes to Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music: “an elaborate, dubiously legal bootleg, a compendium of recordings” unearthed from the 1920s and ’30s, “originally released on and generally long forgotten by” various major record labels.
Marcus notes how the Anthology “was the founding document of the American folk revival”, reconnecting artists of the 1950 and ’60s with their forgotten forebears. Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes ended up having a similar function, albeit with all sense of the passage of time newly constricted, capturing a transitory moment out of sight, when Dylan was in the process of synthesising the past before subsequently “going electric”. The Basement Tapes, in this regard, capture some of the work of mourning, which we’ll turn to soon, I promise…
Poignantly, Marcus notably describes all of these recordings as “ghosts”, adding that, whilst their “presence is undeniable; to most [they were] also an abstraction, at best a vague tourism of specters from a foreign country.” To the contrary, he insists that, rather than being abstractions, these ghostly recordings allowed a generation of folksingers to reconnect with a past all but erased by whatever the major record labels had allowed their audiences to remember. It may have been a past that remained largely intangible, but these folk traditions also became recorded history rather than mere mythology.
Marcus continues that this mythology had previously been utilised to
cut Americans off from any need to measure themselves against the idealism – the utopianism, the Puritans’ errand into the wilderness or the pioneer’s demand for a new world with every wish for change – Americans have inherited.
The same can be said of contemporary poptimists, it must be said. I’d argue they rail against Fisher not because he was pessimistic, as they mistakenly claim, but because his negativity requires that same measuring of an idealism against our material reality. That’s what Burial and The Caretaker did, albeit in different modes. Their foregrounding of a superseded analogue materiality — the prevalence of digitised vinyl crackle, most obviously — was one way in which a new materialism poked holes in a twenty-first-century capitalist idealism.
SOPHIE did something similar, albeit inverting this tendency somewhat as well. By synthesising her sound palette to produce novel sounds that were without imaginable object, her immateriality further heightened and mutated a pop idealism. This isn’t a quality of perforation we should shy away from, no matter the modality used to elicit this sensation, precisely because these are all generative processes. Their ‘negativity’ defamiliarises signs (signifiers and signifieds). It makes both past and present weird again as well. For hauntology, this negativity was intentionally devoid of the pioneer’s demand for a superficial novelty; in SOPHIE’s case, the weird was reconjured through an exacerbation of a ’90s / ’00s bubble-pop superficiality taken it to its limits. One followed the other, but they are not as opposed as many make them out to be.
In all cases, what is disturbed and rejected in a sense of fixity. This is what Greil Marcus rejected also when discussing the new weird America. By “fixing” some notion of a “free America, the true America, in the past”, he argues that an American pop-cultural hegemony had since neutralised what made the past so “weird”. The resurgence of the past inside the present disrupted this. It was a form of disruption that might well be referred to as a “hauntological continuum”, naming a sensibility shared across the Anthology of American Folk Music, Dylan’s Basement Tapes, and — we might provocatively add — Dilla’s Donuts, Ghost Box, The Caretaker and Burial, and yes, even SOPHIE. In this sense, the references or aesthetic particulars shouldn’t be the focus; what mattered was their unmooring from any fixed origin point.
There is more to be said about why an American hypnagogic pop differs from a British hauntology. I think it is important that each engages with a distinct national unconscious. The differences are very subtle at times, but they are vital. Nevertheless, putting these geopolitical contexts to one side, what is shared across the Atlantic is the manner in which the British and American scenes of the 2000s began producing contemporary recordings that sounded like a New Anthology of Pop Music – an invented treasure trove of forgotten sensibilities; a treasure trove capable of reconnecting the present to the past.
To reiterate: what made these sounds so weird was the fact that they were simulacra sounds without origin, placing past and present newly in tension with one another. From Ghost Box to Ariel Pink, what was conjured was an invented past. Unlike the Arctic Monkeys, who made ‘new music’ that was retro without marketing itself as such, the hauntological sounds of the 2000s was consciously engaged with the past in a way that was paradoxically more inventive and generative.
The Unhomely
I’m probably biased, but if British hauntology was more generative and has since (somewhat ironically) aged better than American freak folk and hypnagogic pop, it is because the British contingent was arguably more awake to the unsettling temporalities evoked by their plundering of a national unconscious. In this regard, Ghost Box’s output was especially Freudian in its approach. It took Freud’s Unheimliche impressions of childhood seriously – that is, childhood’s uncanniness, or more accurately, its unhomeliness.
As Jacqueline Rose once observed, we must always remember that Freud “was first brought up against the unconscious when asking how we remember ourselves as a child.” This is because such memories are always partial and incomplete. Much like Fisher’s description of an amateurish television, the narratives we necessarily construct about our earliest years are an admixture of individual and collectives myths – our understanding of the world that surrounds us is inherently participative, before we come to internalise its various rules and regulations more passively. But as a result, any fidelity to ‘reality’ is impossible because our childhoods are riddled with gaps that the unconscious mind must fill with fantasies. It was for this reason that Freud insisted we are never truly ‘at home’ in such memories. What we more often refer to are only ‘screen memories’. As Fisher put it, these are “memories of childhood, not memories from childhood”.
Ghost Box’s output was explicitly framed as a set of soundtracks to ‘screen memories’ – in more ways than one – and this was no doubt the point, exacerbating their unsettling nature. In this way, the ‘new’ music coming out of the UK in 2005, exploring the sounds and sensibilities of decades previous, was not a historical antidote to a national mythology, as the Anthology of American Folk Music had been. There was no anthology to unearth, at least not at that time. As such, these were explicitly not memories; they were imaginings, perforating the thin filament between memory and hallucination. They were propositions for a kind of national narrative that, contrary to pop’s homogenisation, was left purposefully incomplete, leaving space for new histories and futures both.
This incompleteness also instigated an important function for the listener. Noting how Ghost Box’s output was, “by its nature, incomplete”, Fisher once again reiterated the label’s innately “participative” nature:
Incomplete, because each new contribution to the system … would produce new ‘holes’ which demanded to be filled (a process that is necessarily interminable)…; and participative, because the system is genuinely a system, a collective product rather than the work of a single author. (It occurs to me … that such ‘participation’ is the real alternative to the ‘interpassivity’ of so much digital culture.)
Things changed. The proliferation of rave and jungle compilations in the 2010s was a new sort of anthological tendency that overcame the gaps felt within the 2000s.
For me personally, the 2014 release of Suburban Base Record’s 3CD compilation “The History Of Hardcore, Jungle, Drum & Bass: 1991-1997“, which did not leave my car’s CD player for years, functioned as a new anthology explicitly. Perhaps it was the Burial phenomenon that led these old labels to revamp themselves and show a new generation just how weird the 1990s were and could still be.
But in the 2000s, things were different. Artists weren’t unearthing old records but filling in the gaps of memory, of history, with invented archives. A genre like vapourwave would exacerbate this. In this way, they recognised and affirmed the mythological function of their own generativity.
Digital Pharmacology
I am emphasising this sense of participation because it pulls one of Bluemink’s key philosophical reference points, Bernard Stiegler, back into dialogue with the hauntological moment. Without getting too lost in explication, I want to briefly draw on Felix Heidenreich and Florian Weber-Stein’s 2022 book, The Politics of Digital Pharmacology, in which they explore Stiegler’s use of the term pharmakon as something which is both (or neither) remedy and/or cure. They write:
we feel that the term “digital pharmacology”, and more generally the concept of the pharmakon, is extremely helpful in attempting to understand human interaction with digital media — and not only with digital media.
What’s interesting to me is that Steigler’s use of the term is explicitly drawn from Derrida himself, who writes in Dissemination:
This pharmakon, this “medicine”, this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison… This charm, this spellbinding virture, this power of fascination can be — alternatively or simultaneously — beneficent or maleficent. The pharmakon would be a substance — with all that that word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the way for alchemy — if we didn’t have eventually to come to recognize it as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme, indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity of what funds it and the infinite absence of what founds it.
Operating through seduction, the pharmakon makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual paths and laws.
The pharmakon does its work for better and/or for worse. Derrida describes writing as a pharmakon; for Stiegler, this concept can be extended to all of technology. Like Deleuze, who remains vigilant with regards to how a line of flight — an intoxicated escape beyond all habit — can be tripped up by all that it is fleeing, succumbing to an emboldened fascism (cf. Ezra Pound), the question for Stiegler becomes how we might best use technology’s new potentialities to keep ourselves moving, rather than effectuating new methods of enslavement. As Heidenreich and Weber-Stein write:
In Stiegler’s view a skillful way of applying pharmaka would counterbalance a tendency towards entropy: neg-entropy, the process of ‘bringing together’, of gathering, convening, assembling elements is the appropriate antidote against the destructive effects of the digital onslaught. This art of fighting entropy, of working for neg-entropy finds an esthetic expression in Richard Long’s work. When he creates a circle of stones … an archaic technique of ‘bringing together’ is displayed. Working for neg-entropy seems to connect us with the most ancient practices of structuring a life-world, of bringing order into chaos.
Now, again, when Bluemink makes use of Stiegler to evoke this “bringing together”, this inherently participative relationship that seeks to create and not only destroy, why is this core relationship between the ancient and modern — Stiegler’s modernism — left behind and denied its clear resonance with hauntology?
Truthfully, it is Derrida who preserves a gothic Marxist prose when writing about the occulted function of writing itself; Stiegler’s technic writings are very different, and in Bluemink’s hands, take on the bright glamour of the solarpunk. He emphasises a vitalism opposed to Derrida’s “rite of the pharmakos: evil and death, repetition and expulsion”, much like Stiegler does when he suggests:
Derrida argued that the general circumstances of writing set the conditions for critical writing, so there will never be a really critical form of writing, capable of criticizing from the outside. And there is a systematic problem: with Derrida you don’t have any positive discourse on the pharmakon. It is a philosophy of deficiency, if you like: there is no positive side to the pharmakon for Derrida, and this is a problem for me, because in my view the decisive question is how to transform a poison into a remedy.
I’m not a Stiegler expert, but I’m puzzled by this attempt to reinstate a sort of dichotomy into Derrida’s more general ambivalence towards binaries. I don’t think it is fair to say that he was disinterested in the “decisive question” above. Indeed, this is more precisely what is drawn out in Spectres of Marx.
Derrida may not have a clear answer as to how to transform a poison into a remedy, precisely because a pharmakon is both, as it is for Stiegler as well. But the solution is certainly not to ignore what is poisonous or somehow eject what destroys from our considerations of how to create. It is all a question of utility and context, and this is true enough of spectres or phantasms themselves, which are a core “ingredient” of any pharmacia for Derrida. Indeed, to eject what is occulted from an otherwise hauntological analysis seems to carry the same sentiment as Plato’s expulsion of the poets from the Republic.
Derrida:
Let us recall the famous indictment of pictorial mimetics in the Republic. First, it is a question of banning poetry from the city … for reasons linked essentially to its mimetic nature. The tragic poets, when they practice imitation, corrupt the minds of the listeners … if these do not posses an antidote (pharmakon). This counterpoison is “knowledge of the real nature of things” … If one considers that imitators and masters of illusion will later be presented as charlatans and thaumaturges — species of the genus pharmakeus — then once again ontological knowledge becomes a pharmaceutical force opposed to another pharmaceutical force. The order of knowledge is not the transparent order of forms and ideas, as one might be tempted retrospectively to interpret it; it is the antidote. Long before being divided up into occult violence and accurate knowledge, the element of the pharmakon is the combat zone between philosophy and its other. An element that is in itself, if one can still say so, undecidable.
What is undecidable is a phantasma; is a pharmakon. Alex Williams, in his rebuttal to hauntology, similarly proposed “a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical evental sites and historical situations exist within our current time: those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable.” I think it must be acknowledge that this can include the past: those historical situations that are spectrally present “within our current time”.
Vigilance remains essential. Notions of past, present, future — all can hamper us just as readily as they might empower us. Hauntology’s virtue, at the very least, was its vigilance in this regard; accelerationism was proposed as an antidote to hauntology, but in too readily rejecting the work of mourning, it far more disastrously fell victim to all that it was trying to critique. This is why I think hauntology and accelerationism must remain coupled. Each has a function of mitigating and accounting for the risks involved in the other’s undecidability.
Taking all of this together, Ghost Box and their disparate allies weren’t simply archivists looking to preserve the past or mime it. They addressed the analogue pasts inside the digital present as a pharmakon, trying to alchemically discover an antidote to a hegemonic retromania. As it was for Fisher, if “postmodernism” is the name of our sickness, then “hauntology” was itself an antidote — an element extracted as a surplus that could counteract the postmodern.
Making the case for this, contrary to Stiegler, let’s now consider how Derrida’s hauntology sought to address this decisive question, then, of turning a poison into a remedy.
Spectralization and the Work of Mourning
As everyone now knows, ‘hauntology’ was a term borrowed from Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which dealt with a very different context to that of its new musical sibling, if nonetheless sharing certain mannerisms with it. But despite this source now being common knowledge, it doesn’t seem like anyone bothers to go back and read what Derrida had to say.
Similarly to Fisher, Reynolds and co., what Derrida sought to name was a condition — a “sickness” — afflicting a new post-Soviet world order, following the so-called ‘end of history’, after which capitalism began to conjure up spectral images of an enemy already vanquished. A “new ‘world order’ seeks to stabilize a new, necessarily new disturbance [dérèglement] by installing an unprecedented form of hegemony”, Derrida writes. This disturbance was the fall of the Soviet Union, which left a hole in the world order that capitalism had to fill to assume its global dominance, since it was now without any major (systemic) socioeconomic competitor. But capitalism also arguably loses some of its purpose at this moment. Capitalism had long positioned itself as an “antidote” to the sickness of communism, after all — just as communism was the antidote to the sickness of capitalism. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, what becomes an antidote that no longer has anything to cure?
A paradox arose. In order to stabilize itself in this new context, or otherwise retain some sense of post-Cold War continuity, what was necessary was that capitalist culture conjure up the idea of communism anew, in order to have something to do battle against; something to preserve from its formerly dialectical sense of progress. This is to say that, even whilst capitalism was claiming total victory, a narrative was still needed – an altogether incomplete narrative – to fill the hole left by Soviet communism in the new world order, not so that communism could keep ‘living’ but so capitalism could preserve the illusion of its own ‘development’.
As a result, since this battle between political systems and ideologies was essentially one of competing images, competing imaginaries, it is also a battle fought within the media. Derrida argues that “the medium of the media themselves (news, the press, tele-communications, [etc.])” conjure political ideals as things “neither living nor dead, present nor absent”. (The idea of capitalism itself is necessarily a spectre as well in this regard; the lofty ideals by which it claims supremacy are hardly tangible to most.) It is for this reason that contemporary media “spectralizes.”
Derrida’s hauntology thus named a pervasive attempt “to ontologize remains, to make them present … by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead”. Put another way, if communism was ‘dead’, then capitalism had to set about erecting a tombstone for it – an abstracted ‘final resting place’; a symbolic presence attesting to its real absence; a monument that enabled the work of mourning; a site that we might pay a visit to, but which enables the spectre’s re-visitations upon us as well.
What I find so ironic about Bluemink’s argument — and the arguments of others who take a similarly poptimist path — is that hauntology itself is hauntologized by these writers. Hauntology itself becomes the vanquished spectre they must continue to do battle with, despite the fact that we have clearly long since moved on from that ‘hauntological moment’. This is why Bluemink’s argument struggles to make sense to me. He ontologizes hauntology’s remains, locating hauntology in a present that is not its own. This is another way in which his “anti-hauntology” remains predicated on the very thing it is set against.
It is difficult to parse out all of my contentions here, because Bluemink’s argument is broadly correct. I just take issue with its overstated Stieglerian vitalism. The issue is that, to secure this sense of vitality, he must constantly evoke Fisher as a figure simultaneously to be overcome and already overcome. He has to persistently ontologize his remains in order to ground his more contemporary perspective, but he often protests too much.
There is always a quibble about how things are now so different, which tries to force a break where there is instead a continuum — not a straight line, but a continuous percolation, a deterritorialized flux. This frames “anti-hauntology” to an idealistic and under-defined path to final victory, which neglects the manner in which Fisher and others adeptly kept pace with the present and ended up much further down that path than the poptimists do. In this way, their mode of hindsight does a lot of heavy lifting, instituting oppositions that really aren’t all that necessary.
What’s more, this is precisely the way Bluemink utilises SOPHIE as well — both in 2021 and in the new book. Even though she is held aloft as an antidote to Fisher’s theorising, she is sadly no longer with us, and so it is SOPHIE’s remains — her sonic remainders — that Bluemink ontologizes and spectralizes as well, in order to conjure a poptimistic vision of the future that is similarly hauntological. He erects a cult-critical tombstone for SOPHIE, which he repeatedly visits, laying flowers all around her, and enabling her revisitations upon us as well. But if his writing isn’t explicitly mournful, it is in the same way that people sometimes frame funerals as “celebrations of life”. The sentiment is comfy, but it’s still a funeral, an act of memorialization. Beneath the semantics, it remains hauntological.
To be clear, I take no issue with this. Bluemink’s book can be both mournful and future-oriented, and that’s fine. My first book Egress was similar. I remember one reviewer claiming that my own mournful prose meant I couldn’t break free from my own grief, despite trying to write myself out of it. But that’s also the function of mourning. The work of mourning may feel total in the book itself, but writing it really did help me. I was able to move on and overcome the depression that Fisher’s death tripped me into. It was great. It really is okay to cry! But that’s what I find strange in The Future is Not Lost: so much energy is given over to euthanising the elephant in the room — that is, the work of mourning.
My point in 2021 and my point now is that it was through this work that Fisher approached the past, present, and future as well, and the further irony is that Fisher himself is another spectralized figure that the present and future still has to deal with. We must arrive to meet Fisher and SOPHIE now precisely because their work is made newly strange. They are no longer of this world, just as rave, library records and tape cassettes weren’t of the mid-2000s. Although these things have all since made a comeback, owing to the power of corporate nostalgia to “spectralize”, the innovation of a ‘hauntological’ music was to repopulate these temporarily (or temporally) emptied territories with new revenants.
In this way, the new music of the 2000s exacerbated what made the prior cultural forms or moments their music referred to unique. Therefore, they also emphasised the ways in which these forms and moments were made newly unfamiliar — that is, again, no longer of this world. The likes of Burial and The Caretaker, whom Fisher is now synonymous with, may now be canonical, but they were doing something new with the past at that time!
This music thus localised and identified the culturally ‘dead’, enabling the work of a digital mourning whilst also allowing the specific aesthetic and material qualities of these mediums to haunt us. ‘Hauntology’ was clearly an apt descriptor for this paranormal phenomenon. As Reynolds later acknowledged in his book Retromania: “the ‘-ology’ suggested solemn laboratory researchers investigating the sonic paranormal”, echoing Fisher’s fondness for Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape.
Writing about the BBC serial in 2003, Fisher claimed:
All recordings are ghosts.
But are we really more substantial than they?
It’s a question that bears repeating. SOPHIE’s sonic syntheses might be less explicitly haunting or haunted — although they have become more so since her death — but as I wrote back in 2021, her debut album is nothing less than a record that questions the “substance” (or lack thereof) of postmodern identity, particularly as it pertains to gender identity. (The same can be said for Arca, also a transwoman.)
Any trans person will tell you that there are two temporal directions of travel involved in transition that are difficult to separate. For all of accelerationism’s association with trans women — that is, the gender-accelerationism of digitally exacerbating the disintegration of a prior identity — there is a concomitant experience of carrying your past around with you all the same, through buried “dead names” and old childhood photographs. Just because no one else sees this anymore doesn’t mean it’s not within you.
Transing your gender gives you a radically new (and queered) relationship to time in this way — to the past, the present, and the future. You repeat what most people never will – puberty – and find yourself reborn. To be trans is thus to be both radically future-oriented and also mournful. Transitioning necessarily involves putting in the work of mourning a past self. In truth, this is more generally a core component of getting older; all of us move through life facing both backwards and forwards. What is “accelerationist” about transness is how it exacerbates this universal experience to produce wild new possibilities from its scrambling of present conditions. What Bluemink’s book struggles to balance, I fear, is a productive awareness of the fact that these more mournful qualities aren’t anathema to the solarpunk bandwagon he jumps on, but rather essential to any process of transition. We can’t move on without first doing the work of mourning.
This is what it means, for Derrida, to ontologize remains:
all ontologization, all semanticization — philosophical, hermeneutical, or psychoanalytical — finds itself caught up in this work of mourning but, as such, it does not yet think it; we are posing here the question of the specter, to the specter, whether it be Hamlet’s or Marx’s, on this near side of such thinking.
What is at issue, then, for me, in the present’s poptimism, is an assumption that we don’t need to speak to spectres, whether it be Fisher’s or SOPHIE’s. We disparage one and laud the other, but we don’t question the understandings of their work we have inherited, and in that regard, we’ve yet to properly think with or against them. We don’t yet have sufficient knowledge of what they effectuated beyond what has been absorbed by a pop hegemony.
As Derrida continues:
One has to know. One has to know it. One has to have knowledge… Now, to know is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies — for it must stay in its place. In a safe place. Hamlet does not ask merely to whom the skull belonged (“Whose was it?” the question that Valéry quotes). He demands to know to whom the grave belongs (“Whose grave’s this, sir?”). Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt: one has to know who is buried where — and it is necessary (to know — to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and move no more!
This is why most critics of Fisher fail (even if they do not recognise their own failures). They do not know where the bodies are buried. They misidentify the burial sites. They misattribute arguments to Fisher that he never made, or otherwise moved on from himself. They misplace SOPHIE as still being current, eliding her death.
On the contrary, when they were alive, Fisher and SOPHIE themselves knew where the bodies were buried, and having done the work of mourning, they moved into new modalities. We will continue to get nowhere if we don’t consider this essential process. We can’t just position ourselves in some imagined future and forget how we got here.
As a result, although Bluemink insists that the futures are not lost, as he proceeds through his argument, it is the past that becomes newly garbled. How can either past or future be (re)found(ed), if we’re looking for them in the wrong places? As a result, I’m not convinced he has successfully located past or future alike, which leaves his present less generatively unsettled than he otherwise wants his reader to believe.
The Fisherian Zeitgeist
Fisher’s spectres, his spirits, were multifaceted. Like Derrida, he knew that
the thing works, whether it transforms or transforms itself, poses or decomposes itself: the spirit, the “spirit of the spirit” is work. But what is work? What is its concept if it supposes the spirit of the spirit? Valéry underscores it: “By ‘Spirit’ here I mean a certain power of transformation … the spirit … works.”
Fisher’s spirit has not yet been exorcised because we’ve failed to face up to the futures he wrote about and also lived through — not simply his “lost futures”, his screen memories, but the more proximal ones he was equally fascinated by and actively helped midwife. He followed ghosts, yes, but why do we never ask what followed these ghosts in turn? What followed, that is, in a dual sense: what stalks us, and what comes after?
Derrida again:
What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it, always, persecuted perhaps by the very chase we are leading? Here again what seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance: from the past, from the back.
This was the same paradox Fisher did the work to elucidate, and it’s that same future arriving from the (accelerationist) past that I have repeatedly tried to contend with as well. Without also doing this work for ourselves, we continue to be stalked by the very figures we hope to vanquish.
Here, in closing, I want to quote Fisher at length again, honing in on his renewed approach to hauntology at the very moment that accelerationism arose to supersede more hauntological discourses. Here, Fisher again defines hauntology is a way that is anathema to the more popular way it is understood today. In reading Fisher properly, we find that he already offered up revisions that Bluemink and others are trying to conjure less successfully elsewhere. Their attempts to bring the future into the light rise up more powerfully from a last where Fisher said far more than is appreciated.
As he wrote in 2008 (with what is bold being my emphasis relative to Fisher’s original italics):
For me, hauntology is best conceived of not as some political aspiration, but rather as a zeitgeist, something which is already in place and which demands critical commentary (and extrapolative extension). Hauntology is not something that is aimed towards, so much as where we are starting from (the End of History and its escape). Hauntological theory is an attempt, for instance, to account for why the Burial records have captured a mood, a malaise, this decade. The claim is not that hauntology is ultimately preferable to some accelerationist model of culture (although the Burial records are in many respects actually superior to the accelerationist Jungle they spectralise). On the contrary, one of the things that you can hear in hauntology is the spectres of accelerationism itself.
To turn Alex [Williams]’s question about the political correlate of hauntology around — what is the cultural equivalent of accelerationism now? It was precisely the lack of any cultural exemplars of accelerationism that led to spectrality in the first place. The paradoxes that Alex refers to are not a problem for hauntology; or rather, the problems they indicate are constitutive of a hauntological moment which makes the only resistance to the nostalgia mode look like a nostalgia for modernism. Hauntology is not, therefore, opposed to accelerationism; rather, it is the only way, at the moment, that culture makes any kind of contact with it.
Neither is there any opposition between “the return of modernism” that Alex decries and “the arrival of a new (perhaps, or at the very least) a currently properly unthinkable temporo-cultural episteme” which he calls for. What is modernism if not that which generates a “properly unthinkable temporo-cultural episteme”? Modernism (and Badiou’s theory of the event has been characterised as a late arriving philosophy of / for modernism) can return as a recirculated obsolete style, but it cannot ‘return’ as the unthinkably novel without puncturing a hole in postmodernity.
This is the paradox that stalks Bluemink’s book as well. Although he doesn’t like the term “accelerationism”, no doubt owning to its poor appropriations that distance it from its original concerns, it is only through his work of mourning SOPHIE that Bluemink is able to make contact with more contemporary (and still accelerationist) currents. He returns to a “new” that died or is dying. He fetishises a moment in the recent past that is meant to be indicative of how good the present is, whilst sidestepping all of its flaws.
Nevertheless, it is true that SOPHIE’s death isn’t the end of her relevance. Nor is Fisher’s death the end of his. Rather, I’d argue that their deaths must be allowed to more powerfully register within our collective psyches as the closures of two recent eras. That takes more work than a quick disavowal.
This moment arrived for me in 2021. I’m reminded, as ever, that SOPHIE’s death was announced on the same day we organised a For K-Punk edition at the ICA, held online and featuring Oneohtrix Point Never’s resurrection of his Chuck Person project, talking about how “the future is uncertain” at the height of the pandemic.
We were all hanging out on a Discord server that night, and I was sat in my basement kitchen in Huddersfield slowly drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels to myself. Owing to the general shock of SOPHIE’s death, and recognising that we were all already engaging in the work of mourning, we created a split, with one channel discussing Mark and the audio-visual commissions, and another discussing SOPHIE. Unsurprisingly, all present loved them both.
What has since happened, after their deaths, under the work of mourning, is that they have been increasingly distanced from each other. Fisher, who advocated for accelerationism more passionately than anyone, is frozen in the late 2000s. SOPHIE is frozen in the mid-2010s. Both of them were pioneers at one point, cultivating and articulating what was otherwise unformed, inchoate and unthinkable in their respective presents. We can’t go back to those moments. We can’t return to that moment when SOPHIE was unthinkable, confounding all contemporary sensibilities. Still, if she represents a paradigm now, it’s because her death and the subsequent work of mourning has allowed us to monumentalise the future-shock she stood for.
No matter whether a writer wishes to be poptimistic or negative, we’re all out here orchestrating exorcisms for the spectres we ourselves have conjured. It’s okay to own it. We might better understand our present moment if we did. But currently, I’m not sure anyone’s really got as good a handle on it as they think they do, because we’re still not over a twenty-year-old debate about recorded ghosts.
Coda
It was my partner Juno, writing in response to my conversation with Bluemink, who shook me from my own mournful stupor. Admittedly, it took me a long time to get over the pandemic. It led to a protracted period of hermitage that continued long past the pandemic’s “end”. The pandemic forced me to start working remotely — as it did for many us. Beyond a two-year stint in my local pub whilst working on my PhD, I am still working remotely to this day. I continue to struggle with it. But at the same time, I’m roughly three years into transing my gender, so it’s not all rubbish.
What Juno showed me was how a new generation had better dealt with and overcome that moment. As we were sitting on Discord servers mourning SOPHIE and Fisher in tandem, a second wave of hyperpop artists had transformed Discord into a supercollider. The result, Juno argued, was dariacore, which was the “robbing of hauntology’s grave”.
In particular, they write about how Leroy’s 2023 album Grave Robbing “evokes an image of death as a horizon for renewal.” It was an album they played me on one of their first visits to Newcastle in 2024, and it overwhelmed me so much that I literally had to take a break for a lie down. Once I’d gotten over the shock, I became obsessed with all the SoundCloud oddities they excavated (and continue to), feeling myself reconnect with contemporary music in a way that I thought the pandemic depressions had ruined forever.
Their essay also helped me to contextualise all these new sonic experiences alongside the blogospheric heritage I continue to carry around. Producing a new hauntological/accelerationist continuum, which foregrounds a shared methodology of sampling and deterritorialisation from plunderphonics and hiphop through to hauntology and hyperpop, they ultimately give credit to Jane Remover (AKA Leroy AKA venturing AKA et al.), whose trajectory to date oscillates between the destructively mournful and the hyperactively joyful much like Fisher’s writing did:
I want to credit Jane Remover’s Dariacore for … translating the lived experience of capitalist realism in the show Daria into music that transforms the mournfulness of nostalgic hauntology, to a regeneration of joy and new possibilities of being. I want to credit Jane Remover’s repurposing of neoliberal-market driven music used in the plunderphonics of Dariacore as an intervention in the neoliberal process through which this music is made in the major label, copyrighted system, which has been outlined in this essay as a historical function of colonial extraction and an exertion of the neoliberal claim to privatising cultural property.
What I loved about the essay was the way in which Juno openly wrestled with the contradictions of the present, especially the work of mourning involved in our pursuit of the new, and also a properly accelerationist modality that locates the dead in order to rob graves — SOPHIE’s included. That, to me, is the best encapsulation of where a properly contemporary music has moved onto since Bluemink and I had our conversation in 2021. I think it is a far more honest approach that remains material and avoids being seduced by newly vitalistic ideologies.
Attempts to circumvent nostalgia don’t exorcise these spectres; they produce new ones, utopic ones, that only displaces the work of mourning, which is essential if we are to truly avoid repeating all the same mistakes or arguments of the past. We don’t have to pick sides. We can do both. Much contemporary music is adept that doing both as well. Why isn’t contemporary music criticism…?
