TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

A ghost haunts the end: the ghost of the future.

Mark Fisher writes in What is Hauntology? that “the future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production.”¹ But the future is no longer what it was. The future is not future anymore, but the return of another remix and remake of the past. The future is dead, perhaps even undead.

Listen to the Arctic Monkeys whoe presence evokes the ghosts of rock and roll, and the phantasmagoria of the past, with the lighting setup, the hairstyles, and the clothing as the eternal return of the same. Their album The Car² is a time machine to the past, going back faster than the speed of light: “Do your time travelling through the tanning booth / So you don’t let the Sun catch you crying.”³

Instead, dance to the music of SOPHIE and Arca. The sounds and images of the future return in order to haunt the present. It is the sign of the apocalypse. 

The end is beginning.

The Aesthetics of the Apocalypse

In 2014, Mark Fisher writes in Ghosts of My Life: “Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners.”⁴

The question is: what would have the late theorist thought about the sound of SOPHIE and Arca?

Replay the one hundred remixes of Arca’s Riquiquí⁵ created in 2020 by an artificial intelligence called Bronze. To listen to the remix album Riquiquí Bronze Instances⁶ is to hear the same song for the first time over and over again. The concept of remixing itself is remixed. It is no longer about the editing of the past but the bootleg of the future. 

This is what Matt Bluemink, in opposition to Mark Fisher’s hauntology, refers to as anti-hauntology.⁷

The phantasms of the future, instead of the phantasms of the past, are returned to the present.

Fisher’s chapter from Ghosts of My Life continues:

what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.⁸

Now, listen to SOPHIE’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides⁹ and Arca’s KiCk i-iiiii and repeat the thought experiment. All in all, this music would have produced a jolt of future shock in listeners from 2007, even up to 2017.

The future is no longer what it was when Fisher was writing Ghosts of My Life. The ghost of SOPHIE, who died in 2021, does not return from the past but from another future.

Then, the circuit between present and future, which Fisher thought was destroyed by late capitalism, is rewired to the present like in SOPHIE’s Faceshopping¹¹ and Arca’s Mequetrefe¹² where the sounds, images, and even the subject are destroyed and recreated again. These are the digitalized aesthetics of the apocalypse. Sounds and images produced by means of waveform editing and computer graphics technologies no longer represent anything but the future itself. 

You have not seen or listened to anything yet.

The Media of the Future

Hauntology can be about the sound of what is not present. The word ontology in French ia heard like the word hauntology in English. The difference is read, although it is not heard. 

Jacques Derrida writes the word hauntology only three times in Specters of Marx.¹³ The word returns for the fourth and last time in a footnote, where it is read: “every period has its ghosts (and we have ours), its own experience, its own medium, and its proper hauntological media.”¹⁴ The end of the book returns to haunt the meaning of the word hauntology.

Hauntology is what Derrida refers to as the medium of the media. It is the mediation between the present and the future; it is about the temporality of the media, the medium of the media as such.

For Mark Fisher, hauntology is also about the return of the analogical sign to the digital medium: the sound of crackles and black-and-white technology return like phantoms from the past. 

Thus, the analogy between presence and representation is disrupted. “The digitization of the analog destabilizes our knowledge of the this was, and we are afraid of this,”¹⁵ as Bernard Stiegler argues. “But we were afraid of the analog too: in the first photographs, we saw phantoms.”¹⁶

In the analog medium, the light of the image returns the past, and its phantom, to the sign of the present. Representation is the phantom of light. In contrast, the digital medium reproduces light as electricity, the signifier of presence and absence in the form of zeros and ones. The analog medium is the return to the present of the image of the past. Instead, the digitalized image is no longer an image but the imagination of an image. The digital image and the digital sound do not return to the present the phantoms of the past but, rather, the phantasms of the future.

It is the apocalypse according to Saint Mark (Fisher).

The digital sounds and images of SOPHIE’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides do not represent anything any longer but the imagination of another future.

Hyperpop

Hyperpop aesthetics is another example of hauntology rather than anti-hauntology. Hyperpop music is the repetition of the same. The pop culture of Britney Spears, Madonna, and Lady Gaga is plugged back into the circuitry of the present. The pop star of the future is the pop star of the past.

An good example is the music project QT, produced by SOPHIE in collaboration with Hayden Dunham and A. G. Cook.¹⁷ QT is both the name of the project and the name of an energy drink, called DrinkQT, later to be sold and distributed. The music video¹⁸ for Hey QT shows the artist, QT, producing the DrinkQT energy drink in a laboratory: the emotions of the artist are reproduced into the drink formula by means of augmented reality technology. The producer of the energy drink is nothing more than the energy drink herself. There is no difference between the producer and the product. There are no longer any subjects either, but consumers.

SOPHIE’s song Lemonade¹⁹ from the album Product is another example. Hyperpop music is even more pop than pop music: the sound is higher and faster, the graphics are brighter and more colorful, the lyrics are sweeter and even more materialistic. “I get that fizzy feeling and I want lemonade, / Lemonade, l-l-lemonade, lemonade, l-l-lemonade.”²⁰ The rights to the song were later sold to McDonald’s for the promotion of a new lemon-flavored drink. 

The subject and the music of the future do not shock the system. Instead, the negative feedback causes the systemic reproduction of the same. Negative feedback is nothing more than the pleasure principle of the machine. “The pleasure principle,” explains Nick Land, “formats excitation as self-annulling drift from equilibrium.”²¹ The negative feedback resets the potential of digital technology.

The positive feedback, on the other hand, is the reproduction of the sign of difference and aberration. The positive feedback system is the production of another future within the logic of reproduction. The techno-logic of the system is not crashed because now it functions too well. It does not reproduce the same image any longer but the signs of another imaginary.

The Spectre of the East

Hauntology is about the phantoms of the past and the ghosts of Western culture. “The rude spectres of Lewisham will return no matter how far East you travel,”²² writes Fisher in Ghosts of My Life. The vast number of references to Asian culture in Japan’s Tin Drum (from the album cover to the titles and lyrics)²³ do not exorcize the specters of the West. “When I’ve broken every door / The ghosts of my life / Blow wilder / Than the wind,”²⁴ sings David Sylvian in the song Ghosts by Japan, providing Mark Fisher with the title of the book.

Anti-hauntology, on the other hand, is about the phantasms of the future. It is about the presence of that which should not exist here and now but is present nonetheless.

Shanghai-based artist Gooooose is another example of anti-hauntology. The electronic and futuristic music of Gooooose is the sign of another future. It is the sign that the end is not where the Sun sets. It is the sign that the future is not ending but, rather, beginning.

33EMYBW and Gooooose’s Trans-Aeon Express²⁵ is the representation of the Oriental terminus of the future. Trans-Aeon Express is the soundtrack album of Weirdcore’s exhibition in SKP-S department store in Beijing, Orient Flux.²⁶ Weirdcore is currently the director of music videos and visuals for artists such as Arca, Aphex Twin, Miley Cyrus, M.I.A., Tame Impala, Radiohead, and The Caretaker, as well as brands like Louis Vuitton, Adidas, and Nike. Weirdcore’s music video²⁷ for Gooooose’s Trans-Aeon Express (the title track of the album released on the Chinese music label SVBKVLT) is the representation of the circuit between the popular and the experimental, the mainstream and the underground, and the West and the East. In this video, both virtual and real images reproduce from the Trans-Aeon Express, a digital machine traveling through space and time at the speed of light. The phantasms of the future are regenerated in the present; the machine functions too well and reproduces the sign of the imaginary. 

The imaginary is always that which proceeds all images. It is the ghost of the future that resist returning to the present while being always-already present, even after the end. Anti-hauntology is against hauntology as much as it is after it. 

The digital music of SVBKVLT artists like Gooooose, 33EMYBW, Zaliva-D, Nahash, Osheyack, and Hyph11E is the Eastern spectrum of anti-hauntology.

After the End

In the music videos of SOPHIE’s Faceshopping²⁸ and Arca’s Mequetrefe²⁹ the sounds and images are destroyed and reconstructed again and again, as if the subject is itswlf dis- and reassembled, as Arca and Bronze’s artificial intelligence sing in Riquiquí: “Regenerated girl degenerate / […] Thinking it would never end to break off.”³⁰

In an article in response to Bluemink’s introduction to anti-hauntology, Matt Colquhoun writes:

When we argue over SOPHIE’s newness, detached from the new sort of subjectivity she represented […] we undermine the radical imposition that was her bold presence as a transgender pop star. […] We reduce cultural value to a decimal point rather than asking what it is actually doing to our sense of ourselves as late-capitalist subjects. SOPHIE did that, and notably with her music.³¹

To sum up Colquhoun’s argument: “The point is less about whether music itself can innovate and more about whether that innovation actually counts for anything when broader social structures remain so fixed. The point is how does musical innovation disrupt the system at large, intervene in it, move outside of it, push through it.”³²

Here, the logic of the system is pushed to its limit. But the system does not stop functioning: instead, it functions too well. It does not reproduce the end but the sign of the imaginary. 

This is the hyper-nothingness of the medium according to which there is no more any differences between the reproduction of the end and the beginning. This is the reproduction of another kind of nothingness that is more than creation and destruction, more than reality and simulation. There is then no more any differences between the subject of the present and any other subject. Thus, the system reproduces its own apocalypse. The end is both possible and impossible; it is returned to the sign of the imaginary.

You have not seen or listened to anything yet. It is only the beginning.

[This essay is an edited excerpt from Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse by Alessandro Sbordoni (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023), licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-sa/4.0).] 

Notes: