#hauntology

#hauntology

A riff on Jacques Derrida's riff on Karl Marx's claim that "the spectre of communism haunts Europe", hauntology is the name Mark Fisher and his colleagues gave to their perception that "what haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the 21st century is not so much the past as the lost futures the 20th century taught us to anticipate". Beginning from their perception that (Anglo) electronic music of the early 2000s had been unable to innovate, artistically or technologically, on that of the previous century,

For Fredric Jameson, for instance, while modernism "thought compulsively about the New and tries to watch its coming into being", postmodernism "looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds". The latter definition, encapsulating the cultural logic of late capitalism, is all the more intriguing in the context of music culture, since it has found so many breaks to play around with.