another thing Im compelled by is this idea that the âfutureâ is not only a temporal condition but a geographic/spatial one -- the circulation of hegemony around the world, UK to US to China
Mark Fisher, âWhat Is Hauntology?â:Â
If the conditions for this âpopular modernismâ were provided to a large extent by social democracy, its aspirations were not confined to a hope that social democracy would simply continue. The radical dimension of social democratic culture, in fact, consisted in the way it produced a longing for its (self-)overcoming, that it was premised on the movement toward a scarcely imaginable future. As Owen Hatherley has argued, bulldozed brutalist buildings are one sign that this future did not arrive. The actual future would not be popular modernism, but populist conservatism: the creative destruction unleashed by the forces of business on the one hand, there turn to familiar aesthetic and cultural forms on the other. It would not be British, but American; or at least it would a certain version of âthe Americanâ exemplified in consumer culture.
Connery says Pacific Rim Discourse was an effort to think beyond this -- to construct a future neither spatial nor temporal:Â
Economic exploitation and Said's othering coincided in the imperial age, when an ideology of Western cultural or racial superiority over-shadowed any theorizing of capitalism's teleological promise. The undeveloped world was undeveloped because of local factors. Modernization theory shifted the othering to a more purely temporal plane, in keeping with its capitalist universalist teleology. It could speak of "latecomers," whereby the Western present was the East Asian future. Just as modernization theory obliterated the spatial, the new realities of multinational capitalism in the Carter and Reagan years erased modernization theory's temporality. Japan and the East Asian NICs were no longer the West's past. In the eighties, if Japan was anywhere in time, it was in the future, with Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea at the very least in some version of the present. The Rim was a perfect image for a centeredness with no central power.
and Fisherâs localizing addendum:
The erosion of spatiality has been amplified by the rise of what Marc Auge calls the ânon-placeâ: airports, retail parks, and chain stores which resemble one another more than they resemble the particular spaces in which they are located, and whose ominous proliferation is the most visible sign of the implacable spread of capitalist globalization. The disappearance of space goes alongside the disappearance of time: there are non-times as well as non-places.
questions to consider:
how does the shedding of the spatial as an organizing principle affect geographically bound aesthetics (esp in the periods these texts engage -- the postwar era, the global era)? is it possible to talk about the influence of Japanese prints or Chinese iconography or African masks etc. without essentializing?
or relatedly:Â what does it mean to talk about geographically bound aesthetic influences during the age of empire, when land and the metropole/colony dichotomy were precisely where the seat of power lay?
if hauntology is the logical successor to Pacific Rim Discourse, and the failure of Pacific Rim Discourse was due in part to the unpredictability of the rise of Asia, where does Asia sit within hauntology?
