| 02-07-2014 | The Alex Cafe Bar & Brasserie | 123 Undercliff Road West | Felixstowe | IP11 2AF | Suffolk | England | United KingdomÂ
RJLH:Â
How did you happen upon the word/term Hauntology?
MF:
I donât know⌠I was aware of it, via theory, via Derrida, since the 90âs, as a term, it wasnât something Iâd really thought about until 2006 when this confluence of things occurred which later became, very quickly became labelled Hauntology. It was around then that I reached back for the term and started to see the connections, primarily in music, music was the potentiator rather than something which can contain the whole meaning, the scope of Hauntology. Around that time there was some discussion, on blogs, primarily I suppose, as to whether or not it was the right term to use. I felt it was ripe for repurposing.
RJLH:
In relation to music, specifically, Simon Reynolds, who arrived at the term around the same time, says he has come to prefer Memoradelia, as proposed by Patrick McNally.
MF:
I think Memoradelia only captures part of it. The spectral dimension is a very important part of Hauntology. This idea of lost futures isnât about memory, not straightforwardly anyway, itâs about anticipation, itâs about⌠For me a key aspect of Hauntology is the age of the virtual, as I call it. The capacity of the virtual to effect things. A lot of what we call spectral, ghostly, can be classified under that term. The reason why the concept of haunting seems so apposite in the 21st century, was the sense of we live in the ruins of lost futures, really, the future failed to arrive, in the 21st century. Not a specific detrimental future with had in mind failed to arrive, but the sense of futurity had disappeared from 21st century life. Itâs that pang, that longing, for a future that failed to arrive, seems to me one of the curial dimensions.
RJLH:
A sense of having lost-out, a sense of loss.
MF:
Yes, a paradoxical loss, the loss of something that never was, that you never had.
RJLH:
As Iâm sure youâre aware, the word/term Hauntology finds its origins in (Jacques) Derridaâs 1993 document Spectres de Marx: l'ĂŠtat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Ăditions GalilĂŠe). Published in English the following year as Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International (Routledge).
âTo haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a Hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjurationâ
In Spectres of Marx, the word/term Hauntology is just kind of thrown up, but I wonder if youâve ever seen Ken McMullenâs 1983 film Ghost Dance?
MF:
I have the DVD you know.
RJLH:
Derrida appears as himself in the film and expands a little on his thinking regarding haunting, mourning, etc. I feel I must make it clear at this point, that, despite the fact that Jacquesâ is responsible for coming up with the word/term Hauntology, I am not a great fan of him or his work. Nonetheless, heâs someone who throws up ideas and ideas are always good.
ââŚinstead of diminishing the realm of ghosts, as does any scientific or technical thought, is leaving behind the age of ghosts as part of the feudal age, which is somewhat primitive technology, as a certain perinatal age. Whereas I believe that ghosts are part of the future and that the modern technology ⌠like cinematography and telecommunications enhances the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt usâŚâ
âYou know, ghosts donât just appear⌠they come back. In french we talk about them âreturningâ. Now that presupposes a memory of the past that has never taken the form of the presentâŚâ
MF:
The opacity, the intentional opacity, ânothing is what itâs supposed to beâ, etc. The whole underlying sentiment of pious indeterminacy, as Iâve described it before, that kind of priestly dimension to it, which I also donât find too appealing.
Itâs also interesting for me where the encounter with Derrida came from, which for me was not initially through philosophy, but through music journalism anyway. It was via people like Ian Penman, Mark Sinker, who would frequently evoked Derridaâs concepts in the pages of the New Musical Express, in the 80s. Which now seems slightly crazy that that could ever have been the case.
RJLH:
As a young man buying Sounds every week, one thing leads to another. You take an interest in a band, a musician, maybe musician isnât quite the right word. Take Throbbing Gristle for example. You get into Throbbing Gristle, you read an article, or an interview and before you know it youâre taking an interest in William S. Burroughs or Aleister Crowley. Do you think this process is still going on today?
MF:
I donât think so. What I would call popular modernism, from the late 50s through to the end of the 90s, it was a particular kind of hub, perhaps a threshold which linked, opened up lots of other spaces. So yes, you would find out about literature, theory, philosophy, through music. Music wasnât just music. For that period anyway, there was a music culture, rather than music as such, that could operate that way, Iâm not sure it does in quite the same way now.
RJLH:
All is not lost though. Your interview with Burial comes to mind, where he mentions M.R. James.
MF:
It was pure luck that Burial mentioned that, right at the end of the interview. I was just about to wrap it up and he started talking about M.R. James, which was really interesting, yeah.
MF:
I should send you my piece on Alan Garner.
RJLH:
Some of Alanâs work, The Owl Service in particular, ticks a lots of boxes for me. If one sees any of this as a box ticking exercise. Pre-Hauntology, the way I saw the world, with its interconnections, as I still see it now, I would try to explain this phenomenon, this phenomenology, as a kind of Otherness.
Back in 2011, as part of its Literary Walks specials, the long running BBC Radio 4 program Ramblings went on a walk with Alan around his beloved Alderley Edge. And as he walked, in conversation with the shows host Claire Balding, Alan made numerous references to this Otherness.
MF:
Yeah, I think that one of the 21st century pangs, longing, is that comparative lack of otherness I think. That nostalgic dimension of hauntological culture, is a lot to do with a moment when otherness was much more integrated into the popular culture. And the popular culture was a feeling of connecting doors to otherness in a way, I think itâs almost entirely extirpated now. Full of references of para psychology and the like, these would be part of the substance of mass culture in many ways⌠de-stranging is my term, I think. Whatâs happened in the 21st century, in other ways, is the collapse of the sense of otherness.
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(Book Review: A Hidden Landscape once a Week | UAL)
"A Hidden Landscape once a Week: The Unruly Curiosity of the UK Music Press in the 1960sâ80s, in the Words of Those Who Were There. By Mark Sinker (2018)"
See also:
Read three extracts from A Hidden Landscape Once A Week - The Wire
A Hidden Landscape Once a Week review: Between the lines of UK rock journalism â The Irish Times
Just Backdated: A HIDDEN LANDSCAPE ONCE A WEEK, edited by Mark Sinker
A Hidden Landscape Once A Week: The Unruly Curiosity Of the UK Music Press in the 1960s-80s...in the words of those who were there by Mark Sinker | Goodreads
So he plunges into the Twilight World, and a political discourse framed in terms of witch-craft and demons. Itâs not hard to understand why, once you start considering it. The war that the Church and triumphant Reason waged on a scatter of wise-women and midwives, lingering practitioners of folk-knowledge, has provided a powerful popular image for a huge struggle for political and intellectual dominance, as first Catholics and later Puritans invoked a rise in devil-worship to rubbish their opponents. The ghost-writer and antiquarian M.R. James (one of the writers Smith appears to have lived on during his peculiar drugged adolescence) transformed the folk-memory into a bitter class-struggle between established science and law, and the erratic, vengeful, relentless undead world of wronged spirits, cheated of property or voice, or the simple dignity of being believed in.
Mark Sinker, Watching the City Hobgoblins, quoted in Mark Fisher, Memorex for the Krakens: The Fallâs Pulp Modernism (part II)
THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS â In an exclusive extract from his new Hidden Landscape Once a Week, Mark Sinker revisits the "unruly curiosity" of THE UK MUSIC PRESS in the early '70s. Plus he explores themes of Englishness in the music of Madness and more (NME, 1988) and considers record-company "contract-breakers" Frank Zappa, David Bowie and... er, Bros (The Wire, 1992)âŚ
Whoâs going to deny that BATTLE RE-ENACTMENT is a non-starter, if youâre at all nervous about being thought NAFF⌠small-town IT guys in cuirasses bussing over to Naseby to pretend to be gunned down by chain-shot fired a platoon of togged-up provincial chartered surveyors? And yet and yet and yetâŚ
All the same, there are elements to be learnt from re-enactments that official history finds it very hard not to omit, from the smell of hot metal and cordite and andrenalised horses to the viscreal feel of being one small confused person without perspective, weighed down by your kit, lost at the centre of a swirling smoky action that will mean something very different to Big H History than it does to you⌠Theory has a kind of built-in whiggish condescension-of-posterity towards those who arenât up to speed with todayâs ways of seeing the past: with the result that critics and writers are inclined to map retrospectively onto the worldview of generals rather than footsoldiers; artistic intention rather than audience use (even radical poets are secret royalists, argued Hazlitt)
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The advantage of Science Fiction as a point of cultural departure is that it allows for a series of worst-case futures - of hells-on-Earth and being in them - which are woven into every kind of everyday present reality (on a purely technical level, value in SF is measured against the fictional creation of other worlds, or people, believable no matter how different). The central fact in Black Science Fiction - self-consciously so named or not - is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened: that (in PEâs phrase) Armageddon been in effect. Black SF writers - Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler - write about worlds after catastrophic disaster; about the modalities of identity without hope of resolution, where race and nation and neighbourhood and family are none of them enough to obviate betrayal...
Mark Sinker - Loving The Alien: Black Science Fiction (1992)
I read a book as a child in which one character had topsy-turvy optics: at a mile, he was a towering giant; at ten miles, his image was so vast and indistinct it blurred into the sky; up close, he was tiny, shrunken, sad and lonely. After 1991, the year of Dangerous, this became Michael Jacksonâs story.
Mark Sinker, "Michael Jackson" from Frieze's 20 year anniversary feature
