Anti-Hauntology, Accelerationism, Aestheticism

Retrofuturism, or more explicitly, cyberpunk, is one of the most exhausted hauntological aesthetics. As a recall to how the 20th-century imagined 21st-century life, cyberpunk’s influence is evident throughout modern film, music, and multidimensional media, the genre represents a shift from originality at conception to becoming the recycled aesthetic of the past. Consider the games Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout, which take inspiration from the 1956’s sci-fi genre represented by Forbidden Planet and Starship Troopers. Forbidden Planet was one of the first major blockbusters to evoke a truly new vision of the future, and one of the earliest citations of techno-horror. Starship Troopers was one of the first inceptions of the automated exoskeleton, now a common tech-sci-fi trope. Fallout and Cyberpunk 2077 draw directly from 50’s imaginings of futuristic tech, revisiting the films and books as a “visual text code”. Cyberpunk at its conception in the ’80s was edgy and even arrogant; it was an anti-hauntological promise of a neo-liberal future. However, when the once-revolutionary aesthetic was revived with Fallout in 1997, the depiction was no longer that of a pending neo-liberal future, but a crystallized artifact lacking fulfillment. In the late Mark Fisher‘s terms “the future had been canceled”. Here enters hauntology. This concept of a future which refused to arrive, yet remains embodied in the aesthetics of popular culture, was derived from Derrida, who, in authoring Spectres of Marx, projected the notion of a present contrived by an amalgamation of the no longer or not yet. As Fisher puts it,

Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede and surround it, allowing it to possess such consistency and intelligibility as it does. In the famous example, any particular linguistic term gains its meaning, not from its positive qualities but its difference from other terms.

How ineluctable is hauntology? Are we condemned to its omnipresent force? Can anti-hauntological aesthetics exist in our increasingly saturated media-driven existence? Against the backdrop of operationalized hauntology, the nebulous boundaries of anti-hauntology gain clarity. In truth, anti-hauntological aesthetics can and do exist, even if only fleetingly the way cyberpunk and the counterculture was once able (although no longer in such a conspicuous manner). For all hauntaology’s pervasiveness, there are methods, potentialities glimpsed in the ambiguity and accelerationism of projects such as PC music which this essay aims to explore.

To design a project which escapes the hauntology disease, the symptoms and origins must be recognized. In Ghosts of My Life, Fisher re-orients hauntology to a variety of cultural forms, while retaining the original political sentiments. Fisher, ever the devout polymath, cites from multiple mediums, each marked by a certain anachronism and inertia. Examples vary widely, from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to Amy Winehouse’s cover of The Zutons’s “Valerie”. Particularly poignant, The Shining is a film riddled with hauntological symbols, one door leading to the ballroom playing 1920’s pop music, while another reveals a woman’s aging and decaying body. Indeed, the film is a perfect metaphor for the 21st century’s methodized practice of time collaging, so much so that “The jumbling up of time, the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so prevalent that it is no longer even noticed”. Frederick Jameson also critiqued the postmodern condition of culture, noted it is being increasingly invaded with revivalism and pastiche:

It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings, as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our present, as though we had become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself — or, at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history.

Jameson referred to the condition as a “nostalgia mode”; it’s an obsession with the old future constituted by the pathological block of dealing with a murky, mangled present. Central to this inability to look forward is a type of mourning for the promised future of neoliberalism, “the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialized”. Neoliberalism which demands short fixes and immediate solutions cannot look past the next fiscal quarter, leading to the repetition of old already established cultural forms and congealing into a cultural impasse. “These specters, the specters of lost futures — reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world of the futures’’.

Fisher and Jameson’s analysis harkens back to Horkheimer and Adorno’s writing on the culture industry, which they claim is characterized by perpetual standardization and infectious sameness driven by technological rationality. Technological progress hasn’t stopped and is most likely accelerating. Yet there is a crucial difference. Where technology in the past sparked the inspiration for the expansion of new cultural forms or genres, today new technologies are subject to the repetition and refurbishment of already established formulations. “Everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down”. Fisher discusses this radical concentration of time and space contextualized by post-media; techno-tele discursivity, techno-teleiconicity “simulacra” and “synthetic images”, endemic to hauntological culture. This discussion of the tele shows that hauntology concerns a crisis of space as well as time,

As theorists such as Virilio and Baudrillard had long acknowledged — and Specters of Marx can also be read as Derrida settling his account with these thinkers — ‘tele technologies collapse both space and time. Events that are spatially distant become available to an audience instantaneously.

Neither Baudrillard nor Derrida would live to see the full effects, the radically contracted overstimulation of space and time of the contemporary digital age (if only to revel in their prophetic abilities). The digital age chaos easily translates to simulacrum’s transaesthetic society — a new dematerialized society of signs, images, and codes. Defined by Baudrillard as ‘the moment when modernity exploded on us’, the transaesthetic moment is one where everything becomes aestheticized- manufactured into a sign for consumption. Indeed, this collapse of space and time lends itself to that implosion of the trans aesthetics’ space, flattening all objects into the symbols and signs of a post-modern modality. All art, all radical anti-capitalist media is deterritorialized, capitulated into a prostrate mass, any subversive force suffocating under the market. Illustrating the aestheticization of all objects and forms, Baudrillard writes:

Everything aestheticizes itself: politics aestheticizes itself into spectacle, sex into advertising and pornography, and the whole gamut of activities into what is held to be called culture, which is something totally different from art; this culture is an advertising and media semiologising process which invades everything.

In transaesthetic culture, art itself is made over as a sign to be consumed visually alongside a parade of other symbols and representations. As with the advent of Pop Art, we begin to interpret artworks in relation to the images we are familiar with from other visual sites, like cinema, pornography, fashion, advertising, and the history of Western art, all of which are populated by hauntological qualities.

Again is hauntology inescapable? Fortunately, this hauntological position of complete cultural submission to a post-modern, one-dimensionalization of art does not go unchallenged. Questions bubble up, pooling in the blogosphere associated with the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit). How do we escape this left melancholia? Is hauntology a backward defeatist position to take, pining after useless potentialities? What would constitute an anti-hauntology? The reply was, more so indirectly: accelerationism. A stance Fisher himself would refer to in 2008 as “left-landianism”. Alex Williams described the position, Benjamin Noys coined the term, Reza Negarestani critiqued it, Owen Hatherley dialogued with it, and Mark Fisher helped bring it to life. Mark Fisher went from the arch-hauntologist of 2006 to perhaps the most vocal supporter of accelerationism — a position he would openly support and promote until his death in 2017.

Others were also questioning, pushing back, and by virtue of their findings promoting the concept of accelerationism. The most finalized, pointed critique came from Alex Williams on his Splintering Bone Ashes blog, since shuttered and deleted from the internet. Published in the summer of 2008, in a post called “Against Hauntology (Giving Up the Ghost)”, he fatally attacks that argument that had come to dominate the music press, writing:

A fashionable current in the territory where critical theory touches pop culture is a renewed, expanded, and re-oriented notion of the Hauntological. This philosophical concept originates in Derrida’s Spectres Of Marx, but in its current formulation, it is applied to a particular aesthetics of pop music, whilst carrying with it the echoes of its original political context. In a sense, Hauntology’s ghostly audio is seen as a form of good postmodernism, as set against the bad PoMo of a rampaging retroism. As it seems we are at the end of (cultural) history, it is certainly a seductive argument. By foregrounding the processes at the material level (sampling, versioning, deliberately invoking buried/false childhood memories, etc) it is contended that such music comes to terms with the deadlock which we face, the inability to properly think the new as such, and makes of this condition something positive.

The “something positive” that Williams evoked was a sort of counter-intuitive punk stance. which could remain as angry and deconstructive as much of what had become known as “hauntological” music, but which “would be crucially bereft of the quality of mourning” as described previously. This is what stuck in most people’s craw about hauntology then — and continues to now. As Williams continues, “hauntological musical works are frequently acts of reverent mourning for some better time, for some golden age forever foreclosed to us.” Williams’ final critique is damning: Hauntology is a cowardly move, lusting after utopias that never were, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless re-iterative mechanisms of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism, merely in a hyper-self-aware form. The alternatives that Williams offers essentially paved the way for accelerationism. He writes that, alternatively, we could develop “a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop-musical eventual 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 undecidable.” In essence, anti-hauntology’s first name was accelerationism.

The position formed is accompanied by the following necessary questions. How does an accelerationist cultural project manifest? What space must it curate, occupy, or share when the circuit of capitalism is closed to any subversive “outside” to the experimental, to the avant-garde? The use of the term “circuit” evokes Nick Land’s own description of accelerationism:

In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to uncompensated capitalism. The basic — and, of course, to some real highly consequential degree actually installed — schema is a positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were among those to capture important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is incrementally closed or intensified, it exhibits ever-greater autonomy or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive.

As the circuit closes off any potential enclaves with which to effectively critique the system, it follows that any anti-hauntological, imaginative, creative structure must find a balance in embodying the system, the spectacle, the simulation, in order to utilize a critique. It finds itself positioned as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now adopting the ways of the enemy. Enter PC Music, the spawning of hyper pop, and the impetus for this essay.

Founded in June of 2013, PC Music was a small label out of the UK, The releases were rapid. Online only and initially only available on SoundCloud. PC Music artists appeared to utilize as the subtext for their personas: the relentless nature of pop music consumption. The label was a collective of musicians and performers who aimed to embody that exact transaesthetic space that Baudrillard illustrated. Seeking no “outside”, making no moral prescriptions but coalescing around capitalism’s limit as well as the boundaries of what could be considered popular music, while evidencing how pedestrian and limp overt progrssive political art had become. Both the label’s music and public imagery projected a grotesquely glossy pop which in the same instant could be both angelic and abrasive, pushing polished pop tropes to their logical extreme. Transmogrifying something that was traditionally clean and cute into an entity that circuitously pointed to the erie sterility hyper commodified corporate pop. The influences are a coalescence of J-pop, New Age swing, 90s bubblegum trance, Nightcore, UK Grime, contemporary pop, Happy Hardcore, and the list goes on. PC was big shiny mutant pop, reterritorialized by underground UK artists. Of course, this also promotes a legitimate question: What exactly makes this project sonically anti-hauntological? Congratulations, you have matched together every genre you could think of. Is this not exactly what Fisher criticized, a useless rehashing of past sonic aesthetics? However, that argument is shallow, no music or general creative endeavor exists within a vacuum. These new musical forms are invented not through a mournful nostalgia or retrospectivty, but as in the case of PC music, radically exotic incoherency, which has no desire to exist in past futures but has an explicit will to consume (in nauseating volumes) the present and the future of late capitalism’s hyperreality, where art echoes in both form and content the serial reproduction of the commodity. Never before heard sonic aesthetics can be produced through a variety of means, through technological advancements, or causative combinations of pre-existing sounds. Artists like SOPHIE and Arca (integral to the PC scene) are essentially creating new assemblages with sound. As Deleuze and Guattari state in A Thousand Plateaus: “An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections”. In other words, it is precisely the novel combination of sounds that allows a sonic assemblage to be classified as ‘new’.

Artists related to this label included A. G. Cook, Astra King, caro, EasyFun, felicita, Hannah Diamond, Lil Data,, Namasenda, Planet 1999, and several others who have worked closely with the artists or have had a singular release with the label. One artist who never officially released any solo work with PC but was critical in developing the PC sound and the foundations of hyper pop was SOPHIE. Her debut album “The Oil of Every Pearls Un Inside” was full of rubbery plasticky fizz, and bubbly shrieking sounds created synthetically with such tech as Elektron Monomachine: a digital synthesizer and sequencer that’s sound palette ranges from emulations of analog synthesis staples to rich polyphonic textures and harmonies. It is capable of FM and speech synthesis and has dedicated tools for synthesizing drum sounds. It can also emulate the sound chip of a Commodore 64 computer — producing distinctive sci-fi sounds characteristic of classic 8-bit video games. Needless to say, the album was void of much acoustic sound. Despite the outlandish themes on the majority of the tracks, the music mingled with incredibly mundane pop tropes and melodies. But it was precisely this mixing of the prosaic and the eccentric which created the ambivalence of the PC project. As A.G Cook expressed in an interview with Tank magazine:

What interests me about pop music and commercial imagery in the first place is that it has the potential to be overwhelming, extravagant, and banal all at the same time. Not only that, but mixing “high culture” with pop culture has lost its radical edge to the extent that it’s more or less mainstream…Though it means that there is room for a subtler and possibly more compelling way of engaging with these ideas, where shock value and direct irony is replaced with ambiguity and uncanniness.

That “ambiguity and uncanniness” are present throughout the PC discography. PC Music Volumes 1 & 2 (a collection of the releases) exhibited this experiment fantastically with songs that would be almost painfully formulaic in their corporate imitations, followed by a song that is affrontingly violent in comparison. For instance, Broken Flowers by Danny L. Harle has one opening stanza, then the chorus repeats for the rest of the song incrementally with no key or tone alterations on a stale pop instrumental. Yet on the same tracklist follows “a new family” by felicita filled with chaotic future-shock, blended with pointillist electro, populated by roaring distorted vocals.

Although the music itself was central, the label’s internet presence formulated an ambiguous shizophony that was unique to PC music and allowed it to draw the “outside” toward itself. The aesthetics intentionally confuse the line between music images, products, advertisements, and critique. The music is often accompanied by websites with bizarre and cryptic messages and releases are often assisted by actual product advertisements for clothing or perfume. A prime example is found in the 2014 track “Hey QT” a track produced by Sophie and A.G. Cook sourcing from their own Bizarro World of big-budget aesthetics accompanied with a music video of otherworldly pop personas that appear to be asexual androids programmed to simulate innocent playground love. The track features what seems to be a blatant product placement ad for DrinkQT. Throughout the video, DrinkQT remains firmly omnipresent, if not practically celebrated. QT was an initialism for Quinn Thomas, the living embodiment of the semi-fictitious energy drink, DrinkQT. The catch here is that the product in fact never existed or at least it didn’t at the time of release. The drink was later available for some live performances adding to the confusion of authenticity, In part displaying how authenticity itself is an artifice, a commodity to be exchanged. Constant juxtapositions of obvious imitation bordering on mockery, and genuine transgressive experimentation, lends itself to a very subtle interplay throughout the performance. Are they serious? Are they joking? PC as a whole pushes against the idea of any work being satirical. But it is precisely this ambivalence that allows PC to coexist with a more inventive and imaginative alien-type critique than any explicitly leftist or countercultural genre.

In the past, PC music somehow grasped the sense of transgressive art and music in a world where art has largely lost its ability to challenge the status quo. Where it is not a modern-day transgressive punk rock band performance, it’s Britney Spears. You can only listen to so many noise and experimental records before you realize only so much can be said in that context. PC music, in particular, says, “look at this grotesquely shiny pop music” like boy bands or Britney Spears, each created in a sterile boardroom by executives, engineered by rich white men for the main purpose of reaching as wide an audience as possible purely for profit, as opposed to any artistic merit. PC absorbs corporate aesthetics like semiotic parasites to transform music into an ambiguous assemblage of sound and signs, escaping hauntology with post-irony and an embrace of the simulation where there is no outside left to occupy, there is no counterculture, no rebellious art form, no anti-corporation aesthetic. There is no genre that is not co-opted by the market into empty signs. As Baudrillard evokes in his lecture, Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art:

There is no dialectic between the two, synthesis is always a weak solution, dialectics is always a nostalgic solution. The only radical and modern solution: potentializing what is new, unexpected, great in commodity, in other words, the formal indifference to usefulness and value, the primacy given to circulation without reserve. This is what the work of art should be: it should take on the characteristics of shock, strangeness, surprise, anxiety, liquidity and even self-destruction, instantaneity, and unreality that are found in commodities.

The “dialectics is always a nostalgic solution” reflects the hauntological, the corporate vs the anti-corporate, yet there is no longer an anti-corporate, that signifier is an illusion of an effective critique, a “lost future” as it appears in punk and goth scenes. PC music takes those “characteristics of shock, strangeness, surprise, anxiety, liquidity and even self-destruction, instantaneity, and unreality that are found in commodities’’ and still manages to make a critique of capital while embodying the flows “that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution” accelerating that “movement that drives it toward this limit” (Anti-Oedipus), instead of taking an empty counter-cultural position. PC is terminally self aware and deliberate for all its assimilatory aspects, it is that counter-intuitive punk Willams guestered at, creating a new position, the most effective space for imagining a post-capitalist world in contrast to agonizing over lost futures.