Hauntology Ad Nauseam: Reynolds Schools Me

You think you know a thing or two about music until you talk to a guy like Simon Reynolds. Here, he responds to my last post:

“I do think that generally speaking the dub thing has both been over-theorised to the point of exhaustion. I don’t think the music has much more to give us at this point, theory-wise! And the idea that dub is the last word in sonic hauntology is off base. It’s not even the first word—there was all that Musique concrète stuff going on, and then psychedelia. I think with the Ghost Box bunch of people and other figures like Ariel Pink who are being talked up as hauntological, it’s far more relevant to talk about Joe Meek or even “Strawberry Fields Forever”—now that’s a phantasmagoric record, on a production level, and not coincidentally, it’s a song about nostalgia and memory. And it’s a good six years before Lee Perry got into ghostified production!

“I also get a bit of a cognitive dissonance sometimes when reading dub theory and it’s all about deconstruction, ghosts, etc, but the actual vibe of so much dub is...kindly. It’s like this forgiving and wise music, as opposed to a wrecking, derailing experience. Either that, or it’s kind of sensual/sensuous, an erotics of sound, all about pure sonic delight, these tantalizing flickers of sound. I’m talking more about your classic Jamaican ’70s dub, when it was wedded to roots reggae culture, and in that sense dub is essentially an adjunct to a religious music—a form of Caribbean gospel. So as much as the art of making the records technically involves a deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, I think the whole point of the music is about a longing for presence: the presence of Jah, the numinous light of the nimbus surrounding him...

“It’s really later on in the hands of white producers (Sherwood above all) and theorists that dub as this assault course of headfuck FX and spatial derangement really takes hold.”

I think Simon’s point about dub being a "longing for presence" is interesting, and probably partly true, though as in the case of the best blues music (I’m thinking Robert Johnson, for example) or the jazz of Coltrane, it becomes difficult to say whether the music is a longing for God or an exploration of His absence. It isn’t clear to me whether the longing is for communion or oblivion. Perhaps the two meet at some point.

And on the flip side, I would argue that what white, poststructuralist philosophers like Derrida demonstrate with their continual deconstructive movement, the endless, self-reflexive regression, is desire for a kind of covert or unacknowledged transcendence. Actually, I think Derrida's late work grapples with this more self-consciously, tries to understand what “presence” might still look or sound like. Peter Goldman at UC Irvine puts it better than I do:

“While Derrida iconoclastically refuses any figuration of the sacred, he still insists on the incommensurability, the absolute difference of God. As a reaction against the fear that we have lost or forgotten the sacred (or Being), and thus the source for all significance, academics have brought back the sacred with a vengeance. But as a result of iconoclasm, the sacred now takes the abstract form of absolute difference or alterity, and any attempt to understand or even discuss rationally the incommensurable is abandoned. Derrida’s incantatory language—the poetical cadences of his prose, the long and rapturous repetitions—reveals an aestheticism which is at heart rooted in a deep nostalgia for the sacred. His hostility towards modern technological civilization reflects the fear that the modern forgetting of the sacred will allow for unrestrained violence. The so-called primitive ambivalence of the sacred continues then, even in modern academia. On the one hand we resent any defined figuration of the sacred for presuming to colonize the space which is essentially spiritual and thus (for modernity) individual. But on the other hand, we still long for a sense of sacred difference, an absolute sacred immune to the corrosive power of resentment.” [Emphasis mine]

(Thanks again to Richard at The Existence Machine for helping to frame this discussion for me and for pointing me in the direction of folks who have been thinking it through.)