Hauntology, Revived

In 1994, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote a book called Specters of Marx. It was, in part, a response to American philosopher Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. "What we may be witnessing," Fukuyama said, "is not just the end of the Cold War...but the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." The Soviety Union had collapsed, the Berlin Wall had come down, and capitalism and Western liberal democracy had finally won.

But wait, said Derrida: all this talk of the end of history is really just an attempt to "exorcise the spirit of Marxism" from our collective memory. And then he went on to look at the some of the "spectral" metaphors in Marx, whose description of capitalism is full of vampires and ghosts and the living dead.

Along the way, Derrida coined the term "hauntology" as a pun on "ontology." Ontology is the study of being, of what exists. Derrida wants to say that our ideas of reality are "haunted" by the stuff we exclude—the things we don't want to remember or acknowledge. The Holocaust, for example, or the slave trade. Our sense of Western history as the progressive march of "freedom" and "civilization" is haunted by genocide and enslavement.

Lately, this concept of hauntology has been kicked around quite a bit by music critics (and by lit/culture bloggers more generally, such as Richard at The Existence Machine). It's being pretty loosely applied at this point to anything that sounds "spooky," which is fine, but there's value in applying the term more rigorously. I recently attended a discussion of David Byrne and Brian Eno's 1981 album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which lots of critics consider a seminal album in the history of electronic music. It's pretty good, and it was clearly influential.

But the history of "sonic hauntology" as it's constructed around a record like Bush of Ghosts is haunted itself, by the specter of Black artists like Lee Scratch Perry. Perry produced a good deal of Bob Marley's music, especially the darker songs like "Duppy Conqueror," "Mr. Brown," "Kaya," and "Small Axe." Perry put the dread in natty. In fact, he described Dub as "the ghost in me coming out."

There's so much to say about Lee Scratch Perry—and much has already been said—but it bears repeating, especially now as the history of electronic music is being rewritten. Here's the writer Erik Davis on the history of Dub:

"Dub arose from doubling—the common Jamaican practice of reconfiguring a prerecorded track into any number of new songs. Dub calls the apparent 'authenticity' of roots reggae into question because it destroys the holistic integrity of singer and song. It proclaims a primary postmodern law: there is no original, no homeland."

In other words, no solid ontological ground.

Does anyone remember the creepy "duet" between Natalie Cole and her dead father Nat King Cole? That's a good example of what these music critics are trying to describe. But it isn't only this genre of electronic music that's spooky; these self-consciously eerie electronic songs simply allow us to experience, in exaggerated form, the uncanny nature of representation itself. Re-presentation: the presenting again of something that no longer exists as it once did. Actually, as it never did—things in the world are "always already" infused with history, memory, imagination. They aren't simple and solid, but half-fantasy right from the start, and continually in flux.

"By mutating its repetitions of previously used material," Davis continues, "dub adds something new and distinctly uncanny, vaporizing into a kind a doppelganger music. Despite the crisp attack of its drums and the heaviness of its bass, it swoops through empty space, spectral and disembodied. John Corbett even links the etymology of the word 'dub' with duppie (Jamaican patois for ghost)."

Which brings us back to the history of slavery, of "no homeland." According to the blogger k-punk, "It's no accident that hauntology begins in the Black Atlantic, with dub and hip-hop. Time being out of joint is the defining feature of the black Atlantean experience."

This is what's at stake in the term "hauntology" losing its precision: the memory of specific historical experiences that called for specific aesthetic responses. For example, the concept of hauntology can be usefully applied to Rastafarianism, which constructed its own history from the discarded fragments of the Bible. Rastafarianism is a kind of ghost of Western Biblical history, as least as most of us know it. According to some traditions, Haile Selassie was the 225th king in an unbroken line of Ethiopian monarchs descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, leading Rastas to conclude that African people are among the true children of Israel. And in fact, Black Jews have lived in Ethiopia for centuries, disconnected from the rest of Judaism.

Like Rastafarianism, Dub is a response to a specific historical situation. Artists like Perry rose to that occasion. If Byrne and Eno were inspired by Perry's work and wanted to appropriate it for their own concerns, that's great. But when critics describe B&E as these "nerdy," "cerebral" musicians experimenting with electronic music, they start to construct just another history of the Western Avant-garde that ignores the intellectual contribution of Black artists. Perry was as much a theoretician as B&E.

Furthermore, if music critics are going to appropriate Derrida's theory, they'll have to reckon with the fact that "hauntology" as a concept is oddly disembodied (Derrida's ideas usually are), and it should be oddly embodied instead. Derrida is talking about writing, not music. I think that the phenomenon of the "phantom limb" might be a useful addition to a theory of hauntology, especially as it relates to music, which is more sensory and immediate than writing.

In the book The Phantom Museum, the writer Gaby Wood says, "In the sixteenth century, the French surgeon Ambroise Paré discovered what he described as a 'strange and grievous fact'; later, in the course of another war, the writer and neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell gave it a name. He said his patients were suffering from 'phantom limbs,' since these 'vivid hallucinations' were in fact a form of haunting. 'Nearly every man who loses a limb,' Mitchell wrote, 'carries about with him a constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member, a sensory ghost of that much of himself.'"

Is a record a kind of phantom limb?

One final thing: On his Bliss Blog, Simon Reynolds asked readers if they could come up with a catchier name than "sonic hauntology." Any ideas?