Spending time on Padraig’s Subject-barred brought the concept of hauntology to my attention via this piece titled The Gramophone’s Technological Uncanny which furthers Mark K-Punk’s investigation of sonic hauntology. In its origins hauntology is Jacques Derrida’s neologism which is, in French, a pun on ontology and refers to, in the words of the Halflives website: “the paradoxical state of the specter, which is neither being nor non-being.”
Besides by K-Punk (here in a piece on Kubrick), hauntology is also used by Simon Reynolds here and by Woebot here.
No doubt the term goes back 1848 when Marx and Engels stated “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism.” Haunting is about ghost, and one of the first people to use the word in a musical context was David Toop’s Haunted Weather : Music, Silence, and Memory (2004). (oops, I am wrong here, it was Ian Penman in ‘[the Phantoms of] TRICKNOLOGY [versus a Politics of Authenticity]‘ in The Wire from 1995)
About four weeks ago, The Existence Machine also wondered just what is hauntology.
K-Punk thinks this is a good summary of the concept.
Someone wrote an Wikipedia entry on hauntology in October of 2006 but it was deleted by consensus. It finally passed Wikipedia stringent notability criteria in August 2007.
See hauntology at artandpop.
5 responses so far ↓
jahsonic // November 26, 2006 at 11:56 am |
Hauntology update at the Existence Machine with a focus on dub, the Black Atlantic and the Talking Heads album My life in the Bush of ghosts.
Also, comments by academitasse
Αιώνια επιστροφή (remix) « πολλές λέξεις // March 6, 2007 at 1:13 am |
[...] χρόνο (και κάτι παραπάνω ίσως) έχει φουντώσει πολύ η κουβέντα για τη λεγόμενη μουσική σκηνή της [...]
Feast of Palmer » Rockhunter: Your No. 1 Site for Antiquarian Sounds of the Past, Present and Future! // August 31, 2007 at 9:21 am |
[...] writers on hauntology are doing — including K-Punk, here and here and other bloggers, including this one and people in general forum discussions — is regarding sublime landscapes, both cultural and [...]
Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve been here before? On Hauntology « The Ideal Tiger // February 17, 2008 at 3:15 am |
[...] tendency (let’s not call it a movement) in English retro-electronic music. As a genre, hauntology takes its name from a Jacques Derrida coinage, so fairly demands to be theorised. An article on the [...]
kagablog » What is hauntology? // May 1, 2009 at 4:42 am |
[...] this article first appeared on jahsonic’s blog [...]