July 29, 2008
K-Punk says on the concept of hauntology that it must be understood in relation to postmodernity. Postmodernism, in turn, has to be understood – as Jameson has taught us – as ‘the logic of late capitalism’. K-Punk adds:
Jameson’s great contribution was to have grasped was to have grasped the way in which, far from leading to an efflorescence of cultural innovation, the unprecedented dominion of capitalism over the globe and the unconscious would lead only to cultural situation given over to previously inconceivable levels of stagnation and inertia. Shorn of the confidence that an elite modernism could provide a revolutionary alternative to pacifying entertainment, no longer capable of believing that there was any form of detournement which could not in turn be re-incorporated and commodified, Jameson is the successor to both the Frankfurt School and the Situationists.Maybe we need to think of photography as a darker art than most people routinely practice.
Jameson and Baudrillard understood that the user-generated content, together with the concomitant retreat of the cultural elite that has enabled it, would not lead to new kinds of creativity, but to pastiche and retrospection. Just as the capitalist language of ‘diversity’ is a cover for new modes of homogeneity.
What Jameson calls the ‘nostalgia mode’ is one expression of this homogeneity. Hauntology is the counterpart to this nostalgia mode.
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Gary,
I think another source for hauntology is Derrida's Specters of Marx where Derrida takes what he sees as Marx's love of Shakespeare as a starting point for an exploration of untimeliness in Hamlet. So, for Derrida Marx is haunted by ghosts (The start of the Communist Manifesto is 'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.') And a way to think about what ghosts mean for a political project is to look at the ghost that is Hamlet's father and how his message to Hamlet comes from a different past to the accepted version and makes Hamlet's time out of joint.
Hauntology is a play on ontology: being is haunted. I think it's right to suggest that if present being is haunted by spectres then photography, as one of the primary modes of doucumenting reality, can be a political art that captures ghosts and unsettles the nostalgia mode.