Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 4: Tomorrow (Chapter 10: Ghosts of Futures Past)

Simon Reynolds: Author of Retromania (2011)
and an 'old modernist-minded post-punk'

I.

Technically, this is not really a review, so much as an attempt to occupy the textual space that Reynolds has generously opened up in his book Retromania and meet him there in and on his own terms.

But it is also the staging of a confrontation or reckoning [Auseinandersetzung]; an attempt not to find common ground - I clearly share with Mr Reynolds certain interests, ideas, and points of reference - but key areas of difference, so as to open up a pathos of distance between us as cultural commentators.

Readers who have worked their way through the first three parts of this post can decide how successful I've been in that aim so far ... 

II.

The title of chapter 10 suggests that the hauntological theme with which Reynolds closed chapter 9 is going to be developed. And obviously, that makes me happy, as I'm somewhat smitten by this spooky pop cultural concept developed by Reynolds and Mark Fisher in 2005, based on Derrida's philosophical work in this area [a]. 

 

I even like the punning neologisms that have been coined, such as ghost modernism and seance fiction - though maybe Reynolds might be challenged when he describes sampling as groove robbing (not because it's a pun too far, but because it implies intellectual property and the ownership of sounds) [b].  

Sampling isn't theft; it's a practice that reveals the musical equivalent of intertextuality (this is sometimes known as sonic resonance, or intersonority); i.e. the manner in which all recordings echo and refer to other recordings. To put it simply: there is no such thing as an original pop song or an original piece of music; everything's a cover version and the dead are always with us.   

Reynolds finds this uncanny - "because different studio auras and different eras were being placed in 'ghostly adjacence'" [c] - but then, as he goes on to point out, it's not unusual. For recording has "always had a spectral undercurrent" [312], not least because it separates "the human voice from a living body" [312]. 

 

He continues: "Records have certainly habituated us to living with phantoms [...] In a sense, a record really is a ghost: it's a trace of a musician's body, the after-imprint of breath [...]" [312]. That's true. At least that's true of analogue recordings, but not digital works, in which the direct physical relationship with the sound source is replaced by a reading of such in terms of binary data.    

Reynolds concludes: "Recording is pretty freaky, then, if you think about it." [313]. Though the same can be said of photography, of course; "both are reality's death mask" [312]. Sampling simply intensifies this inherent supernaturalism, creating a "musical event that never happened; a mixture of time-travel and seance" [313]. 

 

(Again, at this point I have to express my admiration for Reynolds's thinking here - I love all this stuff on the art of musical ghost arrangement, etc.)

 

But is sampling a form of exploitation? Reynolds seems to think so: 

 

"In a certain sense - neither literally true nor utterly metaphorical - sampling is enslavement: involuntary labour that's been alienated from its original environment and put into service in a completely other context, creating profit and prestige for another." [314]

 

Let's, for the sake of argument, say that's also true: one could just give a Warholesque shrug and say so what? 

 

Alternatively, as a Nietzschean, one might point out that slavery is a necessary precondition for the flourishing of higher culture and that artists have always exploited the work of untold others. Reynolds may find that a politically uncomfortable fact, but, as a cultural theorist he's obliged to acknowledge such an inconvenient truth. 

 

Art is not a form of liberal humanism; it's an aristocratic practice that requires a certain cruelty to impose new forms upon chaos and create new values, etc. For me, therefore, sampling can be defended from a philosophical perspective that is anything other than 'left-wing' [d].      

 

As for the argument that sampling shifts power to the producer and disempowers those "real musicians who think they're so cool and hip", that only holds up providing one wishes to deny the phonographic artistry of the former and see them as merely technicians, devoid of creative talent or skill, just because they wear less "complicated shoes" [e].  

 

Musicianship is, in my view - as a McLarenista - hugely overrated - so more power to the elbow of people like the Canadian composer and audio pirate John Oswald, who on Plunderphonic (1989) "turned sampling into a form of digital iconoclasm, literally smashing pop idols to smithereens" [317], as well as challenging notions of originality and identity [f].    

 

Rock musicians are often the most self-serious and pompous of all artists and so deserve to be "subjected to various degrees of insult, satire or travesty" [321]. 

 

But it should be noted that often digital-era artforms like hip-hop often display an almost reverential regard for the obscure analogue grooves they exploit; "they honour through recycling, in the process conferring a kind of immortality for the music, if not for its anonymous creators" [323]  

 

 

III. 

I was a bit surprised by Reynolds's admission that his sense of Britishness remains so acute after so-many years living in the United States with an American wife.  

 

Obviously, he doesn't define such in terms of blood and soil, but, rather, sees it in cultural terms; nationality is, he says, "a matrix of collective character that involves gesture and intonation, phrase and fable, and an immense array of common reference points [...] from the shape of post boxes to newspaper fonts" [337], which, I suppose is true enough.   

Interesting to consider hauntology as a specifically British thing, however; a mourning for a lost time, before the British were increasingly pressured to apologise themselves out of existence or make themselves either more American or more European (isn't this pretty much the same line that Morrissey takes - or does he veer a little too close to ethnonationalism as well as cultural pride?) [g]. 

1958-1978: this is the golden era that haunts hauntologists and ghost boxers alike; and, ironically, it's the era that "rock 'n' roll in some sense rebelled against by celebrating desire, pleasure, disruptive energy, individualism" [338]. The nanny state suddenly doesn't seem so "suffocating and oppressively intrusive" [338] from the perspective of the early 21st century ...

Everything was better, wasn't it, in the sixties and seventies; the music, the fashion, the films, the football, and, of course, the TV: "The memoradelic imprint left by vintage TV on the child's impressionable grey matter is central to hauntology." [h]  
 

The question is: is this just a British thing catering to a certain generation? Or does "every country, and each successive generation within that nationality [...] produce its own version of hauntology - a self-conscious, emotionally ambivalent form of nostalgia that sets in play the ghosts of childhood?" [343]  

 

 

IV. 

 

Unsurprisingly, some commentators are less than impressed with all this; seeing hauntology as postmodern retro by another name. And Reynolds admits: 

 

"It's true that hauntology emerged from the same matrix of baseline cultural conditions - the scrambling of pop time, the atrophy of any sense of futurity or forward propulsion - that generated many of the things I've castigated in this book." [355]

 

But, of course, he's not going to let go of the concept that he and Fisher worked so hard to develop and popularise: "What makes hauntology different, what gives it an edge, is that it contains an ache of longing - for history itself." [355-356] 

 

By this I think Reynolds means that hauntology is a profoundly serious desire for the real pain and actual horror of past events and not just the nice things which make us feel comfortable in the present; he's affirming history as is (or as was). 

 

And he does this because unless you affirm the past as a total economy, you'll never be able to recover the lost futures he and Fisher hope to find. In other words, tomorrow can be ours - but there's a price to pay and it will require courage (not just irony); the one thing that for Ursula Brangwen really matters at last [i]. 

 

 

V. 

 

If Reynolds is, shall we say, ambivalent about sampling, he clearly doesn't like the mash-up; "bootleg remixes that combined two or more pop hits" [356] to produce nostalgia without the ache. He explains that whilst mash-ups may briefly amuse due to their incongruous juxtaposing of elements, there is no "creation of surplus value, musically; even at their very best they only add up to the sum of their parts" [359].    

 

Mash-ups are thus a form of pseudo-creativity "based on a blend of mild irreverence and simple pop fandom" [359]. Worse: "Mash-ups mash the history of pop like potatoes, into indistinct, digital-data grey pulp [...] devoid of nutritional value" [360], by which I think he means they don't feed the soul.

 

And so, forget about mash-ups and retro. For even if it remains a "precarious and paradoxical strategy" [361], its hauntology which will resurrect the "eyes-on-the-horizon optimism" [361] of late modernism, by radically parodying heritage culture and uncovering "alternate pasts secreted inside the official narrative" [361], thereby turning the past into a foreign country.

 

As Heidegger might say: Nur noch ein Geist kann uns retten ... [j] 

 

 

Notes

[a] See the post 'Notes on Hauntology and Ghost Modernism' (28 Sept 2023): click here.

      Whilst for Derrida hauntology is a framework for understanding that being is always haunted by what is not fully present (traces of both past and present; the no longer and the not yet), for Reynolds and Fisher hauntology is more about the way in which pop culture explores a zone of nostalgia in the hope of finding a way beyond the present (so-called lost futures). It's a little amusing how, on the one hand, Reynolds expresses a certain anxiety about sampling and yet, on the other hand, cheerfully borrows (shall we say) Derrida's term simply because he liked the sound of it.  

[b] It turns out that Reynolds didn't invent this pun, but borrowed the idea of groove robbing from someone called DJ Shadow. See p. 323 of Retromania where he writes of the appropriately Gothic nature of the term. 

 

[c] Simon Reynolds, Retromania (Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 312. Future page numbers will be given directly in the post and refer to this edition.

[d] Reynolds writes: 

      "It's curious that almost all the intellectual effort expended on the subject of sampling has been in its defence [...] nearly always focused on the legal aspect, framing the samplers in punk-like terms (as rebellious, iconoclastic). Academic studies of sampling have likewise generally sided with 'the streets' versus the multinational entertainment companies. This reflects the left-wing bias of academia and a tendency to see the whole area of property rights, including copyright, as intrinsically conservative, aligned with corporations and [...] the status quo. [...] A Marxist analysis of sampling might conceivably see it as the purest form of exploiting the labour of others. In a more general sense, you could see it as a form of cultural strip-mining, a ransacking of the rich seams of past musical productivity." [314-315] 

      Hopefully, my post-Nietzschean analysis provides an interesting alternative. 

[e] I'm quoting George Costanza here from an episode of Seinfeld, 'The Burning' (S9/E16), dir. Andy Ackerman (1998). 

 

[f] Plunderphonic (1989) was a 25-track CD in which Oswald reworked material by both popular musicians like The Beatles, and classical works such as Beethoven's Symphony No. 7. Whilst sources for all the samples used were scrupulously listed, Oswald was happy to acknowledge that authorisation for their use had neither been given nor sought. Although the work was not made available for sale, all undistributed copies were destroyed after a threat of legal action by the Canadian Recording Industry Association on behalf of several of their clients, including Michael Jackson, whose song "Bad" had been chopped into tiny pieces and rearranged as 'Dab': click here. 

      One suspects Jackson wasn't best pleased with the albums cover art either; a photo collage that transposed his head and leather jacket from the cover of his album Bad (1987) onto a naked female body - something that Reynolds compares with "the on-line porn practice of taking images of movie stars and other celebrities and Photoshopping their heads onto nude bodies engaged in hardcore sex acts" [317]. 

      Obviously, this practice has massively accelerated and become ever more widespread and sophisticated thanks to AI. I don't really have an issue with it, but Reynolds insists that, for him, its a "blatant infringement of an individual's rights in their own image" [317] and infringes their dignity, blah, blah, blah.  

      Reynolds does concede, however, that Oswald's 'Dab' is a masterpiece that injects alien DNA into an all-too-human pop song; "micro-syllable vocal particles are multitracked as if in some infinite hall of mirrors and a strobing swarm of micro-Jacksons billows back and forth across the stereo field" [317]. 

 

[g] Reynolds discusses the case of Stephen Morrissey in terms of reflective nostalgia (good) and restorative nostalgia (bad) in a footnote on pp. xxvii-xxviii. 

      Describing him as the "supreme poet of reflective nostalgia", he neverthless fears that Morrissey has, at times, crossed over to the dark side and flirted with fascism, declaring England to no longer be recognisable to the country of his youth due to mass migration. 

 

[h] Where I differ from Reynolds here is that I never gave a shit about British shows like Doctor Who - it was American shows (and their theme tunes) I loved best; see the post 'Theme Tunes in a Man's Life' (2 Feb 2013): click here. 

 

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 270. When her uncle asks her "'Courage for what?'" Ursula replies "'For everything.'"

 

[j] I'm paraphrasing Heidegger's famous statement - 'Only a god can save us now' - from a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, published posthumously in 1976. It reflects his belief that modern humanity is trapped in a crisis that cannot be resolved through human agency alone. Not that he was referring by his use of the term 'god' to a traditional religious deity or a personal saviour, anymore than by my use of the term 'ghost' I am referring to a sheet-wearing apparition or supernatural entity in the clichéd sense. 

      The interview with Heidegger, conducted by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, was translated by William J. Richardson and can be found in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. Click here to read on the Internet Archive.   

 

 

To read part 1 of this post, please click here. 

 

To read part 2 of this post, click here. 

 

To read part 3 of this post, click here. 

 

The fifth and final part will be published shortly.