# reflections on hauntology

_published Wed May 29 22:40:07 UTC 2024_

my friend E sent me a link some weeks ago to a short youtube video about hauntology; specifically, cultural hauntology:

the video on youtube[0]

The following is an e-letter to E I wrote out immediately after viewing:

I have been giving myself the brainspace today to catch up on my tab queue and finally watched that Hauntology video you sent me. I liked it a lot. I appreciated ending on the observation/question about how the nostalgia mining is clearly the result of a need people have as opposed to (victim) blaming the people partaking in it of being wrong/stupid. I think an argument "against" (not fully) the Fisherism of cultural hauntology is the assertion that all art (and thus culture) has to start in the past; it has to be a reaction to / conversation with the past. so I think this endless recycling is not a neoliberalism exclusive thing; I think neoliberalism has just capped how much imagination one can bring to the past/present conversation that is art.

I said in the preface to my cyberpunk cutup collection[1] that I was (to steal phrasing from burroughs) cutting into the past as a kind of divination into the present in the hopes of then imagining and constructing an alternate future which I think all these years later is still the guiding principle of all my dives into the past (VHS, tilde.town, old books, etc). I butt heads all the time with people who just want to dig into the past for the past's sake and I find it really troubling and I feel like that's echoed well in the hauntology video

when I think about creating futures the most clear examples that jump to mind are 20th century revolutionary movements--fascism, sovietism, maoism. there are effectively infinite nightmares that occurred within/because of those movements and i often wonder if we're collectively terrified that trying to dream up the truly new has to lead to immense suffering. neoliberalism with its short term commitment to big-tent-ism feels so safe even as long term it flings us into the apocalypse toilet. it leads me to think that all human attempts at organization are inherently deathward and the only real choices are ardent anarchism (short term localized suffering for potential long term chill) or continuing to sink into the neoliberal drug fog (short term pleasure(?) for long term disaster)

lately i have been feeling extremely TWO WOLVES as a result of my history research. one wolf is turbo anarchist, all states must be destroyed, all centralization of power has a greater cost than benefit; the other wolf is swooning for the visions of early communists (egalitarianism, science, atheism, frugality, collectivism, all wrapped up in a motherly state that can defend itself) and asking me to wonder "maybe this time?? maaayyybbeee this time???" even as i research the nightmare totalitarian end state of communist nations

(end)

I also linked the video in tilde town which spurred some good discussion. I reflected on hauntology, cut-up, and LLM "art" (reproduced below with other replies edited out):

```
22:02:05   @vilmibm | i think the video's perceived negativity is from mourning this 
                    | seeming difficulty in imagining new futures
22:02:30   @vilmibm | what i said in my notes to a friend about it was that this video
                    | could observe that /all/ art starts in the past since all art is a
                    | reaction to what an artist has seen
22:02:56   @vilmibm | and what's changed is not starting out making art/culture based on
                    | the past but a newfound difficulty of taking that inspiration and
                    | making something new with it
22:03:09   @vilmibm | as opposed to just regurgitating it wholesale but in 4k or whatever
22:07:16   @vilmibm | personally the video hits at a creative concern near and dear to
                    | me: cutup poetry vs. LLM-generated "art". i think the level of
                    | human involvement in the former leads to taking the past (the
                    | content being cut up) and turning it into something new (ie meaning
                    | created through more than mere juxtaposition). meanwhile, LLMs can
                    | only autocomplete art
22:07:16   @vilmibm | that has already been made, offering novelty in terms of
                    | juxtaposition but never being able to rise above mere juxtaposition
22:07:42   @vilmibm | humans imbue cutup pieces with a new narrative; LLMs can only
                    | autocomplete old narratives
22:10:12   @vilmibm | whereas a human artist might be doing 90% pastiche but invent a
                    | whole new art form in that last 10%
22:10:30   @vilmibm | which to me is the thing most interesting about humans
```

reposting it all here in case it inspires conversation for anyone else. there are no comments here (YET) but there is always email.


h[0]: the video on youtube	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vNLaPnEoqI
h[1]: preface to my cyberpunk cutup collection	https://archive.org/details/cbprop/page/n3/mode/2up