Being with the Ghosts
Tish Turl and Adam Turl, Detail of the Meeting Hall at the Born Again Labor Museum (2022).
WHAT DISTINGUISHES Mark Fisher’s hauntology from Fredric Jameson’s “retro-mode” is that the former anticipates a rapprochement between sign and referent, while the latter is predicated on their attenuation. This difference is both chronological (Fisher writing in the 2010s and Jameson in the 1980s) as well as in the approach each takes to the subjective. Jameson tends to approach the reading of artifacts as a divining of the political unconscious, whereas with Fisher there is often a sense of protest or negotiation with material and cultural conditions. If, for Jameson, cultural signification is reified — a thingification of cultural being — Fisher is largely interested in strategies (or at least gestures) against this thingification.
While postmodern concepts vary/varied, they tend to observe a generalizable dissociation or dislocation between sign and referent. For Harvey and Jameson, as Marxists, this was rooted in various material shifts in capitalism and cultural production. Jameson argues that the integration of culture into generalized commodity production displaces use-value towards a dominance of exchange value and capital accumulation.1 It is not that the use-value — the discrete meaning of the cultural sign or gesture — ceases to be important. Culture is operating under a new “cultural dominant” that allows for variation while still being over-determined.2 Indeed, the new cultural dominant encourages (or seems to encourage) variation of cultural forms, styles, gestures; an ever-reproducing mannerism. Jameson reads this as a breakdown in the modernist ethos and telos, an “apocalypse” of modernity, also found in Daniel Bell’s concept of post-industrialism, etc.3 Everywhere, for Jameson, there is an “inverted millenarianism” — in which “premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive,” have been replaced by the end of “ideology, art, or social class, the ‘crisis of Leninism, social democracy or the welfare state.”4
The breakdown between “high” and “popular culture” —the “aesthetic populism” of architectural pastiche (where the term postmodernism is coined), Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas vs. high modern international style5 — prefigured a similar process in film.
Jameson discusses a “libidinal historicism”— related to a kind of nostalgia mode, or “retro mode” — in “nostalgia film.” Architectural pastiche is reworked and projected “onto a collective and social level.” This is clear in films like American Graffiti (1973) and other movies that seek to “recapture… the mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era.” But these films do not aim to capture the reality of the 1950s, so much as perform a series of signs. This is — in a Baudrillardian sense — simulacrum. Signs without their original referents, or more exactly, signs increasingly removed from referents, like photocopies of photocopies.6
The past is referent but abstracted from actuality. Eventually this mimicry-pastiche becomes pastiche more generally, a series of historical-signs that construct, like a montage, something altogether different, the non periodic film that quotes the abstract “past.” Jameson gives the example of Lawrence Kazden’s Body Heat, but there are other examples that could be given — the tech noir of Blade Runner (indeed, the entire mixing of time that runs throughout the Phillip K. Dick source material — although this has a more critical aspect), the “used future” of the original Star Wars films, etc. Finally, for our purposes here, Jameson notes the “loss of the radical past.”7
Jameson is describing, in essence, a process of reification, a thingification of historical signs turned into commodity forms — a collapse and “fragmentation” of forms. Past eras are colonized. He does not describe a process of contested “structures of feeling” (Williams) or mixed-consciousness (Gramsci), etc. This is a process of capital itself. And, on its face, Jameson is mostly correct. However, he freezes time without looking sufficiently at its contested future. A transient moment may seem permanent. But neither sign or referent are stable within capitalism. They are in constant mutation in a mediated relationship to the reproduction of life, social class, politics, crisis, etc. An image of Mao ordering the execution of landowners means one thing in 1993, and something different to working-class persons unable to pay their rent in 2022.
***
IN ALFONZO Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), the human race has become infertile. Children have become ghosts. The political and social infrastructures of the world have collapsed. Only “Britain” remains as something like a modern democratic state, albeit as a hyper-xenophobic island.8 The broken main character, Theo, finds redemption by aiding the pregnant refugee Kee. In Theo’s first visit with his older friend, Jasper, there is a John-Berger-like pin up wall of images, including protests against the invasion of Iraq mixed with images of the fertility crisis. The warmth of Jasper’s home — in the middle of wider social horror — connects to the memory of struggle without denying the present-day horror. It is this honesty, warmth-and-memory that enables Theo’s eventual self-sacrifice for Kee. The ghosts come back to life through his solidarity. This is counterposed to the coldness of Nigel’s “Arc of the Arts.” Guernica is beautiful. But Nigel has an uncomfortable dinner with his son and Theo in front of Picasso’s protest. The ghosts are denied: “I just don’t think about it.” Theo refuses, in the end, this bargain with dead signs. His reward is life.
Mark Fisher begins his book, Capitalist Realism (2009), with a discussion of Children of Men, focusing on the film as the apocalypse that is already happening — its commonalities with the world as-is. I am focusing here, however, on the film's counter-imaginary — noting its hauntological rejection of the neoliberal/capitalist realist apocalypse. Mark Fisher’s adaptation of hauntology was part of his attempt to articulate possible strategies against the problem of capitalist realism. If capitalist realism denies us possible futures — sticking us in apocalyptic time — then the ghosts of lost futures might have a potential criticality and redemption.
The concept of hauntology begins at a level of abstraction in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. Derrida notes that, in its triumphalism over the “death of Marx,” the western bourgeoisie accidentally made an undead Marx; because the creation of every concept includes the creation of its opposite (in the deconstruction schematic). For Mark Fisher, however, hauntology is not simply textual. It is phenomenological. The way the bourgeoisie creates an undead Marx is in its ongoing order of exploitation and alienation.
Tish Turl and Adam Turl, Social Resurrection Task-Prints. Digital prints, acrylic, cotton and ash, clothespins and clotheslines (2019-present).
Fisher’s hauntology begins with a lament, “it doesn’t feel like the future,” located in subjective longing — or, to quote from the Worthless Scarecrow song, “Water St.,” “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.” The narrative of “the end of history,” implied through its Hegelian subtext a Panglossian present, “this, the best of all possible worlds.”9 The absence of that “best world” — the gulf between its ideological claims and material being, as articulated by Evan Calder Williams — opens the doors to hauntology (Fisher) and salvage (Calder Williams).10
The performance of anachronism, Fisher writes, in referencing Jameson’s “nostalgia mode,” is best understood as a “formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary experience.”11 In the dominant pastiche, Fisher argues, there is not a nostalgic longing for a “real historic period” so much as a “longing for form.” Hauntology is a more specific longing, a longing against the “slow cancellation of the future” in which the virtual has a kind of “agency” —the haunting of capitalism by its lack of an alternative; leaving it increasingly exposed to by its own failures.12
In this context, the performance of anachronism does seem to have some critical potential. Fisher counterposes this to “left melancholia” that accepts limits, producing a kind of pyrrhic live-action-role-playing (LARPing) of revolutionary politics, cloaked in a confusion of realism with depression.13
Of the charge of “nostalgia,” he asks, “nostalgia compared to what?” — underlining that antipathy toward nostalgia among leftists is born of crude teleologies — all nostalgia is bad, after all, if the past was always worse.14 The 1970s were a moment in which the class and left — and certain sections of the oppressed — were better organized. There was widespread discussion of reformist and revolutionary alternatives to capital. The masses were actively involved in the construction of possible futures. In this way, hauntology begins with a longing not for a particular period per se but for a “process of democratization.” This is antithetical to the capitalist colonization of history described in nostalgia mode.15
Hauntology tends to belong to the “data thief” in John Akomfrah’s Last Angel of History (1996). Retro-mode tends to belong to corporate Hollywood.
Of course, hauntological signs can be re-abstracted and thingified. This is why Fisher’s version of hauntology — by itself — is insufficient as a cultural strategy. Crackle, a quotation of aural signs from the lost decade of the 1970s, can be reified and separated from historic meaning and criticality. Clifford Joseph Price, aka Goldie, aka Rufige Kru, who recorded the song for which Fisher’s hauntological book was named, “Ghosts of My Life” (1992), was knighted in the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire'' and sold “grills'' to North American rappers. No moral judgment here (at least on the grills), except to say aesthetic criticality is not enough — if it is not connected to a conscious being-with the Marxist liberatory subject. It is this subject’s “in real life” (IRL) experience that gives the hauntological a material basis.16
As noted, postmodernism implied/implies a kind of cultural, economic, and political stasis. But nothing stands still. Capitalism is a system of flux based on exploitation and crisis. The center never holds. Eventually, anarchy is loosed upon the world.
***
POSTMODERNIST IDEAS — like the condition/phenomena they attempt to describe — are unwieldy, contradictory, seemingly inclusive, but not always coherent. So, any attempt to summarize them is difficult. While Jean Baudrillard can be overly declarative and decisive, Frederic Jameson often takes pains to qualify. Jameson takes into account variations and counter-currents (from a particular kind of Marxist perspective) whereas Baudrillard often seems to ignore variation and countervailing factors when making a provocative point. Interrogating either becomes almost quixotic. The former recognizes the deviations — depriving their mere notation of critical edge. Meanwhile, criticizing Baudrillard is like criticizing a bulldozer. You may be right but he’s already dug up all the olive trees.
As noted above, a central aspect of postmodernism is the assertion — in both Jameson and Baudrillard — of a growing attenuation or separation of sign and referent. Or, in Jean Francios Lyotard, an argument that the entire logic of sign and referent implicit in modernity has come undone. This is predicated, in the final analysis, on the vulgar Marxist separation of base and superstructure (an artificial separation criticized by Raymond Williams, among others).
For Lyotard, narrative ways of knowing are inherently irrational. But scientific ways of knowing are based, ultimately, on narrative knowledge itself (becoming, therefore, unscientific, also irrational). “The ‘crisis’ of scientific knowledge… represents, rather, an internal erosion of the legitimacy principle of knowledge. There is erosion at work inside the speculative game, and by loosening the weave of the encyclopedic net in which each science was to find its place , it eventually sets them free.”17 There is a lot to unpack here. Firstly, there is something appealing in it from an artistic point of view; a Romantic opposition to the encyclopedic impulses of modernity. You can also see Lyotard’s semi-Romanticism in his work on the sublime.
However, the above is part of the basis for Lyotard’s (and postmodernism-in-general’s) opposition to metanarratives; the grand stories, unifying myths, etc. of modernity. Most importantly, the postmodern opposition to Marxism itself as a totalizing metanarrative. The rejection of Marxism, in this framework, might work if you 1) Think social metanarratives are inherently bad in some way (i.e. you start with a libertarian individualism that pretends to disbelieve everyday life; because daily life is not possible without social myth18). 2) Accept “official Marxism’s” (i.e. academic, social democratic and Stalinist Marxism’s) “scientific”pretense, rather than seeing Marxism as a contingent philosophy of working-class self-emancipation. 3) Fail to recognize the capitalist metanarrative woven into several postmodern and poststructuralist philosophies themselves—most importantly its hostility to all other metanarratives and the “normative” way in which capitalist relations are accepted within them.
The legacy of Lyotard’s “report on knowledge” is mixed. He is correct in understanding certain dynamics of “ways of knowing” — there is no “God’s eye view” — but shows an evaluative bias that is not fully self-examined (rooted in bourgeois individualism which is itself a social myth). Moreover, his antipathy to science is based on the scientific itself: science fails because its underlying mythology is not science! This is, arguably, positivist anti-positivism. To be clear, opposition to aspects of “Science” (capital S) are justified as liberals defend the CDC — a political institution that has repeatedly lied — as if it were Science itself. “Science” (that is not really science) is defended against right-wing conspiracy theorists who are right that the CDC is lying (but utterly delusional about how it is lying), etc.
The problem here is not epistemology per se, but the absence of a working-class Marxist metanarrative in popular mass discourse to articulate from a class position the problems with both the “Science” of the CDC and far-right “anti-science.” In other words, the problem with “narrative” and “scientific” ways of knowing is itself positional. Positional metanarratives, constructed in participatory manner, are the solution to imposed metanarratives, not the rejection of metanarratives.
The aforementioned postmodern concepts about simulacra, and the separation of sign and referent, have had a greater staying power. We live in the constant digital glow of Baudrillard’s worst nightmare (or wet dream, depending, it is often unclear with Baudrillard, which is why he was the model for the mad scientist in Videodrome, along with Marshall McLuhan – See Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs). The separation of sign and referent, the memeification of culture and discourse, seem to confirm both Baudrillard’s ideas of simulacrum and Jameson’s descriptions of mannerism.
The digital hyperreal — not only a separation of sign and referent but an attenuation of reality itself — seems constant. The digital hyperreal seems to exceed, as Baudrillard said it would, Jorge Luis Borges’ map so large that it matches the area on which it is placed.19 “Sovereign difference” is abolished in the “liquidation of all referentials,” etc.20 (2)
But Baudrillard is, as intimated, too categorical. Within his rhetorical sweeps his language contains its opposite meanings and ignores vast contrary evidence. When he argues that the iconoclasts understood the true power of the image, he fails to appreciate the cult value of the icon (the organized processions of icons, etc.), the architectural capture of God within the cathedral space, the way in which the familiar (in the fetishistic sense) is neither the thing itself or simulacrum but both at the same time.21 He betrays a particularly modern and western way of looking at the scared. “What if God himself can be simulated,” he asks. God can be, and is, intimated in countless faiths without becoming a facsimile. The shaman becomes God in the ritual and then becomes themselves again (or was, for a while, both).
Baudrillard’s successive phases of the image are one-way rather than dialectical,22 assuming realism as the starting point of representation, and a static reality being represented by an ever abstracting memetics. Therefore, a modern telos fails Baudrillard in large part because he believes in it.23 He projects stabilities onto power that are not there — nuclear deterrence as a system of control and “programmatic infallibility,” etc.24 These sketches of power strike us, after surviving the last two decades of crises, as naive. His argument that the US defeat in Vietnam had no impact on life in the US itself is myopic (misses the shifting nature of US military policy from Vietnam through the Gulf War, as well as the massive impact the war had on working-class communities from which soldiers were drawn, etc.).25 Much as Baudrillard’s insightful writings on Las Vegas miss the vast majority of that city by focusing only on its exteriority (see Baudrillard, America), Baudrillard mostly sees what capital wants him to see.
Regardless, what he does look at, he looks at with a critical eye, as when he compares the methodology of making Apocalypse Now! with the methodology of making the war in Vietnam.26 Or, his observation that “[information] exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning,”27 (80) prefiguring Jodi Dean’s analysis of communicative capitalism. As neoliberalism precludes the scope of democracy from the economic realm, communicative space is likewise reduced. Instead of communication there is a “mis-en-scene” of communication,28 a performance of communication, a simulacra of communication, etc.
For Jameson, pastiche serves a similar role — “speech in a dead language” but, unlike parody, “neutral… without any of parody’s ulterior motives… blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs.” For Jameson, this is where he begins to discuss simulacrum, citing Plato on “the identical copy for which no original has ever existed.” Simulacrum is born, Jameson argues, in the society that forgets even the memory of use-value.29
The common thread here is the attenuation and separation of sign and referent, the shifting from the use-value of the cultural object/gesture toward the primacy of its exchange value, and the accumulation of these separations over time leading to a kind of base-superstructure divorce.
But, as Raymond Williams argues, there isn’t really a division between base and superstructure. And what is called “base” and what is called “superstructure” have not stopped their tectonic movements. The New Madrid faultline may be quiet today, but someday it will produce another earthquake that makes the Mississippi run backwards. The social faultlines were relatively quiet in the 1980s and 1990s. The New Left and the Soviet Union were defeated. Labor was in decline. Capital was triumphant. As was US imperial power. Since the late 1990s we have had — just in the US — the 9.11 attacks, the failed two-decade-long war on terror, mass immigrant rights marches, the 2008 financial crisis and mass immiserations, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the rise of the far-right and Trumpism, the pandemic, inflation and more mass immiserations, new unions formed, etc.
What appeared to Baudrillard as stable power appears to us as a gaping wound. There is, as indicated earlier, a rapprochement between sign and referent. Millions of young workers, seeking to understand their material poverty, wear the clothes of past socialisms. Millions of petit-bourgeois, seeking to weaponize their thwarted acquisitiveness, wear the clothes of past fascisms. Of course, this is happening in new idioms, and the ongoing attenuation of sign and referent slows and accelerates (depending) the social-cultural processes at work. The right declares its intention to throw socialists from helicopters in meme-form. The left declares its intentions in meme form. Ghosts are slowly being resurrected to act as models for the living, just as Marx described in the 18th Brumaire, for good or bad, tragedy or farce. They are just now pushing through the veil. The signs are re-aligning with their referents.
Something something something slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
Endnotes
1. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 56-57
2. Jameson, 56
3. Jameson, 55
4. Jameson, 53
5. Jameson, 54-55
6. Jameson, 66-67
7. Jameson, 67-70
8. So, pretty much the same. See Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2009)
9. I am mixing metaphors and citations here from Hegel, Francis Fukayama, and Voltaire.
10. See Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (London: Zero Books, 2011)
11. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (London: Zero Books, 2013), 11-12
12. Fisher, 11-20
13. Fisher, 23
14. Fisher, 25
15. Fisher, 25-27
16. Fisher, 20-21
17. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) 39
18. I am using myth in the sense described by Joseph Camblell, neither fact or fiction, but stories that tend to instruct us how to live in the world.
19. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1
20. Baudrillard, 2
21. Baudrillard, 2-3
22. Baudrillard, 6
23. Baudrillard, 6-7
24. Baudrillard, 33-34
25. Baudrillard, 36
26. Baudrillard, 59
27. Baudrillard, 80
28. Baudrillard, 81
29. Jameson, 65-66
Adam Turl is an artist and writer from southern Illinois — by way of Wisconsin, Chicago, upstate New York and Las Vegas. They are an artist and editor at Locust Review, a quarterly irrealist journal of art and literature, and a member of the Locust Arts and Letters Collective (LALC). They have had solo exhibitions at the Brett Wesley Gallery (Las Vegas), the Cube (Las Vegas), Project 1612 (Peoria, Illinois), and Artspace 304 (Carbondale, Illinois). In 2016 Turl was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France. They received their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and a BFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (SIUC). Turl is working on an evolving conceptual and visual art project, Born Again Labor Museum, with their partner Tish Turl, a writer and fellow LALC member. They host the monthly podcast Locust Radio along with Tish Turl and LALC member Laura Fair-Schulz. They are PhD student in media arts and a graduate assistant at SIUC.
Tish Turl and Adam Turl, Mobile Possum Janitorial Liberty Pole - plaster, mop bucket, salvaged iron lamp post, epoxy, possum skull (2022).