Against The Grain: What's wrong with hauntology? - The Wire
Briefly

Against The Grain: What's wrong with hauntology? - The Wire
"A riff on Jacques Derrida's riff on Karl Marx's claim that "the spectre of communism haunts Europe", hauntology is the name Mark Fisher and his colleagues gave to their perception that "what haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the 21st century is not so much the past as the lost futures the 20th century taught us to anticipate". Beginning from their perception that (Anglo) electronic music of the early 2000s had been unable to innovate, artistically or technologically, on that of the previous century,"
"My professors in these latter three fields hammered home the lesson that whenever anyone speaks for or invokes a 'we' or an 'us', the first question you should ask is: "So who do you mean by 'we'?" For example, just as the 'we' in the US Constitution's "We, the people" originally referred to white men, patriarchal racial capitalism continues to encourage people to use and hear these pronouns in ways that mistake the most privileged groups for the universal we and us."
Hauntology names a cultural tendency where contemporary production recycles past forms and the 'lost futures' predicted by twentieth-century imaginaries rather than creating new futures. The term originates from a Derridean reading of Marx and was popularized by Mark Fisher's claim that twenty-first-century digital culture is haunted by those lost anticipations. Observers linked hauntology to perceived stagnation in (Anglo) early-2000s electronic music, arguing artistic and technological innovation stalled. Training in feminist, critical race, and African-American philosophies foregrounds scrutiny of collective pronouns; asking "who do you mean by 'we'?" exposes how "We, the people" once denoted white men and how racial capitalism naturalizes privileged perspectives as universal.
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