'If you are here...' An elegy
The suspicion is inescapable: part of the reason why hauntology should appeal to us so much now is that, unconsciously, and increasingly consciously, we suspect that something has died.
Nothing lasts forever, of that I'm sure.
Is pop undead? k-punk | 31/01/2006
If you're here near the time of publishing, then you're either one of a small number in my private and semi-private circles, or you've chanced upon this blog somehow. Otherwise, I'll grant the rare possibility that before visiting you've perceived some common ground or interest with the author.
You might also be here as the result of a common condition, a state of life, a position in the world—however shifting both may be, you and the world. Whatever the case, the funnel of the Web has done its work.1 This means we're both real far from home, if home exists. And even if you close this page, I'm inclined to say that you'll still be far from home. The Web gives us the impression of instantaneous travel precisely because there is no gap between sources. In this way, it may be more accurate to say that the Web gives the impression, that is, the illusion of travel as such. The modern intervention of 'infinite scroll' takes this illusion of travel into new territorial extremes. At least when you've reached the bottom of this entry, you will have accomplished a discrete activity. You will proceed with your day. You will hopefully have benefited from your stay.
For my part, this has begun as and will continue to be an experiment across several vectors. Inspired by (spiritual) friends at Theory Underground, this is an "experiment with the medium". And given the spare design of the place, you may be wondering about some of my other inspirations. Though I wasn't there for it (I should have been), blogs like this once anchored the considered conversations and personal pieces of those thinking in and through the modernity of their time. Such blogs still exist, but they aren't the norm. The modernity of our time has shape-shifted, and we along with it. As I said when you first arrived, we're far from home, if home exists.
It's only fitting, then, for me to quote one of the originators of this form (at least in its more recent phase), the late Mark Fisher aka K-punk:
Nevertheless, expectations were raised in me, and more or less everything I've written or participated in has been in some sense an attempt to keep fidelity with the post-punk event. Cyberpunk — both in its restricted literary generic sense and in the broader sense we have given to it in Ccru — was up to its neck in post-punk. Gibson's debt to Steely Dan and the Velvet Underground has long been acknowledged, but the dominant tone of Neuromancer was an overhang from post-punk. Gibson named his high-tech prostitutes after the Meat Puppets, but Neuromancer's technihilistic ambience, dub apocalypticism, amphetamine-burned-out Cases and hectic, twitching finger-on-fast-forward and comatone-cut-out narrative, seem to be transposed straight out of the British post-punk scene.
The outside of everything, now k-punk | 01/05/2005
It may be that Gibson's television sky has burned to dust and we're more cyberpunk than we've ever been—and that's not counting the fact that wetware is now a living reality2, or that our minds have become outsourced to the machine in obscene ways. If Fisher gave us language for examining the present haunted by the ghosts of stillborn futures, I'm tending to think we've entered a new phase of that haunting. Increasingly our surroundings feel not as a haunted house, but a haunted ruin.
We once met in a cafe inside the Passage de l'Opéra. Now we stand before the wreckage of the Boulevard Haussmann, even as it presents itself in the form of a wide, tidy street.
©Tsukumizu・Shinchosha/ Girls’ Last Tour Partners
Credit to Joshua Citarella for getting me to think about funnels in the context of the Internet.↩
Though it's well known now, Neuralink bears mentioning as a flagship effort in wetware tech at the time of writing. It's also worth noting Cortical Labs as a fascinating inversion of the classic Neuralink/wetware model. In the case of Cortical Labs, stem cell derived, lab-grown neurons receive inputs from a silicon chip to form the basis of what they call their CL1 biocomputer.↩