Rockhaunter, Issue 37, 31 August 2007
Rockhaunter: Your No. 1 Site for Hauntiquarianism Not Hauntology!
I’ve been thinking about the interplay between antiquarianism, popular music, fictional history and tradition. That may lead me to do something on hauntology, because it seems that my arc of fire has touched that of others thinking about where popular music’s been and gone — and my arc’s zxzxzxzxzx’d significantly.
In fact, I’ll do it now. I’ve long since made a conscious effort not to collect music but to describe my relationship with its creation. Ergo, I’m a Rockhaunter. I’m going to rename my practice “Hauntiquarianism”. Which makes me a hauntiquarian. That’s the first time either word’s ever been written, etymology fans, though others including me have thought them.
Since Rockhaunting’s all about antiquarian sounds and arguing about their provenance till reason laughs, I’m claiming what’s rightly mine. Since history belongs in the fiction section, along with the other realisms, I’m the man who cometh in this hour. Since the death of pop music is what I’m all about, it’s only right that I stand up and be ignored in the great debate that’s currently shaking our universities apart with frequencies often beyond the range of normal men.
I and I am a hauntiquarian, although I didn’t know it until recently. The simultaneity of experience is what I’m about, in all spaces and dimensions. (But don’t give up your own views and actions, thinking others will take up the slack.) I’m seeking a way beyond antiquarianism, while retaining the vital amateurism of independent research, and beyond Hauntology, which sounds fine but is a reinvention of historicism with weird contingencies replacing science.
Why hauntiquarianism?
The idea of hauntology, as inherited from Jacques Derrida (who invented the word as a spectral pun on ‘ontology’) and reworked by contemporary intellectuals, is concerned with the knowability of cultural artefacts and trends that are affirmed by the continual reappearance and presence and/or apparent absence of archetypes; it seeks to distinguish between the paucity of fixed, historical meanings and the fecundity of non-chronological ones. Popular music, for example, is generally thought to be knowable because of the reiteration of a fixed series of historical points back into the past. However, the reappearance, presence and/or absence of historical figures — the constant historicist shifting of focus between past and present — that comprises the formation of the idea of popular music means that it is becoming more present, solid and knowable in time and fainter, less knowable and less historical as its non-presence is appreciated.
It seems to me that what the otherwise engaged writers on hauntology are doing — including Mark Fisher, blogging as K-Punk, here and here and other bloggers, including this one and people in general forum discussions — is regarding sublime landscapes, in the manner of a sketchy aristo on the Grand Tour. In regarding the play of cultural and topographical shadows in gauzy spaces that overlap fleetingly, they neglect to imagine that their choice of active contemplation came from somewhere and imply that space is mostly devoid of conscious affective actions. In fact, it’s worse than that, because they are regarding sublime landscapes as forgotten or uncomplete ideological statements, as they wander, recreating and finishing them — even if they are completed thoughts in space/time — in their own image with synthesizers and critical theory.
In any non-event, people make places. There’s no emptiness, no silence. Let’s let the voices through. But should we use ventriloquism or listen to the sibilant hiss and pop of the archive flowing? Or would you prefer to regard the lips of a hauntologist moving in time to a post-punk soundtrack — singing along to the adverts of the gone future?
I think the hauntologists might find it helpful to read my ongoing reflections on iteration in my occasional series on discovering the sublimity of repetition through repeated listening to generic psych, in which I analyse the effect on me of listening only to a C90 cassette recording of psychedelic pop tunes from the late-1960s over a period of three months while commuting.
Do You Like Soil Music?
Landscapes are subjective. It’s that interpretative quality that allows their narration to be taken as representing something wider or something else entirely. The Specials’ single, “Ghost Town”, for example, was taken by young people, who walk through places at night, as an anthem about their city, town, village or hamlet. You can get that effect in pop music, because not having to take it so seriously, people feel free to insert their own continuation narratives in the spaces left by the song writers and music arrangers. But writers in the throes of ecstacy, having found a place that fits or fixes an idea perfectly, should always be aware that the affectivity of their sensitive subjectivity may not leave as light a mark as they’d hoped, even if they bear in mind the interlinked matters of class, place and money.
That’s the big problem with W G Sebald. In his Rings of Saturn, he depopulates the bit of Suffolk he writes about so as to find space in which to locate his intellect and grief. Some have called this manoeuvre spectral geography. I call it a flaming cheek. Can you imagine imagining empty landscapes in a period just after ethnic cleansing elsewhere in Europe?
Q: What’s a Burial Urn? A: About £150 a week
Sebald was partly inspired by Sir Thomas Browne, who like many antiquarians thought a lot about the irony of corporeal impermanence being represented in long-lived material culture, whether stone — mememto mori or statuary — or the written word. However, Browne wrote Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk as a tribute to the gone generations who’d thought enough of their dead kin, whether sublimely or materially, to find a place for them after death. They had not vanished into ideological aether, although they were assimilated into collective representation through ritual. They were known individuals, the knowing of whom left the underground as peopled as the ground above.
Around the time Sebald was writing Rings of Saturn, someone I knew well was dying in a Suffolk coastal town. His ashes were scattered on a bit of broad near Oulton Broad. There was nothing spectral either about his dying or the simultaneity of his lived experience (felt now in memory) and his not being there any more.
Maybe our two spectral geographies clash, mine and Sebald’s. Maybe I’m fighting a dead man’s dream of future contentment. Maybe I can see his lips moving. Either way, I’ll get the last word in. If you want to canvas his opinion, read the books he’s still writing. Or ask his shade, still haunting the Lowestoft area as he haunted it in life.
Antiquarianism Vs. Realism?
I’ve as much a problem with the hauntologists regarding sublime scenes as I had with Julian Cope doing something similar in his Modern Antiquarian phase: reciting poetry in the wind whistling between standing stones. Are we to just regard these things as the remains of the good that’s gone? I sympathise with Cope’s implication that the down-playing of antiquarianism by historians — writers of fiction — means that the former practice has a place and purpose that history — fictive filing — can’t even aspire to. But the antiquaries were not druid descendants, as Cope imagined them. These were independent intellectuals who wanted everyone to know what they’d found and what they thought about it, unlike the druids who were the epitome of unfreedom, a ruling body of secretive professionals denying affective knowledge and thought to the rest of their people.
In practice, like all amateurs, the antiquarians were dull, careful, maverick, wrong, inspired; these were people with diverse and often irreconcilable dreams and interests. Above all, though, they took it upon themselves to go out and have a look for themselves, ask others what they’d seen, and to collect and sometimes to write about the material cultures of the past and present. In doing so, often within territories they’d earmarked for themselves around where they lived, but also in larger territories, and in attempting to understand the fragmentary and fleeting nature of those material cultures, they came to appreciate the relatively low limits of realism and representation as science — which was were history as a practice and discipline started — and the relatively high limits of locality as a unit of human experience and understanding.
Hunting Vs. Haunting
So, hauntiquarianism vs. hauntology. If we’re talking about making something beyond realism and history, then that’s a fine thing. Most of human life is beyond the scope of the real and history. History is the dead thing we worry about not having. It’s been that way since its state-sponsored beginnings. Reality is what we create in daydreams. It’s always been that way. But to reinvent death and daydreams by circumlocution is a poor waste. Let’s have a waste we can love.
How I Became a Hauntiquarian
It seems I’ve been a hauntiquarian all along. It’s only recently I knew what it meant, due to hauntologists starting to describe what I do, but using the wrong word. We’re just coming to understand the low limits of realism and the extent of the convergency between history, fiction, realism and the sublime. In a time of convergency, I’m all for divergency. In a hauntological milieu, I’m a hauntiquarian.
The Editor
Rockhaunter
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