Non-Time and Hauntology

[dada]

.

I love page 6, and you won't believe what happens on page 13

On page 13, we have a Gottlieb Haunted House pinball machine. There are three playfields on this table. Two buttons control the flippers on the main floor, and a second set of buttons control flippers on both the upper floor and in the basement, which can be seen through a plexiglass window in the main floor. Drop-target multipliers, hit numbered targets in order for skill bonus, unlock multi-ball. All to an awesome soundtrack: Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, naturally. Go for the high score.

From Page 6, your source for celebrity news, gossip, entertainment, pop culture, photos, video and more:

So what would it mean, then, to look for the future's remnants?" asks Owen Hatherley at the beginning of Militant Modernism

Here we're taking for granted the idea that the destruction of the present has reduced the future to rubble. Looking for the remnants of a future that never came to pass. Not the remnants of the future which are the future's leftovers. If we were looking for those, we'd have to look elsewhere. Wouldn't have to look very far to find those.

Not that the leftovers of the future trail behind it. More like the tail of a comet. Half the time the tail comes before the comet, and it always trails away from the sun.

NASA says: "Most comets have two tails. The tails appear as the comet approaches the Sun. Sunlight pushes on things, but very gently. Because the comet dust particles are so small, they are pushed away from the Sun into a long tail. Another tail is made of electrically charged molecules of gas (called ions). Very rarely a comet will have a third tail made of sodium, which we usually don't see with our unaided eyes."

[dada]

Maybe it's time to define kitsch beyond the object. An expanded definition of kitsch would include kitschy action, kitschy thinking, kitschy language.

See how kitsch dominates. Wherever kitsch isn't seen, it asserts itself. We swim in an ocean of it.

I wouldn't be the first to make the suggestion, of course. And I'm certainly not saying kitsch is bad or good. Not judging an asthetic, but harnessing a force.

[dada]

In keeping with the thread, I'll say kitsch is a ghost of sentimentality. The living feeling has gone ahead, the echo all that's left, haunting words, filling time.

For all its academic interest and try as it might, kitsch can't engage the intellect. In its failure is its power.

A moment of redemption, but kitsch will not be redeemed. To paraphrase Balzac, at the resurrection it isn't 'arise, ye dead,' but 'let the living rise.'

[Spiro C. Thiery]

Was gonna contribute my unoriginal take a while ago until I read the thread and acclimated myself to the idea behind what I still find overly complicated by pretentious lingo. Then I was gonna post a snippet of a Dylan interview from the mid aughts wherein he states that the US went from pockets of starkly individualised cultural phenomena in his early decades of touring to an observed total and utter homogenisation later on. Now, I'll just submit the following, which at its outset had me thinking it was somewhere in the Midwest, as even the accents are very much Anywhere, Urban-Rural, USA. The distinction between its being '89 and not '82 or for that matter representative of the entire 1970s is one of the cost of technology and the fact that alcohol abuse meant Ozzy'd be inspired by his own genre as much as Metallica and everything after it. It's indeed the spooky feeling (RIP HMW) that the bot of the universe can make me watch this and think to myself that I still live in this world that would never become anything other than what it is. I blame myself.

[lucky]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33Ort0sjVZI

In case you wondered what happened to the 'Alabama two'.....

[kelley]

the word which came up this week is 'shoddy'

and it's one of which am now quite fond

it has a relationship to kitsch as an expression

and in material terms beneath the mere appearance of things is very descriptive

it is deeply deepy ingrained in the American psyche

an excellent word of unknown mid-nineteenth century origin

'shoddy'

please use freely

ahahahahahaha

[dada]

A shoddy product may be cheaply made, constructed with poor materials. However, not all products produced at low cost are shoddy. Cheap and poor here refer to lack of skill in the construction of a product. It's the low-quality of the workmanship that results in shoddiness.

Quality suffers when time is in short supply. But is a time in short supply, itself, a shoddy product? Then, maybe we could say that shoddy time is the poor material with which shoddy products are made.

A history built with this cheap material would be such a shoddy product. The compression of time into a line, infinite yet spaceless, thus squeezing out all sense of presence. A historical time of a 'presence that is not present,' in fact, would be the non-time in the title of this thread, the time of haunting.

[dada]

A desire for connection, for contact, is implicit in a haunting. The geist is on the other side of a screen, marshalling every ounce of concentration to move someone, hold onto something, touch anything.

I think that the opposite of a haunting is a visitation. The visitor connects, makes contact without effort. Appearing to each in their capacity to see, talem eum vidi qualem capere potui. As it has been said, and long ago.

You know how a page in a book can mean one thing to you on the first read through, but when you go back and read the same page, maybe you get something more out of it than you did the first time. This new reading of the same page can happen five minutes after the first reading, or five years, or fify-five. What has changed? The words on the page have not rearranged themselves.

And then, there are people who go back and re-read a page, and it means the same thing to them as it did before. I think that's as good a representation of non-time as any.

Page 13, going fast. Post em if you got em.

[kelley]

Tome On The Range

The Last Monday On Earth: Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire
The Quietus , September 19th, 2020

Enrico Monacelli dives into a collection of Mark Fisher's final lectures
https://thequietus.com/articles/28950-m ... ire-review


The metro was clinking and clacking away. It was the mid-2010s and I had just read Mark Fisher’s "Ghosts of My Life", my first real encounter with his writings and a work which has latched onto the back of my skull ever since.

As a millennial with a bone to pick with the world, the idea – vital to those essays – that pop culture and its emancipatory futures have been desiccated and stored somewhere out of my reach was more than appealing; it felt almost like the air I breathed. They presented frighteningly natural theses which reflected my existential and emotional landscapes in a surgical and precise way. They were intimate and true.

I started murmuring under my breath, almost compulsively, 'Take care… it’s a desert out there', the mantra which Fisher had dedicated to the Caretaker’s sonorous recreations of the halls and toilets of the Overlook Hotel, to protect myself from the clarity and the familiarity of this vision. I was a corpsed traveller in the arteries of a cold world, a world which Fisher dissected like no other.

As autobiographical as this first, depressing encounter might be, it is also artificial, constructed by the cultural landscape which inherited Fisher’s work. It is clearly not my raw experience of Mark’s writings – it is far too romantic to be the real deal, even though I would swear that the whereabouts are correct and that it is just how it happened. It is surely my encounter with those words plus the collective dreamwork that his readers have been weaving around them from their publication onwards.

After all, since "Capitalist Realism" saw the light of day – and even more so after his untimely death – Fisher’s work has been spoiled by a special kind of melancholia we all fell in love with, an almost fetishistic fascination with the most harrowing and ghostly sides of his pop cultural critique. In the span of a decade, the complexities of his work – and his literary neurosis, too – have been hollowed out by us, his fans (so to speak) and they have been replaced by an uncritical, never-ending sadness regarding the present and the future (or, more often than not, the lack thereof). Mark Fisher has become, in our not-so-idle hands, the one who wrote about our depression and about how everything under late stage capitalism is a ghost which simply repeats the empty shell of a lost future which never was, an idea repeated so often by his acolytes it has become the subject of a micro-genre of YouTube videos. Even the pop culture Fisher loved and commented on got dumbed down, eliding his elegies of Scritti Politti’s Lacanian pop, Drake’s mnestic deficiencies and desperate hedonism, or The Jam’s victoriously bittersweet mass-propaganda and reducing it to an anaemic crawl from Joy Division to Burial.

But everything forgotten is bound to come back and haunt us, Fisher’s lost complexities are no different. And come back they did, in the drastic and biting way which characterised Mark Fisher’s intellectual trajectory.

The first signs of the untenability of this depressing simplification came with the publication of the posthumous collection of Fisher’s blogposts, "K-punk". At the tail end of this anthology stands a fragment that disquiets the vision of a straightforwardly melancholic Fisher, a remainder of a work yet to come and of the complexities yet to be discussed. The fragment, bearing the sun stricken title "Acid Communism", revolved around the constant resurrection, under various guises – be it in 1968 in Paris, in Bologna 1977, or throughout the various baroque sunbursts of the psychedelic counterculture – of the idea of an unbound abundance beyond the drudgery of late stage capitalism, an idea which felt, more than once, not only probable, but even imminent. Nonetheless, this brief piece remained, even within the comprehensive anthology, a kind of pre-Socratic fragment, the unclear trace of a project which could have been but never was, providing, also, an alibi for even more simplified rehashes of Fisher’s unfinished business.

Precisely because of this open wound, these sunken difficulties and this unexhausted potential, the recent publication of Mark Fisher’s "Postcapitalist Desire", his final lectures at Goldsmiths College, edited and curated by Matt Colquhoun for Repeater Books, is immensely precious. Fisher’s last lessons are so vital because they feel familiarly alien and complex within Fisher’s own body of work, extending the ever-present rupture within his posterity.

The bleeding heart of this project is the yearning for a better life, the joys and failures such yearning brings. Contrary to the emaciated ravers and McDonalds outlets that dotted the drowned London which we have accustomed ourselves to while digesting the dirges of "Capitalist Realism"’s lost futures, "Postcapitalist Desire" is inhabited by the dim, and sometimes fading, aura of the generations of workers, students, and pop superstars who dreamt of an abundance which looks at once hopelessly impossible and painfully near. It stems from a form of fun and desire which have little to do with our present umbilical turn-ons and resentments, one that speaks to us through (quoting Herbert Marcuse), 'the spectre of a world which could be free'. "Postcapitalist Desire" is a brief and experimental reconstruction of the march of our own consciousness towards a more thorough and sincere form of enjoyment.

Even the conceptual adversaries that Fisher takes up during these lectures possess a technicolour glow to them. They are not the all-encompassing sterility of capitalist realism and they are finally fully divested of the Derridean pomposity of words like hauntology. They are the quotidian ugliness of another Monday morning, a creature that humanity will hopefully eradicate, or the irrational restrictions of a world which would die of natural causes without its self-inflicted misery. They are banal, surely, but they require a quotidian cunning to work through them. They entail an ethical, political, and cultural work which shines a retrospective light on everything Fisher has ever worked on.

Nonetheless, this fun and these glows come at a higher price than our simplified doom and gloom. In fact, as Mark Fisher notes repeatedly and as Matt Colquhoun highlights in his introduction, these sort of joys require a careful patience, a thing which our misery never did and which makes the analysis of our failures much more interesting and complicated. There is a basic lesson underlying these lectures, expressed through the various iterations of leftist pop culture and theory considered in these pages, and it can be boiled down to the idea that we will not get rid of our pain by simply being or having more fun. We will have to pursue the slow trials and tribulations of a properly psychedelic and liberated reason. We will have to learn to endure the hardships of practical, political clairvoyance and to master the twists and turns of our freedom.

"Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher" is edited by Matt Colquhoun and published by Repeater Books



. . .

I daresay there's something to this last paragraph above which hints at the past eight months here at home in Brooklyn

[dada]

Hauntology is a dying art.

Haha. I'm not familiar with the social theory of the hauntologist. I just like the atmosphere. For me, hauntology conjures images of dusty mansions furnished in gothic style. And non-time is when the clock strikes thirteen.

You rang? I wonder if to study haunting, really study it, one has to be a ghost oneself. Study haunting first-hand. Like seeing from the future. A ghost in the cobweb-filled corridors. Play on the old piano, rattle some armor. Know all the secret passageways, where lost treasures are waiting.

Each ghost is a world. One that could be free, as Marcuse said in the above post. I don't think that's what he meant.

See through the ghost. And if one wishes upon a star, just like a wooden marionette the ghost might become real. Real boys and girls.

Not familiar with the social theory of the hauntologist. I'm reminded of one of the Mr. Wong movies, with Karloff. The one with the Eye of the Daughter of the Moon. At the end, the letter penned by the victim, the one that will reveal the murderer, finally arrives. But Karloff has already solved the case. He tears up the letter, unread.

[dada]

The professional hauntologist must learn to distinguish the various sounds that go bump in the night.

It is not so simple a matter as telling the difference between a dragging chain and air in the pipes, or low moaning and 'just the wind.' The sounds with logical explanations might very well be the sounds of a haunting. Thus a different type of listening is required.

The sound of the scoring plates resetting on an electromechanical skeeball lane is a haunting sound, one you won't hear very often, if at all. By now, practically all skeeball lanes have been digitized.

For those who have never had the pleasure, skeeball scoring used to be tallied by a roll of plates. At the start of a new game, after inserting a dime or quarter, the plates rolled around to zero, making a sound like when the robot dealer shuffles metal playing cards in the Atlantic City of Tomorrow.

Due to the desire to hear the sound, a popular skeeball manufacturer now produces a '1930s-style' lane, complete with flip-scoring plates. However, these prohibitively expensive lanes aren't meant for the carnival or boardwalk, they're for private arcades, where the sound drowns in the displaced nostalgia of the surrounding silence.

Can nostalgia be anything but displaced? Sure, when it is nostalgia for a dream.

Many might interpret that in a despairing way. I don't really find it to be such a bleak statement. No one has seen what justice looks like, 'a fair and equitable world' as someone said in an article on another thread recently. And yet that doesn't seem to stop anyone from having nostalgia for it.

Many dread falling asleep for fear of a recurring nightmare. And luck might have it that you've once visited some out-of-this-world place in a dream which you'd love to go back to.

Because when you go to sleep, you don't know what you are going to get. One can do things that may or may not effect the probablities. One can make preparations for a permanent move. And then close one's eyes and hope to return.

[Luther Blissett]

Dec 3 2018, 1:08pm
LSD Changes Something About The Way You Perceive Time
We measure time in set amounts— seconds, minutes, and hours. But the way time feels is more slippery.

…

In previous work on time perception and hallucinogens, a factor that complicated interpretation were the strong effects from the drugs themselves. When time perception changed for people in those studies, was it truly because their perception had changed, or was it rather that their attention had shifted, for instance, to a strange visual hallucination across the room?

Still, it can be a little complicated to unpack what the findings really mean. Terhune says that it could be that people saw the blue circle on the screen, they perceived it to last longer than it did, and that’s why they held the space bar down longer. Or was time perception affected at a different point—for instance, when they were holding down the space bar?

Manoj Doss, a postdoctoral cognitive neuropsychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies memory, tells me there could be an issue with encoding. In a Twitter thread about the paper, he explained what he means by that: “Let's pretend you thought to yourself that an initial interval felt like 3 seconds (and it actually was). When you're reproducing it under a state in which time feels twice as long, you would think that 3 seconds passed when actually only 1.5 seconds had passed. This means that participants in their study could have encoded the interval in a perfectly normal fashion but felt that time had "sped" up during the reproduction interval, thereby leading to longer estimation. My guess is that both effects are at play.”

“These things are a bit difficult to tease apart,” Terhune agrees. “In this study, we certainly were not able to do that, so we definitely want to be kind of cautious.”

But the main finding of over-reproduction is intriguing despite what’s exactly causing it. In the few other studies using psychedelics and this exact task, the opposite has been found. Marc Wittmann is a neuropsychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany, the author of a recent book Altered States of Consciousness: Experiences Out of Time and Self, and one of the leading figures in the field of time perception and altered states. He has co-authored nearly all of the other papers on psychedelics and time perception, and found that when people were given psychedelics, they under-reported intervals—the converse of Terhune’s findings.

“I was a little surprised concerning the over-reproduction, but it's actually very interesting,” Wittmann tells me. “In our former studies, also with microdoses of psilocybin [the psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms], which is a slightly different drug but also psychedelic and very, very similar to LSD, we found an under-reproduction,”—meaning that when people reproduced the duration they had seen, they did for less time it had actually been.

In 2007, Wittmann and colleagues tested 12 healthy people on medium and high doses of psilocybin and found that psilocybin significantly impaired their ability to accurately reproduce intervals longer than 2.5 seconds. In a 2008 paper in Neuroscience Letters, co-authored with University of Zurich’s Franz Vollenweider, psilocybin also shortened people’s reproductions of intervals. In that study, there was an experiment where the people were given a low dose.

…

https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/j5 ... ceive-time

This all pretty perfectly describes the time dilation hallucinations I’ve always had such a hard time describing on psilocybin. Walking with friends and wondering how we had gone so far so fast, having a ton of difficulty crossing the road and judging the speed of cars, while at the same time experiencing the exact opposite.

Time dilation is always one of the strongest effects for me though I wish the visuals were more fun. Probably just need to take higher doses.

[Luther Blissett]

I feel like you might be on to something with your recent posts dada. I wonder if kitsch hauntology describes a mental device I’ve never had any words to describe other than “genre memory” or “thought genre”: a combination of sense memory, dreams, and ways to thematically describe a mental escape. For instance, the way I conjure up what the most verdant spring morning of the season, what that should look like, feel like, smell like, taste like, what that means for my life or the future, what other concepts or themes I mentally marry to that: the music of Cocteau Twins, thinking about people who are traveling on the vacation of their lives at that moment, and midcentury architecture. I do the same thing with many different ideas, the anti-globalization era being an easy one to describe here: all the films, media, protests, gloomy weather, memories, dreams, time spent in art galleries at the time, early-middle career Radiohead (and Godspeed You Black Emperor, naturally, does everyone else associate them with anti-globalization?) that I associate with that time of my life.

It’s never very deep unless I am actually using the device for creative purposes, but I’m always able to conjure the entirety of the specific theme immediately. In that way, it’s all surface. So maybe it is kitsch?

[Joe Hillshoist]

Dec 3 2018, 1:08pm
LSD Changes Something About The Way You Perceive Time
We measure time in set amounts— seconds, minutes, and hours. But the way time feels is more slippery.

…

In previous work on time perception and hallucinogens, a factor that complicated interpretation were the strong effects from the drugs themselves. When time perception changed for people in those studies, was it truly because their perception had changed, or was it rather that their attention had shifted, for instance, to a strange visual hallucination across the room?

Still, it can be a little complicated to unpack what the findings really mean. Terhune says that it could be that people saw the blue circle on the screen, they perceived it to last longer than it did, and that’s why they held the space bar down longer. Or was time perception affected at a different point—for instance, when they were holding down the space bar?

Manoj Doss, a postdoctoral cognitive neuropsychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies memory, tells me there could be an issue with encoding. In a Twitter thread about the paper, he explained what he means by that: “Let's pretend you thought to yourself that an initial interval felt like 3 seconds (and it actually was). When you're reproducing it under a state in which time feels twice as long, you would think that 3 seconds passed when actually only 1.5 seconds had passed. This means that participants in their study could have encoded the interval in a perfectly normal fashion but felt that time had "sped" up during the reproduction interval, thereby leading to longer estimation. My guess is that both effects are at play.”

“These things are a bit difficult to tease apart,” Terhune agrees. “In this study, we certainly were not able to do that, so we definitely want to be kind of cautious.”

But the main finding of over-reproduction is intriguing despite what’s exactly causing it. In the few other studies using psychedelics and this exact task, the opposite has been found. Marc Wittmann is a neuropsychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany, the author of a recent book Altered States of Consciousness: Experiences Out of Time and Self, and one of the leading figures in the field of time perception and altered states. He has co-authored nearly all of the other papers on psychedelics and time perception, and found that when people were given psychedelics, they under-reported intervals—the converse of Terhune’s findings.

“I was a little surprised concerning the over-reproduction, but it's actually very interesting,” Wittmann tells me. “In our former studies, also with microdoses of psilocybin [the psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms], which is a slightly different drug but also psychedelic and very, very similar to LSD, we found an under-reproduction,”—meaning that when people reproduced the duration they had seen, they did for less time it had actually been.

In 2007, Wittmann and colleagues tested 12 healthy people on medium and high doses of psilocybin and found that psilocybin significantly impaired their ability to accurately reproduce intervals longer than 2.5 seconds. In a 2008 paper in Neuroscience Letters, co-authored with University of Zurich’s Franz Vollenweider, psilocybin also shortened people’s reproductions of intervals. In that study, there was an experiment where the people were given a low dose.

…

https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/j5 ... ceive-time

This all pretty perfectly describes the time dilation hallucinations I’ve always had such a hard time describing on psilocybin. Walking with friends and wondering how we had gone so far so fast, having a ton of difficulty crossing the road and judging the speed of cars, while at the same time experiencing the exact opposite.

Time dilation is always one of the strongest effects for me though I wish the visuals were more fun. Probably just need to take higher doses.

Once on shrooms I had an experience of time stopping. There were intervals between syllables when other people talked and everything was still. I have a memory of waving my hand in front of someone's face when everything was still and them not moving or noticing (but I dunno if I actually did this or not). It was like I was in the space between instants.

And yeah, higher doses make the visuals more ... Well fun is one word but intense is a better one.

[dada]

The term 'Kitsch Constellations' comes to mind, Luther.

Or looking at kitsch as a syntax, a language.

Maybe part of the haunting language. Ghost-speak is a complex mixture of specific and universal dialects. Any licensed hauntologist will tell you.

Being able to translate and decipher the meaning of gesture is paramount for a grasp of the language. Of course anyone can understand the basic ghostly hand gestures, the pointing finger says "over there," the crooked finger says "over here."

But say you are at an amphitheatre in the Pyrenees at midnight one March 18th. The ghost of a knight cries, "who will defend the temple?" and six other ghost-knights respond, "no one, no one. The temple is destroyed."

You've understood the words quite plainly, but what is the meaning?

When a ghost speaks, it is the gesture of speaking that needs translating more than the words themselves. When writing, the gesture of writing. A simple point, but forgetting it has been the cause of many rookie mistakes.

Thankfully, ghosts of one culture will respond to the cultural signifiers of another. By the way, this is true for vampires as well. For example, throwing a chicken egg into a coffin will stop a european vampire from rising as easily as a chinese one, and the wooden stake works just as well on either one. A useful tip for those getting into the business.

Anyway, there's a big difference between dead language and living language. And we'll leave it there.

Page 13, over and out.