Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave And The Commodification Of Ghosts

by Grafton Tanner

It is a confounding and eerie sensation to feel social while alone, thronged with invisible entities whose presence is felt yet who appear wholly absent. These entities are our twenty-first-century ghosts, shorn from their corporeal shells and set loose to glide through cyberspace at lightning speed and with startling precision. We call to one another in the darkness of the Internet, reuniting with hosts of friends and followers, but the act is all theater. There is nothing there in the dark except the dead gaze of a copy.

With unprecedented access to the Internet, the flattened desert where past, present, and future comingle, we find ourselves living in a state of atemporality, yearning for a time before the present. In the West, the time for which we pine is one before the twenty-first century, which arrived violently on September 11, 2001, and before the rise of the Internet. Capitalism knows this and exploits our collective nostalgia for economic gain, commodifying the very ghosts we clutch earnestly. All of this we do because the world we have found ourselves in runs on the motor of chaotic, neurotic capital that wipes away any meaning other than profit.

We can consider hauntology as the past’s idealized portrait of a brave, new future haunting the present and also as an update to postmodernism’s critique of history.

This shift in focus from mining the cultural past for pastiche or parody to mourning a lost future differentiates postmodernism from hauntology. Whereas postmodernism toys with history via an increased skepticism in truly “knowing” the past, hauntology posits that the past notions of the future have in some way failed, causing a disruption of time as an orderly sequence of past, present, and future.

For Derrida, no celebration must be had with regards to global capitalism, for it does not spell redemption from political or personal suffering. He illustrates that such belief in the power of capitalism as a freeing institution is foolish, for it will not promise utopia. With more suffering mounting every day in the wake of the newest moment of capitalism, Derrida argues we are nowhere near the “end of history.” Hauntology, therefore, is the artistic mode of realizing this failure of the future that was promised in the past. It is the dismantling of the definitions of past, present, and future and is absolutely political in its critique of capitalism.

Whereas postmodernism captures and appropriates the past, hauntology sets the past free to disestablish time as a sequence and transform it into a looping construction.

As Hollywood doles out one superhero movie after another and the teen romantic-fantasy book genre delivers endless dreck, our culture becomes total fantasy, one without acknowledgement of our current place in history – which is characterized by rampant unemployment and underemployment, staggering debt, a diminishing middle class, racial injustice, transphobia, environmental disaster, and emotionally and intellectually stunted political groups paid by massive corporations to perpetuate fantasies in order to dilute the collective consciousness of the West.

There is so much music being made to lull us into indifference and to help us escape from the monotony of everyday life, but there must be those who throw us back into the world, who do not commodify our ghosts, who force us to look at the wider injustices, and who artistically wrestle with this alienating, unbalanced, unstable racket we call Western society.