Gary Sauer-Thompson on hauntology  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Gary Sauer-Thompson on hauntology

In a 2008 post[1] Gary Sauer-Thompson, an Australian philosophy blogger I've reading since early 2005[2], picks up on hauntology. Thompson hasn't mentioned hauntology all that much up till now. Only 18 times[3], and I'd never noticed him bringing it up. Thompson is a blogger pur sang. He has no entry at Wikipedia but is referenced in the progressivism article.

Regarding hauntology Gary Sauer-Thompson starts by quoting K-Punk:

"K-Punk says[4] on the concept of hauntology that it must be understood in relation to postmodernity. Postmodernism, in turn, has to be understood – as Jameson has taught us – as ‘the logic of late capitalism’ [in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism]. K-punk adds:
"Jameson’s great contribution was to have grasped the way in which, far from leading to an efflorescence of cultural innovation, the unprecedented dominion of capitalism over the globe and the unconscious would lead only to cultural situation given over to previously inconceivable levels of stagnation and inertia. Shorn of the confidence that an elite modernism could provide a revolutionary alternative to pacifying entertainment, no longer capable of believing that there was any form of detournement which could not in turn be re-incorporated and commodified, Jameson is the successor to both the Frankfurt School and the Situationists."[5]

He then adds:

Jameson and Baudrillard understood that the user-generated content, together with the concomitant retreat of the cultural elite that has enabled it, would not lead to new kinds of creativity, but to pastiche and retrospection. Just as the capitalist language of ‘diversity’ is a cover for new modes of homogeneity.

And concludes by:

What Jameson calls the ‘nostalgia mode’ is one expression of this homogeneity. Hauntology is the counterpart to this nostalgia mode.





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Gary Sauer-Thompson on hauntology" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools