Ghosts of My Data

 

In a lot of ways I think my first real post on this blog could stand in for much of this post.  Three weeks ago I wrote about my own experiences following dead hyper-links in relation to the work of British writer/critic Mark Fisher and it feels almost redundant to do the same this week, but the parallels and contrast between Lisa Blackman’s Haunted Data and Fisher’s own writing seem to striking to ignore. 

Coincidentally (I assume) both Blackman and Fisher, up until his 2017 death, taught at Goldsmiths, University of London and both worked on the Derridean concept of “hauntology” in digital culture.  Blackman’s text deploys the term in the more Affect Theory influenced usage by dealing specifically with the bodily and psychological conditions which originate in specters of past personal (or even intergenerational) experiences that only become uncoverable through fragmentary and temporarily disjointed glimpses.  She then moves this concept to the realm of science, specifically on the internet, where information and experience is exclusively translated to and from data.  This is done, she explains, by way of hyperlinks and are made increasingly complicated as the locations and destinations of those links are prone to change with little warning and left to be sorted by the blackbox algorithms of third party sites like Google.  This storage method has the benefit of creating smoother and more simple user experiences, and can potentially make the recovery of lost/repressed information equally smooth and simple, but she reminds us that it also engenders only very specific modes of recovery.  By translating what were once heterogeneous specters haunting us each differently based on social, political, or cultural factors, or even down to the level of individual families and individuals, must always already be formatted for digital publication and, ideally, search engine optimization. 

As someone with almost no background in the work of Derrida, I found Fisher’s application application of the term “hauntology” to sample-based electronic music to be particularly illuminating.  One of his favorite examples begins with the 1993 Rufige Kru song Ghosts of My Life, a title Fisher himself took for the title of the book in which he discusses the song, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures

The song itself, as he describes it, is a fairly archetypical jungle track with its fast-paced breakbeat drums looped endlessly, ominous atmospheric synth line, and, most notably, the “timestretched” vocal samples.  Timestretching, at the time was a fairly new invention, enabled entirely through the use of digital samplers that were beginning to take the place of tape and vinyl sampling made popular in the decades before techno crossed into Britain and morphed into jungle.  Instead of slowing down or speeding up a sound physically, by playing it slower or fast and thus changing the pitch along with it, digital samplers allowed producers to change the speed and pitch of a clip independently of one another. 

What, aside from being a great song, made this particular Rufige Kru track so important for Fisher was what the group had taken as its timestretched sample:

Time had folded in on itself.  One of my earliest pop fixations [the post-punk group Japan] had returned, vindicated, in an unexpected context.  Early 80s New Romantic synthpop, reviled and ridiculed in Britain, but revered in the dance music scenes of Detroit, New York, and Chicago, was finally coming home to roost in the UK underground… it was as if another part of my life —was being recovered, although in a permanently altered form.” –Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, 34

Hauntology, as the return of the familiar in a new form, a form which retroactively alters our previous conceptions of those once familiar forms, dominates the writings of both Blackman and Fisher’s writings on digital culture.  Time, speed, and accessibility all remain central to both invocations of the haunt, albeit in different ways.  Unlike the broken links in Blackman’s data, the material existence of Japan’s song Ghosts still exists in its original form; it is only complicated, for better or worse, in the mind of Fisher and his fellow post-punk turned electronic music fans but the old records need not be deleted or moved to make space for the new.

For the sake of presenting on this topic to the class tomorrow I’d like to end on some discussion questions to work through together instead of settling on one grand conclusion:

 

  1. To what extend does hauntology depend on the technological ease and speed of digital production to function? What, if any, pre-digital examples of hauntology can we think of?
  2. Specific to Blackman’s work, how do scientists (or just broadly those working outside of the humanities) deal with the ever shifting base of available knowledge in the digital world?  How much gets excluded as unreliable/unscientific/noise in favor of the old institutions?
  3. How possible is it to preserve past understandings of objects (music, art, data, etc.) once their ghosts have been remediated?

2 Thoughts.

  1. Interesting to draw a parallel between remediation and haunting. Also if I read your second question right, you’re relating this issue back to Hayles’ work on pattern and noise as well. It seems to me that remediation is a more expansive term that may enable the haunt to emerge. If a computer terminal screen is a remediation of a television set, is the television haunting the computer screen? Work in object-oriented ontology might be useful here–for example, Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology.

  2. As usual, your post offers much richness for multiple threads of discussion. But at the moment, I’m thinking in response to your question about science and hauntology. What happens when a science was founded on types of haunting, such as might be said of Freudian and Jungian psychology?

    It’s my sense that both areas of psychology have been relegated to a historical role, more or less, as “noisy” in the current research and practice of psychology, which itself seems upended by psychiatry and neurobiology. Science spends more time trying to locate myth in the brain than focusing on how the myth works. But other (less scientific?) disciplines have taken over that branch of knowing.

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