The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology

@article{Fisher2013TheMO,  title={The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology},  author={Mark Fisher},  journal={Distributed Computing},  year={2013},  volume={5},  pages={42-55},  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:110648899}}
  • M. Fisher
  • Published24 October 2013
  • Philosophy, Art
  • Distributed Computing
There has always been an intrinsically “hauntological” dimension to recorded music. But Derrida’s concept of hauntology has gained a new currency in the 21 st century, when music has lost its sense of futurism, and succumbed to the pastiche- and retro-time of postmodernity. The emergence of a 21 st century sonic hauntology is a sign that “white” culture can no longer escape the temporal disjunctions that have been constitutive of the Afrodiasporic experience since Africans were first abducted… 

52 Citations

Africa on the Moon: The Complexities of an Afrofuturist Reading of Dub

This article attempts a detailed and specific analysis of the music and the mythology of Lee “Scratch” Perry and other key figures and works in dub, in relation to Afrofuturist thought and the music,

Haunted Pancakes

: The music scene in post-Soviet Latvia is not haunted solely by its communist past, but also by the musical countermovement against the Soviet Union. Iļģi, one of the most prominent post-folklore

Speculating futures in an age of nostalgia

It is argued that slowly and imperceptibly the authors have become be-guiled by the increasing capacity to store, organise, access, and share vast amounts of cultural data and that this could lead to a dampening of creativity.

A Hauntology of Clandestine Transmissions: Spectres of Gender and Race in Electronic Music

Electronic music is often presented as originating with the Futurists, John Cage, Robert Moog, Kraftwerk and the Detroit techno scene, yet such descriptions elide the role of women in the history of

Souvenirs of Cicero

Cicero’s letters have figured prominently in some of Western modernity’s most cherished illusions about the immediacy of its encounter with classical antiquity. Celebrated since their discovery in

Hauntological cinema: Resisting epistemic erasure and temporal slippage with Sorry to Bother You

Through a hauntological analysis of Boots Riley’s Afrosurrealist comedy, Sorry to Bother You (2018), we explore how fiction can empower sociologists to think beyond the limits of empiricism to better

The Specters of the Mendi: An Attempt at South African Hauntology

The article is an ambitious and complex study of Black response to war trauma, occasioned by the tragedy of the Mendi, a troop transport sunk with great loss of life in 1917. The majority of the

Broken bodies and present ghosts: Ubuntu and African women’s theology

In this article, the notion of broken bodies is explored in relation to the African body and the history of colonialism in South Africa. This exploration will be rooted in a retelling of the story of

The Crackle of Contemporaneity

There comes a time to move beyond asking the broad question “What is contemporaneity?” to consider more acute ways in which this question can be traced and signalled. We consider the notion of signal

Afrofuturism and the archive: Robots of Brixton and Crumbs

Abstract:This article is concerned with questions of history, memory and meaning, and with the construction of Afrofuturism as both an archive and a living tradition. It will begin by outlining the
...

11 References

First as tragedy, then as farce

In this bravura analysis of the current global crisis - following on from his bestselling "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" - Slavoj Zizek argues that the liberal idea of the end of history,

Further Considerations of Afrofuturism

Imagine a team of African archaeologists from the future—some silicon, some carbon, some wet, some dry—excavating a site, a museum from their past: a museum whose ruined documents and leaking discs

Introduction: A Future for Haunting

Chances are, ghosts will make another comeback. For the time being, however, spectres, apparitions, phantoms and revenants have been eclipsed in the popular imagination by a rage for aliens,

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to

A Voice and Nothing More

Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice,

The End of History, or a New Crisis?@@@The End of History and the Last Man.

20th anniversary edition of "The End of History and the Last Man", a landmark of political philosophy by Francis Fukuyama, author of "The Origins of Political Order". With the fall of Berlin Wall in

The Singing Detective

This is the unabridged original text of Dennis Potter's acclaimed six-part television serial. The narrative counterpoints life in a hospital ward of a writer crippled by a horrific skin disease with

Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music

Part 1 Ancestors: Harmonica Frank, 1951 Robert Johnson, 1938. Part 2 Inheritors: The Band - Pilgrim's Progress, Crossing the border, Stranger blues, the weight Sly Stone - the myth of Staggerlee,

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

When films, music, phone calls, and texts are able to reach the individual household via optical fiber cables, the previously separate media of television, radio, telephone, and mail will become a single medium, standardized according to transmission frequency and bit format.

Traité des objets musicaux

This dissertation aims to provide a history of music criticism in the post-modern period from 1989 to 2002, a period chosen in order to explore its roots as well as specific cases up to and including the year in which Pierre Schaeffer died.

Related Papers

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers