When nothing ever happens.

As k-punk makes clear here, it seems that hauntology is positioned in such a way as to blur the line between symptom (an aggravation of postmodernity, the frame, the joins, the shadow of the strings of the puppets etc) and something which is to be actively worked towards. This is because in its recent usage hauntology has become adapted into an aesthetic description, if not a viable political strategy then perhaps a legitimate artistic one. That Postmodern capital has thrown us, like some aquatic animal gasping for air, onto the arid beaches at the end of history is, for me at least, unquestionably accurate. That hauntology might be used as a way of conceptualising the gaps in the seamless blur of PoMo retronecrotic hyper-fashion is also possible. But what I would wish to contend is that whilst hauntology is distinguishable from postmodernity to the extent that it acts as its critique via denaturalisation, this critique remains within the bounds of postmodernity itself, within its circular logics and traps, an auto-criticism which whilst rendering postmodernity self-aware achieves little as the condition itself is surely predicated upon a kind of hyper-self awareness already (though as previously noted hauntology proceeds by a process of aching mourning rather than ironic detachment). Hauntology is a symtomatology, yes, but it not a cure. As the cultural logic of late capital, PoMo thrives upon contradiction, upon the ultimately flimsy nature of its chameleon facades. That it proceeds through a state of mourning also appears highly problematic. Mark has argued in the past that hauntology acts as an exploration of the nostalgia mode, rather than being nostalgic in and of itself, and perhaps thinking of such explorations as being a new aesthetic territory, as using the condition of postmodernity as the ground in which to open up new territory to create within (i.e. to use the accumulated ghost-material of a culture devoted to a near infinite accumulation of self-documentation, recording etc) is a seductive solution to the aesthetic deadlock which appears to afflict popular culture. But it remains debateable firstly as to how far many hauntological works actually interrogate their temporo-cultural ground rather than merely sliding into outright nostalgia, and secondly as to how far even those which do so are operating as anything more than a holding pattern, or a more sophisticated version of the usual Postmodern shuffling of pre-existing possibilities.

To truly escape the ouroboric contours of late capital requires a different process of denaturalisation, which begins by attempting to think the processes of capital outside of its correlation (positively or negatively construed) to the human (or at least, as far as this is possible). That this might undergird an accelerationist position does not necessitate the naturalisation of capital, the very opposite in fact. What we are looking for in part is a point of structural weakness, a point wherein the logic of postmodernity not only fails to operate seamlessly (or where the seams themselves confirm the impossibility of change) but actually assists a radical political praxis. In a sense xenoeconomics might offer us a way to use Badiou’s notion of structural instability within regimes of presentation and representation, but in an extremely heterodox manner which he himself would surely abjure.

“Much as I with it weren't the case”, writes k-punk, “it isn't possible to bring back modernism by force of will alone.” But surely what we must consider, if not in-itself then at least in terms of how we might bring it about, is not the return of modernism but the arrival of a new (perhaps, or at the very least) a currently properly unthinkable temporo-cultural episteme. Or is it the case that "the new" itself is linked so strongly with modernism that only a return can perversely engender a forward-directed breakthrough? This remains unconvincing, if only because it remains enmeshed inside the late-capitalist logic, and seems to lead at best only to the deployment of another attractive facade. For indeed, 'modernism' is already able to return, and does so endlessly, but as yet another “face” of postmodernity… Further, the uncomfortable resonances between hauntology and the melancholic spectral remnants of the contemporary political left remain- if hauntology is the aesthetic wing, wither its political correlate? The paradoxes of a conservative necro-modernism hang unresolved.