Filmmaker’s Journal: resonanz.01 (2008−2013) notes / fragments on a case of sonic hauntology

Mourning always follows a trauma. I have tried to show elsewhere that the work of mourning is not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of production.…

A question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.…

There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality.

—Jacques Derrida, “Specters of Marx”

Note One: Early Thoughts (2008−2010)

I am developing resonanz.01, a video essay that ghosts, or thinks through and rearticulates Derrida’s concept of hauntology, as referenced in the above epigraphs, into relation to my reading of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, in which he maps blackness as a transnational diasporic form whereby musical, cultural, and political tropes, themes, and genres circulate via technologies, particularly sound recordings. Given that sound recordings (like the texts that I often deform in my practice) are objects of commodity circulation and consumption for multiple publics in disparate contexts, they inhabit a kind of virtual space and time of future deployment, consumer desires, and potential abuse. By that I mean that these familiar forms are constantly being shifed, re-encoded, and re-circulated among nodes: their origins are played, replayed, and displaced. My adaptation of Gilroy’s concept involves unsettling any notion of fixed historical origin, or essentialist notion of blackness, and thinking instead about how black cultural practices inhabit, shadow, and shif modern cultural forms in unexpected ways and contexts. This video case study will consider ways in which non-blacks participate in, retrofit, and complicate black cultures, not through appropriation, thef, or misappropriation (as these exchanges may have been traditionally enacted and described) but through reworking the logics, technologies, abuses, and improvisations that blacks themselves deployed to invent, reproduce, and circulate their historical and sonic interventions. It’s not about simply copying or imi tating a given image or static idea, as if there were an authentic mode. It’s about taking up a technology or structure (usually at some cultural or geographic distance from its normative use or tradition) and trying to produce differential originary meaning with it. I’m arguing that blackness is not an essence, but a hack (or series thereof), a method, a technological intervention under construction (and also under often dire social pressures) being coded, or played into existence daily. My work is an attempt to think blackness as an uncanny, ghostly methodology, that is, blackness as a critical, technical hauntology in relation to whiteness.

My video resonanz.01 explores the sound of Manchester post-punk band Joy Division and its linkages to dub reggae and subsequent forms like minimal techno and dubstep. Additionally, the video will consider Joy Division’s habit of producing darkness and the uncanny in visible form, particularly the way that English art director Peter Saville’s design vocabulary appropriates certain generic modernist or minimal forms to question the normative conditions and tropes of display for popular music in late 1970s capitalism. I will take up some of these same visual and cultural codes in the aesthetic of my project.

Note Two: (2011−2012)

The product did not have to appear as if it was for sale, only that it now existed and was itself. It did not have to draw attention to itself in the old fashioned way, with photographs and large blatant type and a general attitude of commercial neediness.

—Paul Morley, “Joy Division: Piece By Piece”

What does it mean to construct a visual form that functions as a conceptual or imaginative symbol, not an illustration or caption for sonic (or other) content? What would a critique of neoliberalism or late capitalism look like, or sound like? I read Saville’s decision to use a series of layered radio waves from the first observed pulsar¹ for the cover...