Distant Music: Recorded Music, Manners, and American Identity Jacklyn Attaway

Home , Age Of, Ariel Pink, Before Today, Hauntology, Hypnagogic pop, New Weird America

Florida State University Libraries

Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2012 Distant Music: Recorded Music, Manners, and American Identity Jacklyn Attaway

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

DISTANT MUSIC: RECORDED MUSIC, MANNERS, AND AMERICAN

IDENTITY

JACKLYN ATTAWAY

A Thesis submitted to the American and Florida Studies Program in the Department of Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2012

Jacklyn Attaway defended this thesis on November 5, 2012 The members of the supervisory committee were:

Barry J. Faulk Professor Directing Thesis

Neil Jumonville Committee Member

Jerrilyn McGregory Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

I dedicate this to Stuart Fletcher, a true heir-ethnographer who exposed me to the deepest wells of cultural memory in the recorded music format; Shawn Christy, for perking my interest in the musicians who exhibited the hauntological aesthetic effect; and to all the members of WVFS Tallahassee, 89.7 FM—without V89, I probably would not have ever written about music. Thank you all so much for the knowledge, love, and support.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge Dr. Barry J. Faulk, Dr. Neil Jumonville, Dr. Jerrilyn McGregory, Leon Anderson, Dr. John Fenstermaker, Peggy Wright-Cleveland, Ben Yadon, Audrey Langham, Andrew Childs, Micah Vandegrift, Nicholas Yanes, Mara Ginnane, Jason Gibson, Stuart Fletcher, Dr. Misha Laurents, Dr. Mona Behl, Dr. Elise Jensen, and the members of WVFS Tallahassee. Thank you for all of your expertise and support.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... vi

Chapter 1-Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2-Hauntology ...... 11

Chapter 3-Hauntological Aesthetic Effect ...... 33

Chapter 4-The Sound of Aesthetically Haunting Recorded Music ...... 57

Chapter 5-Manners and American Identity ...... 89

Chapter 6-Conclusion ...... 106

REFERENCES ...... 111

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 117

ABSTRACT

This thesis discusses Derrida‘s theory of Hauntology, establishes a theoretical framework for an analysis of the hauntological aesthetic in recorded music, and explores the hauntological aesthetic in reference to Victorian spirit photography and contemporary recorded music of producer-musicians such as Greg Ashley, Jason Quever, Tim Presley, and Ariel Pink. By describing and analyzing the recorded music of said producer-musicians, this thesis reveals how aesthetically hauntological recorded music expresses American anxieties concerning the effects of changing technologies and cultural transitions. In effect, this thesis shows how American ideologies operate as ―ghosts,‖ and how one can better interpret and understand these core values by combining aesthetics and history through the medium of recorded music.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Since the late 1990s and early millennium, a new aesthetic in visual art and recorded music has emerged and become popular in underground culture. In recent criticism, this aesthetic has been cycled through various terms and music genres. Often associated with the Ghost Box Label music and ―New Weird America,‖ ―Americana,‖ and ―Hypnogogic Pop‖ music micro-genres, the hauntological aesthetic effect, named for Jacques Derrida‘s term ―hauntology,‖ is an aesthetic experience that expresses a post-utopian retro-futurism—a mourning the loss of the past‘s belief in the possibility of an yesterday‘s idealized tomorrow. The hauntological aesthetic, rather than simply mourning the past, mourns the past‘s hopes and dreams for the future. Recorded music that exhibits the hauntological aesthetic effect is characterized by a low fidelity sound often described as ghostly, spooky, old, far away, distant, and haunting. The origin of the aesthetic is old-sounding, "haunted" music, and a new niche group/ musical movement is sampling the music, or trying to recreate the sound. Achieved by recording with obsolete technologies, through creatively innovative recording processes such as recording in old homes, under bridges, and even in caves, or by various production methods of layering intentional "dirt" or surface noise, the hauntological aesthetic in modern recorded music expresses a quality of sonic distance and aural crumble much like that of the early 20th century‘s 78 RPM recordings. With age and wear-and-tear, time has placed its own layers of sonic ―dirt‖ on American folk and blues 78s from the 1920s and 30s. In this regard, these early recordings, later collected on The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, John Fahey‘s American Primitive: Raw, Pre-War Revenants, Volumes 1 & 2, and other compilations, exhibit the hauntological aesthetic on their own. Modern recorded music that seeks to intentionally synthesize the ravages of time on the physical and sonic integrity of a recording demonstrates a construction of the hauntological aesthetic. This intentional synthesis of the past—said aesthetic—in recorded music sounds ―spooky,‖ ―ghostly,‖ and ―haunting‖ and creates an uncanny sense of the past. Listening to Grizzly Bear‘s 2006 release Yellow House, one notes

1 how songs seem muffled and distant, buried under years of rotting floorboards and decay, each track a hazy sonic footprint of the place where the majority of the album was recorded—in the aging Cape Cod home of lead singer Ed Droste‘s mother. Texas turned San Francisco musician and producer Greg Ashley utilizes strange spaces such as highway overpasses and personal homes to achieve the distant, ghostly sound on his solo work and the recordings of his band Gris Gris. Both artists‘ recordings exhibit the distant and resonating sound of older recordings though both are contemporary. While aesthetically evoking the aural crumble of analog recording—which can be traced back to early recordings of the 1920s and 30s—recorded music that exhibits the hauntological aesthetic often stylistically expresses the sounds of the 1960s, 70s, or 80s. Furthermore the hauntological aesthetic in recorded music demonstrates a longing to negotiate a transformation of our cultural consciousness. In America, this cultural phenomenon exhibits how changing technologies create fears of dramatic cultural change, more specifically possible shifts in and even the loss of cultural memory. With the common usage of the internet and cell phones, communicative and media technologies have evolved beyond their progenitors. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, a great leap in communicative technology occurred with the surge of inventions and discoveries that brought forth electric wiring, photography, telegraphy, the telephone, the phonograph, and radio. Within 50 years, the world changed from years of only postal communication to the possibility of immediate, long-distance verbal exchange. The voice of another person could not only travel miles to allow one to hear it, but the voice could also be preserved and played back and broadcasted even over many more miles for even more people to hear it. In the midst of this great technological leap, many anxieties concerning the resulting culture changes arose. People feared that their traditions would be drastically altered or even destroyed by the onset of the new technology. Many worried that religious, economic, and family values would be swiftly and irrevocably changed for the worse by these new technologies. Religion became threatened by the very existence of new technologies as many felt their machinations challenged God. Economically, industrialization would increase employment and possibly do away with obsolete services, but it would also change the way people worked and possibly the core

2 principles of the American work ethic. Family structures would be affected by the countless number of husbands and sons who would leave the family farm to find work in the transforming economy. As communities evolved from the spread of new communication methods, so too would the family and further, the individual. Many people viewed the new technologies as unstoppable, ―unseen forces‖ swiftly revolutionizing America. With all the sudden shifts in American traditions, a great deal of anxiety and a need to understand all ―unseen forces‖—not just the new technologies altering America—arose. Spiritualism, then internationally becoming a prominent feature of late Victorian culture, spread throughout the United States with the spirit rappings heard by the Fox sisters near Rochester, NY. With Spiritualism‘s growing popularity, the séance and its comparative aesthetics (such as spirit photography) became the outlets for interpreting and reconciling the mysterious invisible operations of modern technology. In The Strange Case of William Mumler Spirit Photographer, Louis Kaplan focuses exclusively on the cultural phenomenon of William Mumler‘s spirit photography. Kaplan notes how spirit photography as an aesthetic grew out of Victorian Spiritualism‘s need to reconcile the new technology of photography with the post-Civil War legions of American dead. According to Kaplan, Mumler‘s spirit photography articulated anxieties about the swift cultural changes in American technology and society. Mumler‘s spirit photography became not only an aesthetic representation of the séances of Victorian Spiritualism but also an aesthetic expression of the anxieties surrounding the very technology that created it—the camera. Kaplan‘s analysis of Mumler‘s photography reveals that spirit photography is an early example of the hauntological aesthetic. Like Kaplan, British critic and blogger Adam Harper identifies the hauntological aesthetic in visual art (painting, sculpture, and collage), but Harper also recognizes it in recorded music. In Harper‘s ―Hauntology Now: The Past Inside the Present,‖ he analyzes the hauntological aesthetic more thoroughly than any other critic has to date. Harper argues that it operates on two layers. The first layer is idealized and often evokes the past nostalgically, and the second (or hauntological layer) ―undoes the first by

3 introducing irony‖ through the ―viewpoint of the present.‖1 The hauntological layer ―transforms the perception of‖ and ―deconstructs‖ the first layer.2 Although the hauntological layer can merely be a ―consequence of context,‖ the two layers are often intertwined within the work to achieve the hauntological aesthetic.3 Harper also notes that, in music this aesthetic can be achieved by using ―lo-fi effects (such as fading, ‗dirt,‘ noise, reverb, filters, and audibly decaying or broken technology in music).‖4 Thus, the relationship between recorded music that is aesthetically hauntological and the applied recording/ playback devices (the phonograph, record player, tape player, compact disc player, even MP3) is the same as that between spirit photography and the camera. The hauntological aesthetic expresses a ―ghosting‖ of the technology. In this regard, the aesthetic is a commentary on the nature of the technology, bringing awareness to the technology that created it and asking the viewer or listener to mourn the past. Furthermore, the hauntological aesthetic expresses the problematic nature of technologies that preserve the past (photography and phonography) by ―ghosting‖ the past and thus expressing a ―hauntology‖ of the technology that created it. In order to further identify and discuss the hauntological aesthetic, one must become familiar with the term ―hauntology.‖ ―Hauntology,‖ first coined by Jacques Derrida in 1993 in Specters of Marx, is a lens through which one can analyze and interpret how people confront loss. In Specters of Marx, Derrida describes the political climate after the fall of Soviet Union—a post-Berlin Wall world where capitalism has seemingly triumphed only to have the ghost of communism haunting the now capitalist world. Derrida coined the term ―hauntology‖ as a pun on the French pronunciation of ―ontology,‖ suggesting that the ontological essence of language—which compels one to define entities by their opposites through a structure of binaries, dichotomies, and dualities—is problematic when confronting ghosts. To Derrida, ghosts exist in suspension, between life and death, between presence and absence. Ghosts cannot be defined by their opposite because they exist between the opposites. For Derrida,

1Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics. 27 October 2009. WEB. 13 January 2012. 3. 2Harper 3-4. 3Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics. 27 October 2009. WEB. 13 January 2012. 3. 4Harper 4.

4 defining and discussing ghosts often presents an opportunity to reform the way we use and approach language and the entities it describes. Derrida expresses that in order to reform the way in which we approach and discuss the world, one must take into account all that is excluded either by language or hierarchies. In his analysis, Derrida identifies the ghost as having three components: mourning, voice, and work and notes two aspects of haunting: spectrality and conjuration. In Chapter 1, I will discuss each one of these components and establish a theoretical framework for my analysis of the hauntological aesthetic and for my analysis of American political theory. Because the concept of America can be seen as a process of ―always becoming,‖ it becomes difficult to define America and its core ideologies. In America, freedom is progressively realized (or unrealized), and like Derridean truth, freedom is complex and contradictory. In Chapter 2, I will explore the hauntological aesthetic in reference to Victorian spirit photography, phonography of the 1920s and 30s, and contemporary recorded music that expresses said aesthetic. Using an analysis of the practices of Victorian Spiritualism (namely the séance and spirit photography), I will compare the hauntological aesthetic in the recorded music of underground producer-musicians to folk and blues 78s from the 1920s and 30s and the spirit photography of William Mumler in order to demonstrate how both aesthetics of photography and phonography express anxieties surrounding swift technological changes. Both aesthetics seem to emerge from the technologies that traditionally preserved their respective art forms. Spirit photography grew from the use and manipulation of the camera‘s mechanical abilities and limitations: The double exposure ―mistake‖ became a realistic way to visually render the existence of two separate worlds at once, thus expressing the possibility of a ghost world. In the same regard, phonography preserves and disembodies the human voice. Using folk and blues 78s from the 1920s and 30s, I will describe the hauntological aesthetic effect in the ―gritty,‖ old sound of early recorded music. Many of these 78s—recollected on The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music and John Fahey‘s American Primitive complications—demonstrate how folk culture can become popular culture when technology expedites its transmission. In this regard, folk music turned popular music reaches the American people on a collective level and stimulates collective cultural memories and forms national identity. Like Harry Smith, I have left

5 out field recordings and reel-to-reel tape for the same reason he did: Because phonograph records were bought and sold and because most contemporary audiophiles at least own record players, pre-war folk and blues records certainly reached the public and arguably still do. People did listen to these cultural artifacts and are still listening to them; this means that these records have influenced Americans and still do. Furthermore, recorded music—constructed to sound older than it reasonably could— also expresses how the phonograph and other recording practices that are rapidly becoming technologically obsolete can be utilized to create a sound that conjures the past. In effect, the recorded medium is a ghosting of sound, but also sound, essentially, acts as a ghost. Using David Toop‘s discussion of sound in Sinister Resonance, I explain how recorded music not only operates as a ghost through the recording medium but also by its very essence, operates as a ghost as sound. The devices used to preserve memories now shape how memories are made. For chapter 3, I will describe and analyze the technology of recorded music that conveys the hauntological aesthetic effect—namely the phonograph and modern technological processes that are, in the digital era, becoming obsolete. Focusing on the technologies and processes employed to create the haunting sound, I will discuss the key role that technology plays in the construction of and discourse on recorded music that expresses said sound. For instance, producer-musicians who seek to create the haunting sound often record in their homes or other places outside the controlled studio setting and utilize now ―obsolete‖ tape and tascam four-track recorders. Using ―D.I.Y.‖ recording methods and obsolete recording devices and media, independent label and self-released American producer-musicians such as Jason Quever, Greg Ashley, Tim Presley, and Ariel Pink create recordings that sounds ―airy,‖ analog-textured, and from another time. While Quever‘s music seems to synthesize 60s Baroque chamber pop akin to The Left Banke‘s ―Walk Away Renee,‖ Ariel Pink‘s sound is that of innocuous 80s teen films. Greg Ashley and Tim Presley both utilize home recording spaces to create their raw, 60s garage pop sound with more ―airy,‖ faraway vocals. As White Fence, Tim Presley records ―fuzzed-out‖ pop music in his apartment. Greg Ashley recorded several tracks for his band Gris Gris and solo work in his parents‘ cabin in Texas and under a highway overpass. The acoustics of a recording space become very

6 important when using older recording devices because the producer is recording the sound of the whole space, not just the singer and musicians—an idea that hearkens back to early acoustically-recorded phonograph 78s where no matter how close a musician came to the recording horn, echoes and the strange acoustics of the room would nonetheless emerge in the recording. These methods not only give analog texture to the recording through the very devices used, but also add more sonic layers with the spontaneous sounds of the world (passing cars, dogs barking, and the ―imperfect‖ acoustics of the recording space). Furthermore, while illustrious artists such as Robert Johnson biographically express a hauntology, I have chosen to focus more on less infamous artists, like Charley Patton, whose sound evokes a haunting sensation. For this study, I am more concerned the sonic component of haunting— which, I argue, is best expressed through aesthetically hauntological recorded music. In addition, I will claim that recorded music conveys the hauntological aesthetic more completely than any other form of artistic expression because a sound recording—like a ghost—is invisible yet can have textural complexity and generate intense emotion and specific memories within the listener. Not only is ―haunting‖ a property of the technological medium of recorded music but also of music and sound. By comparing the anxieties surrounding the emergence of Victorian Spiritualism to the current cultural fears expressed in haunting, D.I.Y. sound of producer-musicians such as Jason Quever, Greg Ashley, Tim Presley, and Ariel Pink, I will explain how swift technological changes not only create anxieties concerning societal interaction but also evoke lamentations on the passing away of an era. Hauntologically, the purpose of any ghost is to initiate the mourning process. The ghosting of our memory technologies (which by their very existence and function were already ghosted to begin with) initiates our mourning of the past. With so much debris of the past (records and photographs) being discovered and resurrected, people are now finding curious enjoyment in grappling with the collective memories of the past. Relics of a now-dead, modern time before one was born evoke unanswerable questions and yet allow one to imagine life in the past. Art forms created to aesthetically resemble or mimic these relics also beget inquiry into how we live today and often ask which way of living is better. A culture‘s

7 way of living is affected by the technology they use—which can make one wonder how we are changed individually and collectively by our emerging and shifting technologies. In Chapter 4, I will reveal how aesthetically hauntological recorded music expresses complex American ideologies, and how American ideologies, in essence, operate as ghosts. Core American ideas such as ―liberty,‖ ―freedom,‖ and ―individualism‖ are complex and not only have subjective meaning. In addition, the American Dream operates as a ghost—while the American Dream is different for each individual, is a complex idea and with subjective implications, it also has not been realized by and has been kept from many Americans. For African-Americans, a future with hope for complete equality and actualization of the American Dream has not happened yet—the haunting is that of a deferred, or unrealized, Dream. America‘s past of promising the actualization of the American Dream to all while denying it to many social and ethnic groups haunts the present so that we are constantly striving to bring American practices closer to American rhetoric. In this regard, American identity is shaped by America‘s past and its haunting of the present. By listening to American recorded music that expresses the hauntological aesthetic, we can better interpret and understand American manners—enduring national images composed of a combination of aesthetics and history—in order to better understand American identity. The recorded American folk song or neo-folk song commodity expresses American identity because it is individualized. Recorded music gave Americans the space to reflect on ideas and themselves in the private world of listening, and listening to Americana music allowed Americans to better understand their national identity. Hauntologically, individualization is a complex term and essentially rejects a clear, ontological meaning. Furthermore, individualization stands as a core idea of the American Creed. In America, interaction involving our inalienable rights is core to national identity. Thus aesthetically haunting art asks one to consider how communicative and memory- forming technologies have altered American value systems and continue to do so. For example, just 12-15 years ago, most people remembered portions of their lives with tangible, film photographs. Because one had to wait for developing processes, film sometimes was defective and did not ―turn out,‖ and most people did not carry a clunky camera with them everywhere, a person would only have so many moments in his life

8 documented in photographic form. Now people have digital cameras on their cell phones that are compact, can save thousands of pictures, and instantly can be upload said pictures to social networking sites like Facebook. A person can snap a photo anytime and anywhere of anything. The convenience of this technology is great but often leads to laziness or confusion about what images deserve preserving. The real difficulty comes in deciding what should be preserved, and this method had to be employed in the preservation of the relics of the past. When a newer art form aesthetically mimics the past, it is asking one to consider what contemporary culture is missing and what creates authenticity. It is asking America to remember who she is. Therefore the hauntological aesthetic can be closely analyzed in reference to American culture and identity. Just as the great technological leap into the electric age occurred at the turn of the century, the world is now realizing its next leap in the communicative devices of the post-millennial digital age. Looking back on the 1990s, Americans wonder how they ever lived without cell phones and the internet. Within the last 20 years, the world has evolved into a digitally managed network of communication. As people continue to move further into the digital era and possibly leave the age of analog behind, a desire to hold onto fragments of the analog era seems to grow. Much of current recorded music seeks to synthesize analog sound: Many musicians are employing obsolete recording equipment and press their albums in analog mediums like records and tapes. Even novice music listeners are considering out-dated modes of playback devices for such resurrected and rejuvenated media. Recorded music that synthesizes analog sound, and thus exhibits the hauntological aesthetic, does so in order to reconcile the cultural changes that are occurring as a result of the technological changes brought about by the digital age. Furthermore, this aesthetic in recorded music conveys the cultural representation of the liminality created by the technological changes through which America is transitioning and reflects a negotiation in transforming our cultural consciousness from the 20th century to the post-millennial era. Like the séances of late Victorian spiritualism, aesthetically hauntological recorded music expresses a dissatisfaction with or hesitancy toward modern communicative technologies and a lamentation of the rapid passing of the previous era. In America, this cultural

9 phenomenon exhibits how changing technologies create fears of dramatic cultural change—more specifically possible shifts in and even the loss of religious, economic, and family values—and asks one to consider what (be it media, art, or values) is carried on into the next era and what is discarded.

CHAPTER 2 HAUNTOLOGY

As a society grows and evolves, the question of what is retained and what is discarded for future generations becomes more important. During times of dramatic cultural change, a society may fear the loss of certain cultural relics. When these systems seem to be fading into obsolescence, their fragility and decay may render them ghostly—provoking society either to preserve them for future generations or eliminate any outmoded and no longer useful structures. Discussion of retaining or discarding various cultural relics demands that one consider inheritance. Cultural inheritance may include several degrees of systems and ideas such as politics, religion, ethics, technology, aesthetics, and traditions. In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida speaks at length about the ramifications of cultural inheritance. According to Derrida, one must sort through and choose from his culture to decide what he will carry on into the next era and what he will abandon. Derrida states: An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. ―One must‖ means one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several different possibles that inhabit the same injunction. […] If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. […] The critical choice called for by any reaffirmation of the inheritance is also, like memory itself, the condition of finitude. The infinite does not inherit, it does not inherit from itself.5 What the inheritance will include is the responsibility of the heir to choose and decide. The choice is not an easy task because most cultural inheritance often passes from one generation to another through silent and mysterious ways. Like a club‘s ―secret handshake,‖ cultural inheritance is preserved by being kept hidden and only revealed

5 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 18.

11 when the initiate has proved himself worthy of the responsibility and has chosen to abide by all the rules of his cultural system. Derrida furthers discusses inheritance‘s responsibility of choice by saying: Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. It remains before us just as unquestionably as we are heirs […] even before wanting or refusing to be, and, like all inheritors, we are in mourning. […] To be […] means […] to inherit. All the questions on the subject of being or what is to be (or not to be) are question of inheritance.6 Derrida utilizes Hamlet‘s question to suggest that by being (or living), one inherits from his culture—manners, etiquette, history, traditions, customs, and rituals. One must choose what he inherits, carries into the next era, and passes on to those who will come after him. Such societal components are pivotal and define not only the individual but also the core of a nation. Already obscured by their essential complexity, these elements of national identity can become even vaguer if they ever seem waning or less effective than in previous years. Many times language fails to give clear and definitive meanings for such intricate and essential ethos. Because of their nebulous and ―ghostly‖ explanation, such elevated yet crucial terms demand alternative modes of interpretation. Because of the vagaries surrounding cultural inheritance and all the terms used to describe it, one must explore different methods of research to ascertain a better understanding of such vital yet textually obscure aspects of one‘s culture. Derrida suggests a study of ―ghosts‖ and asserts, ―One never inherits without coming to terms with […] some specter, and therefore with more than one specter.‖7 To sort through and choose from one‘s cultural inheritance is to reckon with certain ghosts. ―Ghosts‖ exist as crucial yet ambiguous terms, ideas, mores, ethics, customs, and codes. Thus, as Derrida expresses, ―[It] would be necessary to learn spirits.‖8 To decipher and learn from ghosts, one must identify them by their characteristics. The ghost: is an event or happening, is transient, is unseen or invisible, operates through a ―body‖ or space as a specter, is perceived through the senses, is

6 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 67. 7 Derrida 24. 8 Derrida xvii.

12 spectral and of a temporal disjuncture, and generates feelings of uncertainty. The ghost foremost is an event or happening. It is experienced and can only be perceived or felt in the moment. This event is transient and happens in the ―now.‖ The ghost is also unseen. It is invisible and lacks a physical form. Therefore, the ghost operates or makes itself felt by animating a ―body.‖ A ―body‖ is a space—house, room, person, or object. When the ―body‖ is animated by the ghost, the ―body‖ becomes the specter. The specter is the physical matter that has become ghosted, haunted, or animated by the spirit of the ghost. One perceives the ghost through the specter. This perception is a sensory perception. Using his senses, one experiences the ghost through the ―spectralized body.‖ This awareness involves a certain sentience—a subjective way of perceiving, feeling, or intuiting. Feeling the presence of the ghost leads one to sensing a temporal disjuncture. Time does not seem to proceed as it naturally should, causing one to experience time as circular or spectral because the ghost itself is spectral. This means that the ghost is returning from both the past and the future at the same moment. Because the ghost has no verifiable source, it breeds feelings of uncertainty. In addition, these uncertainties and vagaries are what the ghost seeks to communicate. The ghost exists between presence and absence, between life and death, between the past and future, and resists language‘s compulsion to define it by its dichotomous opposite. The ghost has no dichotomous opposite; therefore, it suggests the problematic nature of language. Concerned with the language‘s compulsion to define a term by describing what it is not rather than what it is, Jacques Derrida expresses that the ontological nature of language falls short when giving meaning to such important principles of cultural inheritance and identity. Derrida also argues for a new way of understanding and interpreting language—a ―hauntology‖— which is required to discuss such vague and shifting tenets of national, and essentially human, values. For Derrida, ―hauntology‖ is a lens through which one can analyze and interpret what is lost in language‘s deficient definitions of significant precepts and how society must confront and amend those losses. A ―hauntology‖ of an idea is an alternative method of analyzing, interpreting, and defining that idea by affirming what the term ―is‖ and ―does‖—how it communicates and functions or ―works.‖

Hauntology hinges on the problematic and ontological nature of language‘s compulsion to define entities by their opposites through a structure of dichotomies, binaries, and dualities. Because the complexities of life cannot be contained by any uniform category or definition, language cannot always efficiently articulate its meaning. Language, by its very essence, renders discussion and description of such fundamental terms as ―the present‖ and ―the action of living‖ impossible. Once one takes a closer look at definitions and usage of ideologies, he will find that several elementary discourses may be rendered ―ghostly‖ by language. Therefore, in order to better understand certain principles, one must study and try to understand the nature of ―the ghost‖—that which exists between dichotomies and cannot be defined by its opposite. Using the fundamental act of ―living‖ to illustrate the need for ―a hauntology‖ of language, Derrida states: If it—learning to live—remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between two […] such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost […] So it would be necessary to learn spirits. Even and especially if this, the spectral, is not. Even and especially this, with is neither substance, nor essence, nore existence, is never present as such. The time of the ―learning to live,‖ a time without tutelary present, would amount to this […] to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and…not better but more justly. But with them […] And this being-with specters would […] not only but also [be], a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.9 Derrida‘s contentions are that to live justly, one must live with ghosts or ―certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us‖ (Derrida xviii). In this respect, ghosts can be past and future generations—―those who are not yet born or who are already dead,‖10 but ―ghosts‖ are also political systems, hegemonies, religions, ethics, traditions, values, culture, technology, and aesthetics that are passed

9 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. xvii-xviii. 10 Derrida xviii.

14 from one generation to the next and will continue to affect future generations. Ghosts are entities that reject definitions which place them between dichotomous oppositions. Coined as a pun on the French pronunciation of ―ontology,‖ Derrida‘s ―hauntology‖ suggests that the ontological essence of language—which compels one to define entities by their opposites—is problematic when confronting ghosts. To Derrida, ghosts exist in suspension, between life and death, between presence and absence. Ghosts cannot be defined by their opposite because they exist between the opposites. Exercises in defining and discussing ghosts often presents an opportunity to reform the way we use and approach language and the entities it describes. In ―The Spectral Turn,‖ Jeffery Weinstock describes the haunted character of contemporary American culture. Of ghosts, Weinstock says, ―Ghosts […] violate conceptual thinking based on dichotomous oppositions. They are neither fully present nor absent, neither living nor dead. The ghost is the mark or trace of an absence.‖11 Because ghosts disrupt established linguistic methods of assigning meaning to concepts based on binary negation, they present opportunities for scholars to reexamine and reform the ways in which we use language and define entities. Hauntology offers an alternative to traditional modes of deciphering language and allows one to modify interpretation. Derrida first introduced the notion of ―a hauntology of language‖ in his 1993 publication Specters of Marx—a book in which he analyzes the supposedly apparent failure of Karl Marx‘s notions of Socialism and Communism. By describing the political climate after the fall of Soviet Union—a post-Berlin Wall world where Capitalism has seemingly triumphed only to have the ghost of Communism haunting the now capitalist world—Specters of Marx mourns the end of a never completely actualized yet nevertheless idealized communist Russia. While Derrida focuses on the lingering effects of Communism and Marxist ideas in reference to modern history, he poses interesting questions concerning language, meaning, identity, ethics, and values in reference to Marxism. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon applies a hauntology to sociological data that is incomplete due to history‘s exclusions of marginalized peoples (women, ethnic minorities, laborers, and

11 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. “Introduction: The Spectral Turn.” Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 3-17. Print. 6-7.

15 homosexuals). Gordon also remarks on the ghostly character of obscured or misinterpreted political systems. She furthers Derrida‘s descriptions of how Marxism imparts an insight into the ghostly workings of a nation‘s commerce and legislation, saying: Marxism too provides a paradigm for understanding the impact of unseen forces. Marxism calls the ensemble of these unseen forces a mode of production, which never can be located as such, but that produces real, often quite phantasmatic, effects: objects that come alive only when you can‘t see the labor that made them; markets that are ruled by invisible hands; value that is a surplus of what has been appropriated from you; groups of people, classes, that are bound to each other in wrenching division.12 The invisibility of government, workers, people, classes, markets, production, and product value all suggest the ghostliness of the unseen forces that continue the cycles of business and regulation. These unseen forces of government operate as ghosts— watching yet invisible to the watched—perceived nonetheless through the after effects of their operations or as scarcely palpable presences. Gordon continues to convey how haunting is the narrowly-perceived, invisible function of the ghost: If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well- trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening.13 According to Gordon, haunting is not only the function of the ghost, but also how one perceives it. Haunting is unseen. It is invisible though felt. It is also an event, a

12 Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print. 196. 13 Gordon 8.

16 happening. The ghost (language, history, event, or person that resists dichotomous definition) is an invisible and vague presence, a complexity that demands reexamination. Unseen and barely perceived, the ghost haunts in order to be reconsidered. Linguistically, haunting expresses the insufficient functions of language and history in reference to providing more accurate truth. Hauntology then provides another manner in which language and history can be clarified. Derrida expresses that in order to transform the way in which we approach and discuss the world, one must take into account all that is excluded either by language or hierarchies. Derrida notes that in order to reform language and history (and ―live justly‖), one must reckon with the ―generations of ghosts.‖ He furthers this proposal and defines what constitutes and composes the ―generations of ghosts‖ as ―those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.‖14 In this regard, ghosts are those who have been and have suffered and those who will be and will suffer from a repetition of history‘s atrocities. He urges that we have a ―responsibility‖ to these ghosts ―in the name of justice.‖ This responsibility is to seek justice for the crimes that were committed and will continue to be committed against humanity unless we recognize, interpret, and resolve the history of these ghosts and the reasons for and by which they have been rendered so. Otherwise, these ghosts— residual memories of moments when the language of our national systems and thus, our national systems themselves fell short or failed us—will haunt us by breeding more uncertainty through the repetition of history (more atrocities, erasures, and exclusions of human beings). In Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature, Kathleen Brogan analyzes the literary ghost of the subjugated, ethnic American through Derrida‘s hauntology lens. Brogan describes cultural ghost stories, saying: The unifying theme in stories of cultural haunting is the need to identify and revise the cultural past. […] The ghost gives body to memory, while reminding

14 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. xviii.

us that remembering is not a simple or even safe act. Like the partially obliterated records that appear in contemporary haunting literature—the family papers mildewed and faded, stories left without endings or explanations, crucial words that resist translation—the ghost‘s elusiveness conveys a past not easily accessible.15 Whether in language, history, or memory, the ghost always insists on revision. The ghost asks that one take another look what is obscured and revise how he previously viewed and interpreted the past. Only through reexamination and revision can the scholar draw closer to truth, awareness, and comprehension of complex forms of language and inexplicable, omitted events in history. Analysis through the hauntological lens begins with identifying the ghost and its functions and allowing the ghost to speak and thus, transform itself, language, and history. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida offers three ways by which the ghost operates or haunts: mourning, the voice or language, work or the ―power of transformation,‖16 (Derrida 8-10), and discusses two aspects of haunting: ―conjuration‖17 and ―spectrality.‖18 Spectrality denotes a circular, disjointed character of time exhibited during haunting, a moving toward and coming from the future and the past at the same time, and a being toward death. Conjuration is the method by which one calls forth the ghost and allows it to speak and communicate its meaning. Conjuration seeks out the ghost and asks it to speak but also threatens to exorcise it. The ―work‖ of the ghost is the transformation of language, history, and ideas when it speaks, and the ―voice‖ of the ghost is how the ghost communicates and the language being transformed. ―Mourning‖ is the haunting of the ghost and how one perceives the ghost‘s presence. Mourning is also the ritual that ushers in the transformative process. Each of these components of the ghost and aspects of haunting suggest that complex ideas in language and history can be reassessed and reformed in order to be passed to the next generation with more understanding and clarity.

15 Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Print. 29. 16 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 8-10. 17 Derrida 49-50. 18 Derrida xix.

Mourning The ghost‘s primary operation is mourning. The ghost seeks to be mourned, and mourning is how the ghost haunts. One perceives the ghost through mourning. Without mourners, the ghost has no influence and cannot be felt. According to Derrida: [Mourning] consists always in attempting to ontologize [be it philosophical, hermeneutical, or psychoanalytical] remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying bodily remains and by localizing the dead […] posing the question of the specter, to the specter […without] confusion or doubt.19 To know what remains (and to be aware that there have been exclusions) is the first step not only in the haunting but in how one interprets the haunting. If only sparse history remains, then the ghost seeks justice for the erasure of this history, and the justice sought along with our awareness to the injustices suffered is the act of mourning. The ghost seeks mourning and that it is mourned. Mourning is way of remembering that is both contradictory and sensuous. For Kathleen Brogan‘s Cultural Haunting, the act of mourning is central to the cultural ghost story: The haunting is the ghost‘s demand to be mourned. She notes, ―Mourning represents a form of memory centrally marked by an awareness of a break with the past.‖20 Mourning is a remembering but also an affirmation that what is being remembered has passed and is of the past. Contradictorily, while mourning insists on remembering and lingering on an event, person, or idea, it also asserts that what is being remembered is no longer tangible or physically operating (except by some seething presence). Brogan furthers this, saying, ―The work of mourning is perhaps always paradoxical: mourning ritual confirms the separation of the dead from the living even as it reasserts their bond.‖21 Not only does the mourning ritual evoke the past while reaffirming the changes of the present through memory, it also divides the living from the dead while reestablishing how they are connected. The mourning ritual is a coming to terms with swift and final changes. Through the funeral, the final change is

19 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 9. 20 Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Print. 134. 21 Brogan 171.

19 death. With history, mourning avows that the past cannot be reenacted except through memory and imagination, and this particular form of reenactment is vital to the mourning process and thus the transformation of the ghost. In ―Afterword: After Loss, What Then?,‖ Judith Butler explores the role mourning plays in how people abide loss. Butler further expresses how the morning ritual not only avows that the past cannot be reenacted but also helps situate the past into the paradoxes of disjointed time created by grief: The presumptions that the future follows the past, that mourning might follow melancholia, that mourning might be completed are all poignantly called into question […] as we realize a series of paradoxes: the past is irrecoverable and the past is not past; the past is the resource for the future and the future is the redemption of the past; loss must be marked and it cannot be represented; loss fractures representation itself and loss precipitates its own mode of expression.22 The mourning ritual is an expression hastened by loss. Mourning forces one to consider loss and the changes that follow a loss. Derrida also notes, ―Mourning always follows a trauma.‖23 Because times is disjointed and fractured by grief, mourning is an operation seemingly beyond time, but in effect, it allows one to better interpret the ways in which the past, present, and future are connected. Mourning is practiced through perception and is emotional, intuitive, and sensuous—employing the use of the senses. It is a way of feeling, of perceiving the ghost through sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound. Butler emphasizes the sensuous quality of mourning, saying: And mourning is, ineluctably, an encounter with sensuousness, but not a ―natural‖ one, one that is conditioned by the proximity of the artifact to flesh. That mourning is subjected to a metaphorical identification with the artifice that brings the body into view suggests the very process by which mourning works.24 Imaginary or ephemeral entities may be recognized and interpreted through the primal senses of the body. Systems of feeling and intuition are employed during mourning.

22 Butler, Judith. “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?” Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Ed. Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. 267-473. Print. 467. 23 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 121. 24 Butler, Judith. “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?” Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Ed. Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. 267-473. Print. 470.

Because mourning operates through the senses—allowing one to recognize the ghost through his bodily, sensory perception—it refers back to the body. The mourning process is first initiated when one perceives, feels, or intuits the presence of the ghost on a sensory level. Because ghosts are neither present nor absent and neither living nor dead, they must inhabit or possess a ―body‖ in order to be comprehended. This ―body‖ is not necessarily a human body but an object, a room, a chamber, a house, a space. The ghost must occupy palpable space. The ghost must fill space and must be felt within the space it fills. Derrida says: The production of the ghost, the constitution of the ghost effect is not simply a spiritualization or even an automonization of spirit, idea, or thought […] No, once this autonomization is effected, with the corresponding expropriation or alienation, and only then, the ghostly moment comes upon it, adds to it a supplementary dimension, one more simulacrum, alienation, or expropriation. Namely, a body! In the flesh […]! For there is no ghost, there is never any becoming-specter of the spirit without at least an appearance of flesh, in a space of invisible visibility, like the dis-appearing of an apparition. For there to be a ghost, there must be a return to the body, but to a body that is more abstract than ever.25 In order for the ghost to be sensed, it must take residence and operate within a space. In example, one may say: A house can be haunted; a room can be haunted; a person can be possessed. Derrida‘s haunted ―body‖ also includes a system, a government, an ideology, a nation, the masses, and the laborers. To be haunted is to sense the ghost, and to mourn is to be haunted. When the ghost inhabits a ―body‖ and animates that ―body‖ so that one may witness and acknowledge the ghost‘s presence, that animated ―body‖ becomes the specter. The specter is the spirit of the ghost animating a discernable (and sometimes previously inanimate) space. The specter is that which haunts and is haunted. It is both the object, person, house, system, or space haunted by the spirit of the ghost and that which haunts the mourner. To recognize the specter—and thus be haunted—is to mourn the ghost. The ―voice‖ of the ghost moves

25 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 157.

21 the mourner from credulity to knowledge. In addition, the mourning ritual‘s sensory observance of the ghost is an awareness of the voice of the ghost. Voice The ghost appeals to the senses through language or ―voice.‖ The voice is how the ghost moves the mourner to sensing the ghost‘s presence. Derrida states, ―One cannot speak of generations of skulls or spirits…except on the condition of language— and the voice, in any case of that which marks the name or takes its place.‖26 The act of giving voice to the ghost, of allowing the ghost to speak, of giving a name to the invisible history that haunts, is not only a way in which the ghost haunts but also a primary component of mourning. This voice is the ―powerful fiction,‖27 the story erased from modern history. The story that haunts, be it through fiction or oral tradition. Kathleen Brogan notes the transformative power of a fictional reimagining of history used to fill in the omissions of the past by stating: ―The saving movement from reenactment to enabling memory is represented as a movement from traumatic silence into language.‖28 The fictionalized history and the act of telling the re-imagined history (the filling in the gaps) become the haunt and the act of mourning. While the hypothetical historical reenactment expresses the operation of the voice, the telling of the new history exhibits the mourning ritual. Often pieced together with fractured memories and decaying primary source documents such as personal letters and diaries, the fictionalized history is a key amending force in the cultural ghost story. Brogan says: Stories of cultural haunting attempt to remap an often fragmented and inevitably changed memory to its new coordinates by conjuring ghosts who pass from the past into the present, from the old territory into the new. The ghosts bear witness to the rift that necessitates their presence, even as they often function to transmit a tradition threatened by accelerated or violent change.29

26 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 9. 27 Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print. 25. 28 Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Print. 10-11. 29 Brogan 130-131.

Deteriorating memories and weathered artifacts of the past (letters, diaries, an photographs) facilitate the creation of a fictionalized history which informs the present with the knowledge and traditions the ghost can impart and considers the flawed systems that excluded the ghost in the beginning. Both cultural artifacts and memory give voice to the ghost, thus enabling the ghost to transform language and craft a corresponding history. Presenting possibilities for an alternative history gives agency and voice to the ghost. It allows the ghost to speak. Voice characterizes the moment when one allows the ghost to communicate. Derrida notes, ―What seems almost impossible is to speak always of the specter, to speak to the specter, to speak with it, therefore especially to make or let a spirit speak.‖30 While speaking to the ghost is vital to initiating the mourning process, listening to the ghost speak (giving the ghost voice), is the very transformative power that the ghost exerts on language. According to Derrida, in order live justly, one must keep ghosts close and must maintain constant discourse with them.31 Rather than hearing the ghost then immediately forgetting it or avoiding it all together, one must ―intend to understand spirits in the plural and in the sense of specters, of untimely specters that one must not chase away but sort out, critique, keep close by, and allow [ghosts] to come back.‖32 Although they generate unsettling feelings of uncertainty and anxiety, one must continue to converse with and contemplate on ghosts because forgetting denies them justice and agency and only perpetuates more uncertainty and anxiety. Being mindful of ghosts and aware of their ambiguities enables one to give voice to the voiceless and to transform and evolve language. This transformation of language through the voice is the ―work‖ of the ghost. Work When the mourner experiences the voice of the ghost and begins the mourning process, the ghost ―works‖ or transforms the mourner, language, and itself. ―Work‖ is the third component of the ghost. Derrida explains, ―[The] thing [or ghost] works, whether it transforms or transforms itself, poses or decomposes itself: the spirit, the

30 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 11. 31 Derrida xvii. 32 Derrida 109.

‗spirit of the spirit‘ is work […] ‗a certain power of transformation.‘‖33 The work or transformation of the ghost occurs through mourning—which occurs through the act of molding a fictionalized reenactment of history. Therefore what is transformed is not only the ghost or the justices being brought to fruition, but the mourners also—as listeners and as the haunted—are transformed by the ghost. Kathleen Brogan notes the twofold transformative powers of the ghost and its cultural work in the reparations of fractured history by saying, ―The curious dual force of the ghost who makes present what is absent powerfully shapes the American story of cultural haunting. As both presence and absence, the ghost stands as an emblem of historical loss as well as a vehicle of historical recovery.‖34 The work of the ghost is to transform the history of the ghost and the history which the ghost is anticipated to influence. In this regard, the work is to reconcile history by transforming the ways in which the mourner analyzes history and the ghost. By transforming the mourner‘s perception of the ghost, the ghost works by altering the processes by which the mourner contends with ghosts. Essentially, the ghost adapts the ways the mourner approaches the world and the world of ghosts in language, history and culture. Derrida furthers the ghost‘s transformative powers by pondering the work of changing the mourner‘s head space: […The] critique of the ghost or of spirits would thus be the critique of a subjective representation and an abstraction, of what happens in the head, of what comes only out of the head, even as it has come out of there, out of the head, and survives outside the head. […] And what if the head, which is neither the subject, nor consciousness, nor the ego, nor the brain, were defined first of all by the possibility of such an experience, and by the very thing that it can neither contain, nor delimit, by the indefiniteness of the [ghost]?35 The ghost seeks to transport the mourner to an uncharted territory of the mind, to teach him a different way of knowing—whether it is through perception, intuition, or thought,

33 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 9. 34 Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Print. 29. 35 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 216.

24 and to bestow upon the mourner a certain sentience. This transformative work results in the mourner‘s perception of and communication with ghost‘s voice, and the voice is called forth by the act of ―conjuration.‖ Conjuration The process of transformation—the work of the ghost—is initiated by conjuration. Conjuring calls forth the voice of the ghost to speak. Conjuring also begins the mourning process which leads to a transformation of the ghost and thus, the mourner. The transformation of the mourning process through language is initiated and completed through conjuring. Conjuration signifies both ―conjuration‖36 and ―conjurement.‖37 Of conjuration, Derrida says: Conjuration signifies […] on the one hand, the conspiracy […] of those who promise solemnly, sometimes secretly, by swearing an oath…to struggle against a superior power […and…] on the other hand, the magical incantation designed to evoke, to bring forth with the voice, to convoke a charm or a spirit. Conjuration says in sum the appeal that causes to come forth with the voice and thus it makes come…what is not there at the present moment of the appeal. This voice does not describe, what it says certifies nothing; its words cause something to happen.38 The act of conjuring can be seen not only as an invocation of the ghost through the voice but also as a promise, an oath, a verbal pact made in the present in reference to a future-not-yet-come that when complete, will refer back to the past, to the time in which the pact was made. Moreover, Derrida notes, ―A conjuration […] is first of all an alliance […] a matter of neutralizing a hegemony or overturning some power.‖39 Conjuring is method not only of speaking with ghosts but an initiation of the mourning process. Conjuring is the act of allowing the ghost to speak, of listening to the ghost. In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon employs conjuring to fill gaps of information where social hierarchies subjugated the voices of subordinated people (women, ethnic minorities, laborers, and homosexuals). Gordon explains:

36 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 50. 37 Derrida 58. 38 Derrida 50. 39 Derrida 58.

Conjuring is a particular form of calling up and calling out the forces that make things what they are in order to fix and transform a troubling situation. As a mode of apprehension and reformation, conjuring merges the analytical, the procedural, the imaginative, and the effervescent.40 Conjuring is a combination of methods for understanding and interpreting the ghost; it is the multi-faceted approach and study of the ghost. Conjuring is also the act of becoming aware of, exploring, and perceiving the ghost; it is the process that enables the ghost to be perceived. When the spirit of the ghost enters a ―body‖ to become specter, it does so through conjuration. Conjuration as ―specterization‖ of a ―body‖ involves animation of a previously inanimate space and the sensory perception to that specter. Gordon uses Walter Benjamin‘s ―profane illumination‖ and Karl Marx‘s ―sensuous knowledge‖ to explain how conjuration (in regard to ―specterization‖) works. She first suggests Benjamin‘s discussion of the ―profane illumination‖ as conjuration‘s specter-making process. Gorgon says: Profane illumination is a concept that Walter Benjamin used to describe the ―materialistic, anthropological inspiration […] of the surrealists‘ experience of Parisian urban everyday life and its new, outmoded, and sometimes forlorn object world. [Using the profane illumination as a window into] ―the immense forces of ‗atmosphere‘ concealed in everyday things‖ [the surrealists sought to unlock and liberate these forces and break from the monotony of everyday habit…] It was the emphasis on phenomenal forms, our habitual relation to them, and their capacity, upon a certain kind of contact, to shatter habit […].41 Benjamin‘s concept of the ―profane illumination‖ suggests that objects hold within them energies of deeper meaning than those assigned them by their everyday use. An example might be a rocking chair. While a rocking chair is essentially a seat that rocks, the idea of a rocking chair implies notions of motherhood via rocking a baby to sleep, grandmother-hood via old age, and southern culture via hot summer evenings spent drinking iced tea on front porches. The profane illumination reveals how the sensory

40 Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print. 22. 41 Gordon 204.

26 images of memory attach deeper meanings and powers to everyday objects. Conjuration, like the profane illumination, seeks to access these forces (or memories) contained within objects. When the ghost animates a ―body‖ (and becomes a specter) in order to be perceived, it does so through conjuration. Conjuration is ―specterization.‖ Gordon expounds on profane illumination using some examples from culturally haunted literature with: What are these ghostly signals? […A] sunken couch, a hand, a photograph, a wolf, an open door, a hat. These are the flashing half-signs ordinarily overlooked until that one day when they become animated by the immense forces of atmosphere concealed in them. […They] are […] charged with the spirit that made them. […] Whether it appears unexpectedly or whether you cultivate and invite its arrival, the profane illumination is a discerning moment. It describes a mode of apprehension distinct from critique or commentary. […] Proximate and vibrant, the profane illumination captures just that experience of the ghostly matter. Profane illumination is a kind of conjuring that ―initiates‖ […] because it is telling us something important we had not known; because it is leading us somewhere, or elsewhere. […] For profane illumination is a way of encountering the ghostly presence, the lingering past, the luminous presence of the seemingly invisible. When you see, in a photograph or in a hat or in a footprint, the hand of the state, the other door, the water and what is down there, you have seen the ghostly matter: the lost beloveds and the force that made them disposable. When you have a profane illumination of these matters, when you know in a way you did not know before, then you have been notified of your involvement.42 When an ordinary object (or ―body‖) suddenly carries more meaning, the ghost has been conjured. The ghost is speaking through the object with its voice. The object is transformed. The haunted object becomes a specter of the ghost. The ghost is working through the object. One perceives the specter, and what one perceives transforms him and his perspective. He has allowed the ghost to speak. He listens to the ghost. He perceives the deeper meaning that the ghost is conveying, and he perceives the ghost

42 Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print. 204-205.

27 through his senses. He mourns. A pact is made between him (the mourner) and the ghost. A promise is made to ghost to remember, to not forget what has been made known to him. Becoming aware of the ghost—and what it is communicating—through the senses is the mourning ritual. The raw, sensory awareness of the ghost‘s voice is mourning—the work of the ghost. Mourning—the sensory awareness of the ghost—is how one experiences the specter, and the recognition of the ghost‘s voice is accomplished through the senses. To illustrate how one interprets the profane illumination, Gordon uses Karl Marx‘s concept of ―sensuous knowledge‖ (Gordon 205). Mourning is sensuous knowledge—understanding through feeling. Gordon says: This mode of apprehension that notices and comprehends the ghostly matter of the sunken couch, the hat, the photograph, the reflection in the mirror, the open door is a sensuous knowledge. Sensuous knowledge is a different kind of materialism, neither idealistic nor alienated, but an active practice or passion for the lived reality of ghostly magical invented matters. Sensual knowledge is receptive, close, perceptual, embodied, incarnate […].43 (Gordon 205) Sensuous knowledge is awareness of the ghost. Sensuous knowledge is the understanding gained from perceiving the ghost through the senses. It is how the specter affects and what the specter generates within a mourner. Sensuous knowledge is visceral, raw, and emotional. Sensuous knowledge moves the mourner; it is a transporting force. Sensuous knowledge is gained when the ghost (through specter) triggers a memory or image within the mourner and enables him to make a connection with a deeper meaning—an essential truth—of the past, language, or himself. When one gains sensuous knowledge, he mourns. Thus mourning is experience of feeling and gaining sensuous knowledge; mourning is the connection one makes with the past. The ghost is working, transforming. The ghost is working through the specter, speaking with its voice. The ghost is asking that its listeners mourn it. Although ―conjuration,‖ in one respect, means ―conjuration,‖ it can also mean ―conjurement.‖ Both terms are similar and have similar meaning, but conjurement represents the converse side of conjuration. Conjurement means to exorcise or conjure

43 Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print. 205.

28 away and seeks to drive the ghost away. Conjurement is the pursuing of the ghost in order to prevent it from returning. Derrida notes, ―For ‗conjuration‘ means, on the other hand, ‗conjurement‘ […], namely, the magical exorcism that, on the contrary, tends to expulse the evil spirit with would have been called up or convoked.‖44 Rather than calling the ghost and allowing it to speak, conjurement calls the ghost to banish it. Because the ghost is being exorcised, it is not being listened to. The ghost is not being considered and mourned. Conjurement is a temporary solution to the problem of the ghost. The ghost asks one to feel. The ghost brings uncertainty, doubt, and foreboding feelings. If the person perceiving the ghost does not want to mourn, he may attempt to expel the ghost without trying to understand the reason for the ghost‘s return. Nothing can be learned from conjurement except perhaps, the wrong way to grapple with ghosts. Derrida further explains conjurement saying: For to conjure means also to exorcise: to attempt both to destroy and to disavow a malignant, demonized, diabolized force, most often an evil-doing spirit, a specter, a kind of ghost who comes back or who still risks coming back post mortem. Exorcism conjures away the evil in ways that are irrational, using magical, mysterious, even mystifying practices.45 Conjurement exorcises a ghost without allowing it to communicate. In ghost stories and horror movies, ghosts are said to return because they have ―unfinished business.‖ The work of the ghost is to communicate something about itself. The ghost‘s work is to express why it is a ghost. Conjurement denies the ghost of this work. It explains away the ghost. Derrida expresses: To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would call here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration.46

44 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 58. 45 Derrida 59. 46 Derrida 202.

The type of conjuration Derrida is describing is conjurement. Conjurement is the attempt to ―onologize‖ away the ghost, but the ghost will not stay away. The ghost will return. Ontology cannot justify the ghost, and the aspect of ―returning‖ is a key characteristic of the ghost. A ghost is always returning. This quality articulates the ―spectrality‖ of the ghost. Spectrality Spectrality suggests that the origin of the future is the past—that time is circular rather than linear. It is a state of being toward death, a ―facing backwards.‖ Spectrality is also an aspect of the ghost. Simply put, Weinstock says, ―To be spectral is to be ghostlike, which, in turn, is to be out of place and time.‖47 The ghost is always returning. This return is from the past and from the future, and the ghost‘s returning will happen again in the future. This unexpected return of the ghost generates uncertainty. There is a difficulty in knowing where the ghost came from, yet there is a déjà vu feeling when the ghost does return because, to reiterate, the ghost is always returning. The ghost is always there, has always been there. The ghost is spectral. Derrida describes the spectrality of the ghost, saying: Turned toward the future, going toward it, it also comes from it, it proceeds from […] the future. It must therefore exceed any presence as presence to itself. At least it has to make this presence possible only on the basis of the movement of some disjointing, disjunction, or disproportion: in the inadequation to self‖48 The presence of the ghost creates a sense of temporal disjuncture of time—a sense of the phenomenon of ―spectrality‖ or that the origin of the future is the past. This spectrality of time creates a curious sense of temporal disjuncture, which also adds another sensuous quality to the mourning process. The idea of experiencing the very same feeling before but not knowing when and from where can produce unsettling emotions. Time does not seem to be proceeding as it naturally should. Time is disjointed and strange. Derrida says:

47 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. “Introduction: The Spectral Turn.” Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 3-17. Print. 6. 48 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. xix.

A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: ―now,‖ future present). We are questioning this instant, we are asking ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time, at least to what we call time. Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time, it does not give time […].49 Because the ghost is spectral and exposes the mourner to the sensory perception of spectral time, one must consider time as spectral. One must consider time as circular, always repeating and always returning to the same outcomes. If time is circular and is destined to repeat, the study of the ghost becomes even more important. Derrida ponders: What exactly is the difference from one century to the next? Is it the difference between a past world—for which the specter represented a coming threat—and a present world, today, where the specter would represent a threat that some would like to believe is past and whose return would be necessary again in the future, to conjure away?50 Derrida‘s questions on the spectrality of time are thought-provoking yet disquieting. What essentially sets one generation apart from another? Being in conversation with ghosts enables one to ask these questions and produces responses that may not necessarily answer the questions in full but ultimately assists one in understanding his generation and the generations that came before him. It facilitates the sorting and choosing of one‘s inheritance, and his inheritance is the direct link to the generations before him. Each member of a culture chooses the aspects of his culture he will affect and pass on to his progenitors. He inherits his culture from the generations before him, but he has chosen what to keep. Inheritance requires that an heir sort through and decide on what he will keep and what he will discard. Whatever the inheritance will include is the responsibility of the heir to choose and decide, and the careful sifting through cultural inheritance becomes even more important during times of dramatic cultural

49 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. xix. 50 Derrida 48.

31 change. A society may fear the loss of several vital components of its culture and may seek to preserve them for future generations. Systems and ideas such as politics, religion, ethics, technology, aesthetics, and traditions are complex entities that resist clear-cut definitions. These entities comprise one‘s cultural inheritance. When a culture evolves and moves into the next era, its key structures, aesthetics, and values may threaten to disappear. Because these entities can only maintain themselves with some ghost, it becomes more and more important to understand the characteristics and functions of the ghost. The ghost is an event or happening. It is transient and unseen yet operates through a ―body‖ or space as a specter. This specter is perceived through the senses. When one encounters the specter, he feels a temporal disjuncture of time which alerts him to the spectrality of the ghost and time. That the ghost is spectral means that it is returning from the past and future at that the same time. Because the ghost has no verifiable source, it generates feelings of uncertainty and anxiety. Exploring this feeling of uncertainty is what leads one to sentience, knowledge, and a revision of history, language, and culture. Being in conversation with the ghost pushes one to a more well-rounded awareness of his history, language, and culture. By analyzing the ghost (a complex idea, term, system, or aesthetic) through the lens of hauntology, one moves closer to understanding his culture and his cultural inheritance.

CHAPTER 3 HAUNTOLOGICAL AESTHETIC EFFECT

Hauntology offers an alternative method by which one can analyze and interpret complex ideas, terms, systems, or values that lack clear dichotomous definitions but nonetheless exert force, shape culture, and affect life. By analyzing the ghost (a complex entity) through the lens of hauntology, one moves closer to understanding his culture and cultural inheritance. This perspective becomes even more important when a culture evolves and moves into the next era because significant ethics may be forgotten, eliminated, and thus not passed on to the next generation. In this regard, hauntology prompts one to reconsider certain modalities of their cultural experience that are new and difficult to comprehend or are old and threaten to vanish. As much as hauntology is a theory of ―ghosted‖ or ―spooked‖ practices, it is also the ―ghosting‖ or ―spooking‖ of theory and practices. Therefore, hauntology is more often experienced through a certain aesthetic effect than a theoretical perspective. Cultural theorist and blogger Adam Harper outlines the tenets of the ―hauntological aesthetic‖ in his article ―Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.‖ He asserts, ―Hauntology is not a genre of art or music, but an aesthetic effect, a way of reading and appreciating art. Like wonky/wonkification [meaning tilted, cheap and broken], hauntology is a theme that can be read into many subjects, and which can be brought out in many different ways.‖51 So while hauntology is a lens through which one can read and analyze an entity, it is also a filter or lens through which an artist may create. Harper also goes on to say that this particular aesthetic conveys a certain longing for the past or dissatisfaction with the present. Harper states, ―It seems to express a melancholy frustration with The Way Things Are. As an overall aesthetic experience it deconstructs the historically utopian, romanticises the post-utopian, and yet the Utopia it presents is stubbornly ‗undead.‘ In all this it has what we might call a ‗hauntological effect.‘‖52 In this respect, the hauntological aesthetic effect demonstrates a longing—a repressed desire for cultural transformation. Furthermore, this

51 Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics. 27 October 2009. WEB. 13 January 2012. 3. 52 Harper 3.

33 transformation of cultural consciousness often is triggered by a technological transition in which outmoded forms of communicative media are reconsidered before discarding them because they articulate vital components of cultural exchange more ―realistically human‖ than that of modern technology. When one uses a certain form of technology throughout his life, he becomes comfortable with that form. That older technology becomes a part of his tradition. Therefore, a person feels that by abandoning older technology, he is discarding a piece of his tradition. His older technology communicates something about his identity, thus, it seems more ―human‖ than the newer technology which feels more synthetic and alien. In turn, the hauntological aesthetic effect is achieved by constructing art using outmoded or obsolete media devices and processes to suggest a reconsideration of these older technologies. Hinging on a sense of irony, the aesthetic effect hastens a disconnect between the art that one is encountering and the context within which one is experiencing it. In turn, hauntological art implies the existence of another dimension which pushes the viewer to reconsider not only the hierarchies in technologies employed to create art but also the difficulty in assigning values to entities so subjective as art and aesthetics. Adam Harper outlines the sense of irony produced by the hauntological aesthetic by describing the operations of the two interconnected and entwined layers of the effect. According to Harper: Hauntological art (i.e. art that permits a hauntological reading, art that has hauntological aesthetic effects) can be thought of as having two stages, or layers. The first layer seems to present something that‘s in some way idealised—this is often but not always an image involving the past […]. The second, ―hauntological‖ layer problematises, compromises and obfuscates the first layer, undermining or damaging it in some way and introducing irony into the work, and represents the opinionated viewpoint of the present. While the first layer might express hope and confidence, the hauntological layer contradicts and undoes this by expressing a satirical doubt and disillusionment. […The] hauntological layer can result from a relatively unintended consequence of

context, but in the purposefully hauntological art […], both layers are to a relative extent suggested in the text itself […].53 The first layer of hauntological art seems to present something that is in some way idealized. This initial stage often evokes the past and can be articulated by employing obsolete or older technologies of production. The second, hauntological layer expresses the present context in which one is subjectively viewing the first, idealized layer and therefore negates the first because the present context has deemed this initial layer now inoperable or ―untrue.‖ The aesthetic effect pivots on the irony generated by the viewer‘s ―inside information‖ that the first layer is no longer credible. Harper further discusses how the present context ―undoes‖ the idealized image saying: The hauntological layer ―deconstructs‖ the first layer—in this way hauntological texts deconstruct themselves. Just as it‘s impossible to pin down a ghost conceptually, it‘s not always easy to separate the two opposing layers of a hauntological text because they occur simultaneously. The first layer is ―inside‖ the second layer (―the past inside the present‖). The first layer (―the past‖) can only be seen through the medium of the second layer (―the present‖) so that we can‘t be entirely sure of the image portrayed by the first layer. This process of obfuscation is a metaphor for memory (or more specifically an allegory of memory), and more broadly an allegory of any sort of representation of the world or any inadequately (―untruthfully‖) symbolic or imaginary conceptualisation. The hauntological layer shows the first layer to be ―untrue‖ […] and hints at some unresolved lack in this truth. The perceived inability of something to adequately express the ―truths‖ expected of it is sometimes referred to as its ―Death,‖ as in ―the Death of Painting,‖ ―the Death of Rock,‖ ―the Death of God‖ etc. Appropriately enough, hauntological art negotiates these sorts of ―Deaths.‖54 Much like memory‘s situation of past recalled within the context of the present, the past situates itself inside the present. This indicates that the poignancy of hauntological art stems from its mimicry of memory. One can only view the past through the context of the present—this is the very essence of what it means to remember. The hauntological

53 Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics. 27 October 2009. WEB. 13 January 2012. 3-4 54 Harper 4.

35 aesthetic effect is a synthesis of memory and its disquieting hindsight which compels one to reevaluate how he viewed the past when the past was a present reality for him. When a person reassesses the past from a hauntological perspective (in that, he laments the loss of the ―truth‖ of the idealized past), he mourns the death of the past‘s dream of the future which, as he has seen, has not come to fruition as once he had hoped it would. Harper continues this by saying: In many cases a hauntological layer in art pointedly reminds us that what we‘re witnessing is an imperfect, failure-prone and/or all-too-human construction by drawing our attention to the form or medium of the art: we hear the sonic by- products of obsolete or broken technology, we see the unrealism of painting, and art‘s status as a magical window onto the world is denied. Such aesthetic experiences can haunt, mock, accuse and open our minds to the delicately contingent and circumstantial nature of art and history.55 By utilizing obsolete and decayed media to create art, the very processes and mediums of said art suggest that technology is synthetic and thus limited in how it renders life. Because the aesthetic effect in the medium proposes that one reconsider what he perceives as ―truth,‖ it also indicates art‘s inability to convey logical truth and technology‘s inevitable insufficiency to convey human truth. This realization fosters disquiet, uncertainty, and anxiety while also stimulating feelings of comfort and familiarity in its ―humanness.‖ While technology cannot verifiably communicate human truth, it can however, insinuate the possibilities of it. With the photographic and phonographic mediums, technology has demonstrated how it can aesthetically reflect the possibility of the most intangible components of humanness, and the hauntological aesthetic effect often expresses how images of the indefinable human experience are reflected by aesthetics. The aesthetic development of spirit photography in the 1860s establishes an early instance of a technological advancement (photography) which created an aesthetic movement based on the processes and manipulations of the innovation‘s apparatus (the camera). Spirit photography exhibits a particular photographic aesthetic

55 Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics. 27 October 2009. WEB. 13 January 2012. 4.

36 that manipulates the camera‘s processes of layering images of separate figures onto one double-exposed film negative. The effect of double exposure creates the image of two figures in same frame but not within the same moment in time. Often, the second figure is fainter and less prominent than the original figure. Looking at a double- exposed image suggests the possibility of parallel worlds or the prospect of a ghost figure or ephemeral realm haunting the frame of the physical world of ―reality.‖ A spirit photograph depicts a living person in the forefront being shadowed or ghosted by the faint and pale second figure that may resemble an expired relative or an unknown ghost figure. In this instance, the photograph seems to have captured the image of a ghost haunting the reality of the living subject, thus proving the existence of ghosts or that a ghost world operates parallel to the realm of the living. Spirit photography expresses how the spirit of the ghost could be conjured by the camera into the ―body‖ of the photograph. Thus, the spirit photograph functions as specter. In The Strange Case of William Mumler: Spirit Photographer, Louis Kaplan assembles the images of William Mumler, a spirit photographer working in America in the 1860s—at the very height of the Spiritualist movement in the United States. Kaplan also includes biographical information, primary sources, and his analysis of the sociocultural implications of Mumler‘s spirit photography in American history. Kaplan states, ―Spirit photography functions as a technological practice that offers the ghosts a place to haunt us, whether on film or on the glass-plate negative, and, on the flip side, it offers to the skeptics the place from which to chase the ghost and to hunt them down.‖56 Spirit photography offers an artistic, photographic representation of the ghost and expresses the hauntological aesthetic effect through the double-exposure, in which the layering of the two figures from different times represents the placement of the past inside the present context. While it initiates a conversation with ghosts, spirit photography also visually displays the work of mourning by situating ghosts in close proximity with the living. Kaplan furthers this idea by saying, ―Spirit photography […] opens up an (ethical) relationship with the dead (spirit)—a connection with this spectral and inspecting other watching and observing.‖57 In this respect, spirit photographs

56 Kaplan, Louis. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print. 219. 57 Kaplan 240.

37 could ―verify‖ that an ancestor or loved one watched over his surviving relative and that this voyeuristic quality of the ghost could enforce the living obligations to carry out traditional duties while subsequently offering them a sense of comfort and protection. In addition, the person who obtained a spirit photograph depicting himself and his expired relative could access that ethical relationship repeatedly. This means that the surviving relative would continue to mourn his familiar ghost. Kaplan notes how the technology of the camera and photography thus initiated and repeated the mourning process by saying, ―[…Spirit] photography serves as the telecommunications medium that operates between the living and the mourned dead, preserving and conserving itself as ‗living dead‘ through these visual traces of lost love objects.‖58 Providing a technical and scientific process for communicating with the dead, the spirit photograph came to function as a technology of mourning. While spirit photography not only divulged itself as a mechanical method for mourning, it also imparted the ghostly nature of photography to reveal the unseen. Kaplan notes ―how spirit photography serves as an emblem for all photography as a generator of ghosts‖59 by saying, ―Spirit photography‘s very being in the world—which can be formulated only as a being-haunted—reminds us that a ghostly production marks all photographic reproduction. Dead or alive, photography gives up the ghost.‖60 Because photography revealed what had previously been unseen, it also created triggered the possibility of revealing other intangible dimensions. Photography‘s power—to reveal the unseen and conjure infinite possibilities of further revelations— transformed photography from a mechanical process to a mystical ritual. Furthermore, by synthesizing and replicating a human image, photography generates a ghostly double of that person. Anytime a photograph (and thus photography) is developed, one encounters the ghost. Preserving the human figure in the photograph is to conjure the ghost and create a specter. Kaplan says, ―The darkroom becomes the secret tomb where the photographic conjurer, who avoids the light of day and lurks in the shadows,

58 Kaplan, Louis. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print. 231. 59 Kaplan 220. 60 Kaplan 220.

38 reanimates these phantom doubles.‖61 The photography gives ―body‖—physical, tangible form—to the ghost. Thus, the photograph become specter—the animated body—for the ghost, and the photographer acts as conjurer (or specter-maker) of the ghost into the body. In addition, not only does the photograph specterize the human form but also the geographical place and the temporal moment of the photograph‘s creation. Eventually, the person or living entity shown in the photograph will die; the place will alter or disappear with time; and the moment becomes past as soon as it happens. As soon as the photograph is taken—as soon as light burns the image into the chemical film—the moment depicted (and developing) has become past. The photograph will ―out-live‖ its subjects and continue to exist far beyond the life span of the person being captured or the moment in time that is portrayed. Because the photograph will always refer back to the past, photography, by its very nature, is haunted, and the photograph is specter. Even though photography was a relatively new technology at the time, spirit photography already set about to ghost it. Interestingly, the haunted characteristics of photography initially arose out of its new and wondrous capabilities. Kaplan describes the reasoning of Victorians in believing that photography could reveal the world of the dead, noting how they pondered, ―Since photography had been able to conquer space and time and to reveal the microscopic world of the telescopic, why not consider this new extension of the medium?‖62 Victorians saw new technology as having endless possibilities for expressing previously hidden knowledge. Understanding the mysteries of life seemed within their grasp as Kaplan says, ―Here was the possibility of a visual ―technology of the afterlife‖ that sought to bridge the living and the dead by means of photographic images to complement the aural rapping and the table turning in the séance room.‖63 Photography, like other new technologies of the time, influenced the language and practices of Spiritualism. In Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Jeffery Sconce explores the connections between modern communicative technologies and the occult. While Sconce focuses mostly on the link

61 Kaplan, Louis. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print. 219. 62 Kaplan 212. 63 Kaplan 212.

39 between telegraphy and the 1848 spirit ―rappings‖ experienced by the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York which sparked the Spiritualist Movement in America,64 he alludes to the important role that all the multi-faceted technological changes of the late 19th and early 20th century played in shaping the rhetoric of the Spiritualist Movement. Sconce notes how Spiritualists drew their inspiration from ―the truly revolutionary capabilities of a technology that could defeat time and space by sending messages hundreds or thousands of miles at the speed of light.‖65 Because the rhetoric of the newer technologies could express the miraculous, transcending abilities they performed, it could easily be incorporated into the language of the death-transcending communicative activities of the Spiritualist movement. Sconce says that, in turn, ―Spiritualists conceptualized an even more fantastic technology that could defeat the seemingly unassailable temporal and spatial void of death itself.‖66 As new communicative advancements were suddenly becoming available and allowing long-distance contact and exchange, people felt that the possibilities of further transcending space and time were just around the corner if not already possible. If the invisible world of electricity and electromagnetic telegraphy could transmit messages across great distances from one person to another, then the potential of overcoming the vast distance between the living and the dead became even more feasible. In this regard, Kaplan declares that Sconce‘s discussion of ―haunted media‖ can be applied to spirit photography and asserts that spirit photography‘s ―fantasy would be to deploy the medium‘s occult powers in order to give visual form and provide access to an ‗elsewhere‘ inhabited by unseen and departed spirits beyond the powers of the naked eye.‖67 Like other technological developments of the time, the idea that photography (through the aesthetic practices of spirit photography) could suggest the possibility of the impossible (that one communicate with his dead relatives) became enough to consider all impossible notions as possibilities. Kaplan says that with spirit photography, ―the question as to whether we are dealing with […] supernatural

64 Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Print. 12. 65 Sconce 12. 66 Sconce 12. 67 Kaplan, Louis. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print. 212.

40 intervention or […] photographic manipulation is not something that can be settled […but] it is important to […] to acknowledge the possibility of the impossible itself […and to] give way to […] what is beyond philosophy‘s (but clearly not photography‘s) wildest dreams.‖68 Because photography‘s manipulations can suggest the possibility of capturing the image of a separate parallel world, then the possibility of that parallel world existing became viable within the world of photography and beyond. The mere suggestion of the possibility of the impossible became enough to inspire belief. In addition, spirit photography also imparts notions of disembodiment by depicting the spirit as an ephemeral form outside the physical structure of the body. Kaplan notes spirit photography‘s specterizing powers by noting that it ―taps into the so- called fantasy of discorporation by claiming that the human soul can exist independently as a shadowy trace of its material and corporeal frame and that this can be captured in these haunted photographic proofs.‖69 By showing the ghost operating as an ethereal form outside the confines of the body, spirit photography implies a separation of the soul from the body. Along with photography, other new communicative technologies proposed (and continue to propose) disembodiment. While the figure of spirit photography depicted the withdrawn state of the soul from the corporeality of the body, the telephone and phonograph separated the voice from the body. With these new communicative developments, voices could now float from place to place, over vast expanses of space and time. In ―The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology, and the ‗Direct Voice,‘‖ Steven Connor discusses Victorian Spiritualism‘s practice of the séance and its emphasis on the disembodied voice to represent the ghost. Connor explains how contemporary communicative technologies which separated the human voice from its source helped contribute to the rhetoric of Spiritualism as well. Connor says that in ―1876 and 1877 came the near-simultaneous invention of the telephone and the phonograph […and both] these technologies, […] quickly entered the language of spiritualism.70‖ Because newer technologies disembodied the human voice, they

68 Kaplan, Louis. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print. 217. 69 Kaplan 212. 70 Connor, Steven. “The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology, and the „Direct Voice.‟” Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. Ed. Buse, Peter and Andrew Stott. New York, NY: St. Martin‟s Press, Inc, 1999. 203-225. Print. 212.

41 seemed to specterize the voice. Spirituals felt that if the human voice could exist and travel without the body, then the voices of the dead could do the same. By incorporating the language of technology into their practices, Spiritualists sought to ―further to ‗materialize‘ spiritualism itself and to highlight the ghostliness of the new technological power to separate the voice from its source, either in space, as with the telephone, or in time, as with the gramophone [or phonograph].‖71 Similar to the camera‘s ability to ghost the human image, the phonograph‘s ability to record, preserve, and repeat the human voice, and thus detach it from its source (the human body), further spectralized yet another aspect of humanity. Furthermore, by capturing and synthesizing the human image and human voice of a living being in time, the technologies of photography and phonography already ―ghosted‖ themselves by their very function and existence. These ghosted communicative technologies further ghosted the human attributes they sought to commodify and manipulate. In ―Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory,‖ Eric W. Rothenbuhler and John Durham Peters discuss the history, powers, and possible endings of the era of phonography and analog recording formats. Rothenbuhler and Peters note that the phonograph‘s ghostliness by saying that was ―unsettling about the phonograph to early audiences […was due to] its ability to capture voices and sounds no longer tired to the human body or to the organic cycle of birth and death.‖72 Like the telephone, the phonograph has the ability to disembody the human voice, capture it, and preserve it for years after the owner‘s death. By preserving the human voice, the phonograph seemed to violate the natural laws of sound and mortality. In this sense, the phonograph lends itself to a glimpse of the spirit world. By recording, preserving, and playing back the human voice, the phonograph could conjure the voice of the dead. Rothenbuhler and Peters note, ―Once recorded, music belongs to a spirit world of sorts. It is a fixed state of suspended animation. The voices and music of the dead or distant can be revived at

71 Connor, Steven. “The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology, and the „Direct Voice.‟” Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. Ed. Buse, Peter and Andrew Stott. New York, NY: St. Martin‟s Press, Inc, 1999. 203-225. Print. 212. 72 Rothenbuhler, Eric W. and John Durham Peters. “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory.” The Music Quarterly 81.2 (1997): 242-264. Print. 245.

42 will and without their presence or permission.‖73 Because the phonograph utilizes the power to disembody the human voice, it therefore, ghosts the human voice by detaching it from the corporeality of its source—the human body. Liberating the voice from the cycle of life and committing it to the world of spirits to be summoned and conjured without the consent or attendance of the person who originally elicited it, phonography conjures and specterizes the human voice. Rothenbuhler and Peters further assert, ―The music from the phonograph is a sound from the other side; it speaks out of the grave.‖74 In Recorded Music and American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945, William Howland Kenney offers a concise history of the phonograph and declares that recorded music created an ―aural knowledge‖ and stimulated ―collective memories‖ in America.75 Kenney notes, ―Phonograph records ‗froze‘ past performances as engraved sound pictures: 78rpm records offered Americans memories of memories.‖76 Kenney also says that because the phonograph appeared during a time when technology was so rapidly developing and changing in America, both it and recorded sound are often forgotten as having ―influence on the popular imagination.‖77 Furthermore, the invisible voice of the phonograph is not only witnessed in this forgetting but also in the technological advancements of listening devices that impel the recorded human voice deeper into invisibility. Kenney states: [The] error of forgetting about the phonograph and recorded sound was the more readily made as the phonograph industry itself steadily disguised the machine that dispensed the sounds. Contemporary collectors and phonograph buffs treasure the up-front aura of the early machines with their soaring trumpet and ―morning glory‖ horns, but those dramatic technological instruments were soon replaced by record players made to look like furniture, pianos, overnight bags, and suitcases. Recorded sound devices were eventually miniaturized and

73 Rothenbuhler, Eric W. and John Durham Peters. “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory.” The Music Quarterly 81.2 (1997): 242-264. Print. 245. 74 Rothenbuhler and Peters 260. 75 Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. xvii. 76 Kenney xvii. 77 Kenney xii.

hidden behind walls and ceiling tiles. The phonograph seemed to disappear as it became even more ubiquitous.78 Because the phonograph renders the human voice ghostly by disembodying it, the physical structure of the phonograph in turn, is rendered ghostly by being shrunken to invisibility. This occurs because the phonograph‘s function and purpose revolve around the unseen sensation of hearing the disembodied human voice. In addition, the disembodied human voice preserved on a recording will, like the photograph, also ―out- live‖ its source—the person who originally elicited it. Furthermore, the recorded and thus disembodied human voice becomes specter within the already ephemeral ―body‖ of the recording (or record medium) and within the phonograph (or playback device). This suggests that like the camera‘s specrtalization of the human image through the photograph, so too is the recording a specrtalization (of the human voice). While spirit photography expresses the hauntological aesthetic effect of photography and thus imparts the nature of photography—by its very technological machinations—to be aesthetically haunting, the nature of recorded music—by the processes and manipulations of its specific mechanisms—also exists as aesthetically haunting cultural relic. In order to further analyze recorded music through the lens of the hauntological aesthetic, one must identify not only how recorded music operates like a ghost but must also delineate the ghostly functions of sound. Previously, the ghost has been characterized as: an event or happening; that is transient; and unseen; yet operates through a ―body‖ or space as specter; which is perceived through the senses; thus generating a temporal disjuncture; which alerts one to the spectrality of the ghost and time; which then conveys that the ghost is returning from the past and future at that the same time thus having no verifiable source; which thus inspires feelings of uncertainty and anxiety; which through the exploration of such feelings one may reach a certain sentience or knowledge; in order to negotiate a revision of history, and a transformation of language and culture. By identifying sound‘s similar ghostly characteristics, one may assert that sound is a ghost and thus, recorded music, a ghost as well.

78 Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890- 1945. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. xii-xiii.

In Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener, sound artist and theorist David Toop outlines how sound haunts and therefore operates as a ghost. Toop wastes no time in making his comparison, saying, ―Sound is energy unleashed, yet also the perpetual emerging and vanishing, growth and decay of life and death – the perfect metaphor for a ghost.‖79 Sound is a vibration and a force. It rises to the forefront then dies away. In this regard, sound‘s brief expression and emergence is indicative of the transience of life and life‘s cyclical movement from birth to death to rebirth. Toop also furthers his assertion of sound as a metaphor for the ghost saying, ―[Sound] is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny—a phenomenal presence both in the head, at its point of source and all around.‖80 While sound is palpable, it is nonetheless ephemeral. Sound is made of air; it is the vibration of air. One cannot hold onto sound, and because one recognizes sound in his head yet feels it as a vibration coming from all directions, he cannot indubitably uphold that the sound he is hearing is not a figment of his imagination. According to Toop, the act of close listening is not unlike that of a spiritual medium, transmuting the ethereal messages of the ghost from the air. In addition, Toop describes sound as an event—a characteristic directly in line with the notion of the ghost as a happening. Toop says, ―[…The] only way to explain sounds is to regard them as events, rather than things, or objects.‖81 Sound is an event, performance, and moment; it happens and then it is no longer happening. It operates only within the present moment. Sound occurs over a set span of time. This notion also imparts sound‘s ghostly trait of being transient. Toop states that sound is transient, saying that ―the energy of any noise will dissipate in time. If an event is known to be short-lived, then there seems to be less cause to note its brief existence and little desire to address any problems or distress it provokes.‖82 Like the ghost, sound happens in a brief, transient moment. It rises then recedes. It makes itself apparent and felt, then fades away. The transience of sound pivots on a set interval of

79 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. xiv. 80 Toop xv. 81 Toop 45. 82 Toop 46.

45 time, and the one verifiable quality of sound is that it will occur over a span of time. Toop says: What comes together through sound is emergent and passing time—a sense of duration, the field of memory, a fullness of space that lies beyond touch and out of sight, hidden from vision. Sound must be trusted, cannot be trusted, so has power. When sound that should be present seems to be absent, this is frightening.83 Sound fills space, colors a moment or a memory, and then ―disappears‖ when its set duration of time has expired. Because sound expresses released and spending energy, it can only persist for a certain amount of time: It can only maintain itself until its energy is spent. Toop furthers this idea with, ―As sound fades, its energy is spent, its reputation as verifiable evidence diminishes, to be treated with circumspection as an unreliable witness to the past.‖84 Once sound‘s time is up, it moves back into the realm of nonexistence. Like a ghost, it cannot stay but will always return, and sound‘s transience is also ghostlike in that it can float through walls and saturate a space. Toop remarks, ―Sound can flow from public space into private place or the reverse. […It] lacks tangible or verifiable connection to a source, and this capacity to move as apparition into places uninvited, to cross the threshold of private territory, combines with its […] lack of visibility to be a subject of suspicion, fear and intrigue.‖85 Sound moves covertly. It travels as far as its energy will expend it and reaches out to caress whatever physical matter it may encounter, be it a the rock music radiating through a teenager‘s bedroom walls or the ears of hiker who pauses in the woods to hear the screech of an owl. Sound goes where it wants, enters uninvited, and exits quite suddenly either leaving an unforgettable impression on the listener it meets or going unnoticed or ignored. In any case, sound‘s operation happens over a set amount of time that eventually must end. Formed by collection of sounds, music is also active only within a set amount of time. Toop notes, ―Music is of time, never quite in the moment of itself since it emerges before full hearing then decays before it can become an object, so its death, impending

83 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. xv. 84 Toop 151. 85 Toop 154.

46 or lingering, is a constancy. […It] can shake a room, pass through walls, fill the air, yet for all its magic, death is never far away.‖86 Because of its transience, music is always being born and dying away. By sounding out, it insists on its own death, yet throughout its duration, music can exert palpable vibration and force. Just as sound and music are being heard, felt, and experienced, they are dying away and receding. Sound is also exhibits the ghostly quality of being unseen. One hears sound but does not see sound (unless that is he sees sound vibrating matter in close proximity). Toop notes, ―Sound is absence, beguiling; out of sight, out of reach. […] Sound is void, fear and wonder.‖87 Sound seems to come from nowhere. It is unseen yet nonetheless felt, therefore sound seems to be a supernatural force—a perceived and felt entity—―an absent presence‖88 that cannot be verifying by the faculty of sight. One knows sound exists and is present because he can hear it (which can become problematic when hearing distant music or muddled sounds). Toop says, ―What is seen can be easier to verify and share than what is heard. This is particularly true of sounds whose source is hidden or too far away to see.‖89 Yet seeing and hearing do offer one with different skills for perception. While sight verifies one‘s place in the world, Toop says that, ―[Hearing] allows us constant access to a less stable world, omni-directional, always in a state of becoming and receding, known and unknown. This is the world that surrounds us and flows through us, in all its uncertainty.‖90 Hearing asks one to think differently and to turn his interpretations of his surrounding inward. Unlike sight, hearing requires that a person process what he is hearing in order to better interpret the source of the sound. In other words, hearing naturally moves toward thought and introspection. Toop thinks, ―If the eyes are windows to the soul, then ears must be tunnels to some other place, some darker zone of unreason, or simply a channeling of inner feelings described, by implication, in common sayings, as too subtle and elusive for the rationalism of seeing.‖91

86 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 140. 87 Toop vii. 88 Toop vii. 89 Toop 46. 90 Toop 37-38. 91 Toop 186.

Hearing‘s process of compelling to one draw conclusions based on a structure of feeling is not unlike the mourning ritual. Toop notes that listening is a form or mediumship, saying, ―Listening, as if to the dead, like a medium who deals only in history what is lost, the ear attunes itself to distant signals, eavesdropping on ghosts and their chatter. Unable to write a solid history, the listener accedes to the slippage of time.‖92 Because one must draw his own conclusions from what is heard, listening becomes an act of mourning—a way of rewriting and re-enacting an unknown history. Like mourning, listening asks that one reach realizations based on how the ghost (or in this case, sound) makes him feel. In addition, hearing suggests a more circular and relative configuration of time. Toop says, ―Seeing is now-now-now-now-now-now-now- n-n-n…, whereas hearing is then-and-now-and- then, over there at the source of the sound then here, within the body, already gone but still dispersing into ambience.‖93 Seeing is immediate but hearing proposes a past, present, and future structure of time. Hearing demands that one listen for the particular allotment of time. One must wait, to absorb and consume all the sonic information before making an affirmation about what he is hearing. Perhaps because hearing is not as immediate as sight may be the reason sight has customarily been favored over hearing. While seeing ―ventures out,‖ hearing ―pulls in.‖ Toop states that, ―[Hearing] [is often regard as] feminine […it] gathers in, enfolds, receives, gestates. Ears are the instruments of darkness.‖94 While seeing traditionally has been privileged over hearing, hearing involves being impressed, changed, altered, affected, and transformed by one‘s surroundings whereas seeing insinuates the manipulation of one‘s surroundings by gazing at them. In this respect, hearing offers a more suited method of interpreting the ghost. Toop asserts, ―Without sight, a person is vulnerable to supernatural forces. Invisible and immaterial, ghosts are more at home in the domain of hearing.‖95 By the domination of and reliance on the sense of hearing to perceive sound‘s unseen forces, one can conclude that the world of sound is a world of ghosts.

92 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. vii. 93 Toop 48. 94 Toop 184-185. 95 Toop 192.

Probably the most interesting parallel between the characteristics of the ghost and those of sound is the idea of specterization. Like the ghost, sound must animate a ―body‖ in order to be perceived, felt, and heard. David Toop gives some particularly amazing examples of the conjuration and specterization of the sound ghost. Toop says, ―Bodies are shell that hear themselves, instruments to resonate space. Instruments are rooms also […]. [Their] Music [is] of tiny chambers built from the body. […] Bodies are instruments and instruments are bodies: the double basses […and] the semigrand open piano.‖96 For Toop, any space, room, or ―body‖ for the vibrating air of sound within which to resonant provides an example of the specterization of sound. To Toop, musical instruments are a series of haunted rooms and chambers filled with the ghosts of sound. Sea shells and human bodies become haunted rooms of sound, too, reverberating their ghostly echoes of nature‘s uncanny placeholders for silence. In addition, Toop expresses that everyday objects can become instruments—specters animated by the ghosts of sound. He says: Wooden boxes, cooking pots, cups, bowls, bottles, drainpipes, tin cans, jerry cans, plastic water jugs, matchboxes—[…] scattered evidence of these everyday vessels being transformed into musical instruments. The majority of the musical instruments that we call acoustic—piano, clarinet, guitar, violin, drum, and so on—derive their audible energy from being enclosed or semi-enclosed rooms, chambers, tunnels or vessels of marvellous shape, their equally fanciful apertures opening out onto the greater vessel of an external world. The crowded molecules of sound move about in these rooms, the equivalent of social beings, missing and conversing, crowded or left alone, emptying out and filling up, speaking quietly or making noise. This movement is reminiscent of the architecture of the body and our sensitivity to sound moving within the body or escaping from the body.97 For Toop, sound‘s means of resonating through and animating a ―body‖ that becomes an instrument or ―noisemaker,‖ serves as an abundantly functional metaphor for the specterization of the ghost. In addition, instruments that ―sound-off‖ on their own also

96 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 141. 97 Toop 143.

49 demonstrate the animated or spectralized ―body‖ haunted by sound. Toop says, ―Sometimes an instrument claims a form of autonomy, aspiring to automatism by sounding itself (the rattling snare drum, or resonating grand piano), like a house in which a chair creaks […] as if haunted by the sounds and players that have activated its body in the past.‖98 Instruments that have a lot of resonance tend to vibrate on their own as if they are being played by invisible hands. These unexpected moments of autonomy further the notion of sound as the ghost that animates the ―body‖ of the instrument and thus haunts it. In reference to the spectralized ―body‖ yielding a sound that is aesthetically haunting, Toop also explores the sound of decay resonating through a ―destroyed‖ or ―damaged‖ ―body‖ to express the hauntological aesthetic effect in the specterization of sound in a particularly manipulated or distressed instrument. Stringed instruments offer the most resonance and sound out with a great deal of clarity when in tune. In the same regard, when string‘s instruments are out of tune, they resonate their ―brokenness‖ even more. Toop says that ―a deliberate act of untuning, or untuned, [an instument‘s] natural state of neglect […] summons the uncanny aura of an abandoned house, even a haunted house. When a stringed instrument is untuned by age and natural forces, so that any sense of its original pitch relationships fades, then it prophesies its own decomposition […] a sibylline moan predicting human civiliasation‘s entropy.‖99 When sound is elicited through an ―untuned‖ instrument, its effect is an unsettling and haunted sound. The sound is as unnatural and strange as a haunted house. The quality of sound inhabiting an ―untuned‖ instrument exaggerates its haunting quality of sound and also expresses the hauntological aesthetic effect. Because one is hearing the unexpected, ―untuned‖ sound of the instrument, the skewed sound that is emitted seems to signal the death and ―undoing‖ of the instrument. While the sound of an untuned instrument still retains some of its original sound quality, it is skewed and tilted and expresses its own destiny to decay. By its nature, sound is a haunt, but sound resonating through a decaying and ―untuned‖ instrument expresses an aesthetically haunting sound. This example of the specterization of the decaying or

98 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 145. 99 Toop 143-144.

50 destroyed ―body‖ proposes that different bodies and bodies in different states of decay will reflect the sound of their specterized forms while conveying remnants of their former selves. Toop furthers this idea by mentioning the ghostly sounds of a dilapidated piano. He states, ―Whatever state of senescence has been reached, a ruined piano retains some vestige of its music, so encapsulating the ghostly aura associated with certain collapsed, broken or abandoned buildings and artefacts.‖100 Just as the damaged and ―untuned‖ piano will reflect the haunted sound of its decay, so too will a derelict building or condemned home reflect the haunted sound of its decay. Just as an instrument can produce sound through the haunting of its chambers, so too can a space, building, or room produce a sound through the haunting of its space. Sound bounces off the walls of the rooms; it ricochets and resonates. Whether it is a musical instrument, building, room, or cupped hand, any space can act as the ―body‖ haunted by the ghost of sound. Toop reasserts this idea of the specterized ―body‖ as ―space‖ animated by sound, saying, ―Space itself is an instrument in which the background sound of subtle auditory shifts, singing resonance and dead echoes fills the air so completely that this peripheral sound seems to personify the place itself.‖101 Specific to its dimensions, materiality, and integrity, space resonates and reflects its own sound. In turn, sound articulates the space in which it is operating. Sound that maps the auditory spatial configurations of an area also expresses the hauntological aesthetic effect because it implies an unseen yet sonically felt realm where the ghost of sound fills the space and reconstructs a sonic image of that realm for the listener to interpret. As sound fills and spectralizes a space, it effectively reflects the dimensions and feeling of that space, and thus conveys how the sound haunts the space. Furthermore, like the ghost, sound is perceived through the senses. Because sound is a vibration, it is comprehended through both the auditory and tactile senses. Not only can you hear sound, but you can feel it. Toop says, ―Touch and sound lie together: the sending out of a sound that touches objects and surfaces at distance; sounds can vibrate water; sound waves caressing tiny hairs in the cochlea.‖102 Like the

100 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 144. 101 Toop 147. 102 Toop 62.

51 ghost, sound impresses upon someone. The senses of hearing and touch suggest malleability, and sound impresses upon the ear and the skin. Both sound and the ghost leave an impression on a person. While sound has a way of impressing upon someone both auditory and tactilely, it can also be very forceful on and saturating of these senses. Sometimes sound or music can be so loud and powerful that one has no choice but to submit to it, refrain from talking, become still, and let it wash over him. Toop says, ―[To open the valves of sensation] is what deep listening means: to go beyond a shielded, inattentive state […]; to allow sensation to enter and flood the body; to relinquish the manufacture of sound, if only momentarily; to hear the details of inaudibility.‖103 Sound or music can be so loud that one can feel his clothes vibrate and his body hairs quiver. Very loud sound is commanding and inundating. Sound can also be so faint that one has to strain to hear. These ways of hearing can be difficult and sometimes unpleasant for the untrained, non-audiophile. Perplexingly vague one moment and paralyzing loud the next, sound can be unnerving and forceful as a ghost, and techniques of hearing sound may seem as psychically tenebrous as mediumship. As a proponent of intent, ―mircosonic‖ listening, Toop claims that this sort of concentrated listening can help one fine-tune and focus his senses and ―can ground [one] in the sense of being in the moment, open [him] to a form of concentrated attention, [is] essential for developing skills in the habit of listening to peripheral and subliminal sounds, all of which is a lesson in becoming aware of how strong feelings emerge in relation to barely noticeable elements within an environment.‖104 Already, hearing is a very powerful sense for recalling memories and producing emotional responses, and yet focused listening can expand on this concept by assuming a meditative posture in which a listener may remain in a liminal state of free association with the memories and emotion evoked by each sound. Close listening allows one to understand his world as Toop says, ―The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance form that which is not entirely there.‖105 Listening though, in any capacity, is highly subjective. Furthermore, this exercise in concentrated listening is exemplary of

103 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 195. 104 Toop 61. 105 Toop xv.

52 the subjectivity of hearing (and all sensory perception). Toop states, ―Each person‘s brain adapts auditory input to a template particular to the individual […]. The further back in time we travel, the less certainty can be ascribed to the way people once listened, what it was they heard, and what it was they believed they heard.‖106 Because hearing is subjective, it will always manufacture a different experience for each person. From person to person, the sonic experience of hearing sound can only maintain itself with some ghost. Already essentially ephemeral, sound only enters the human experience through sensory perception and thus becomes more fractured and ghostly. While the subjectivity of sensory perception demonstrates yet another way in which sound is a ghost, Toop formulates an additional approach to considering how the sensory perception of sound renders it even more ghostly. Toop says everyone born with the ability to hear: […Begins] as eavesdroppers in darkness, hearing muffled sound from an external world into which we have yet to be born. […] Four and a half months after conception we begin to hear. This is the first of our senses to function: hearing dominates amniotic life and yet after birth its importance is overtaken by seeing. […Sound] without apparent source will always return us at some unconscious level to our pre-birth state, but with the added anxiety of awareness, of know that sounds should have a cause. If they lack a cause, then our need is to invent one.107 Before one is ever born, he hears the world. From the ghost realm of pre-birth, one experiences sound. Therefore, sound penetrates and operates within the ghost world of before-being/ non-being. Furthermore, the anxiety triggered by unverifiable sound unconsciously returns one to the pre-birth ghost state of non-being. If unverifiable sound can generate a feeling as jarring as an unconscious return to the pre-birth state of ghost-being, this strange sensation of re-experiencing the past can be characterized as temporal disjuncture. Temporal disjuncture is a feeling that conventional time is not operating as ―nature‖ dictates it should. Essentially, people experience temporal disjuncture because linear time is a societal human construct.

106 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 33. 107 Toop ix.

Occasionally when a person breaks through the wall of these constructs, entering into the realm of ghost, he will have the sensation that time is ―off,‖ ―out of joint,‖ skewed, or broken. To sense temporal disjuncture is to be in the presence of a ghost. Similarly, sound (music) can create temporal disjuncture. Toop notes, ―When the stylus connects with the surface of the record the crackle of this contact ushers in a ghost of time, even before music has begun […] this is a transformative sound, a sound that dispels for a moment the visual, tactile reality of the present.‖108 Listening to the dirt and grit of a very old, analog record channels another time. A listener acquires the sensation of being in the presence of a very old entity, a ghost. Time seems to be folding in on itself, happening all at once, and approaching from directions. In this regard, the temporal disjuncture suggests that time is spectral. The spectrality of the ghost proposes not only that time is not linear, but also that the ghost is returning from both the past and the future at the same time. Sound can also seem to be approaching from all directions at once. Sound‘s power is also eternal and returnal. David Toop encounters with the spectrality of sound is from the perspective of hearing ―distant music‖—the sound and music of the memory that returns one to a past experience. Toop says, ―Distant music is the perfect poetic expression for [the spectral qualities of sound…], [it is characterized by] a reaching back into the lost places of the past, the slippages and mirages of memory, history reaching forward in the intangible form of sound to reconfigure the present and future.‖109 Here Toop purports that when one hears ―distant music‖—melodies and sounds recalled from deep within personal memory—the force of linear time falls away and time becomes spectral (without a definite trajectory but more circular than linear). Like the ghost, sound suggests that time is spectral. If spectral sound seems to be approaching from all directions, then like the ghost, it has no verifiable source. When pondered furthered, pinning down sound‘s source does produce a host of problematic possible non-solutions: that a sound is in the air vibrating from a certain force, that the sound for the recording elicits from the physical groves, or that the human voice originates in the voice box and vocal chords of a

108 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. x. 109 Toop ix.

54 person. All of these considerations are in some way true, but insufficient, nonetheless. Like the ghost, sound‘s source is essentially unverifiable. Toop states, ―Sound […] is all around, and existing in ambiguous locations, articulating time at the same time that it describes space.‖110 Unable to exist without both time and space, sound indicates time as it indexes space. Sound is everywhere and nowhere. Toop says that people view, ―sounds as phenomena that are difficult to control or subdue, signals that may seem to come from nowhere, or an unknown source, then fade and die. […Because] we live in a visuocentric culture, […] sound seems disturbingly intangible, indescribable or inexplicable by comparison with what we can see, touch and hold.‖111 Sound‘s source cannot be verified. Sound cannot be grasped, held, or chained. Sound is a ghost, and because it has no verifiable source, sound has a tendency, like the ghost, to evoke anxiety and uncertainty. Ghostlike, sound can evoke feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. Initially, one may want to flee these feelings and not tarry in their ―uncomfortability.‖ This reaction is understandable. Uncertainty drives people to madness, suicide, or just a constant state of general malaise; however, if one allows himself to feel the uncertainty that sound (and the ghost) induce, he affords himself the opportunity to gain knowledge and sentience from listening (to the ghost). Toop remarks: Closer to thoughts, emotions, memories and fleeting, peripheral sensations than to tangible objects and reassurances of the known world, sound slips into the territory of the mind to settle at unknown depths, to stir up intimations of other futures. […This] capacity to broach bodily defences begins by unsettling beliefs. The listener‘s sense of self is destabilized in the initial stages of a transition from materialism and rationalism to the world of ghosts, spirits and demons.112 Like the ghost, sound transforms the mind through a crisis of self, and once the period of uncertainty is reconciled and stabilized, the listener (or mourner) gains new knowledge and sentience that he may carry into his next encounter with beguiling sound or the complexity of the ghost. Toop notes, ―[Sound…] seems to be such a potent

110 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 61-62. 111 Toop xii. 112 Toop 170.

55 carrier of memory, as well as being a powerful influence on the formation of a sense of identity.‖113 Sound impresses, resonates, and returns. Sound shapes how we perceive ourselves and the world. Sound can only maintain itself with some ghost. Therefore, Toop ascertains, ―Listening, then, is a specimen of mediumship, a question of discerning and engaging with what lies beyond the world of forms.‖114 Hauntologically, sound functions as a ghost. It transforms language, culture, and the one‘s notions about the self by imparting knowledge and sentience onto listeners who do not abandon introspection out of fear to become saturated with uncertainties. Sound reveals that it has no verifiable source, that human time is a construct and that the trajectory of time is not linear. Sound also enables one to perceive the disconnect between constructed time and infinity through his senses. It animates and fills space in order to be perceived because essentially sound is an unseen, transient, event that can only maintain itself with some ghost. By its very nature, sound is already ghosted. Such too is the case with the phonograph and recorded music. Already ghosted by the very nature of sound, the technologies of the phonograph and recorded music further ghost sound and humanity. Moreover, when recording technologies and practices further manipulate the sound of recorded music to seem even more ghostly, these recordings express the hauntological aesthetic effect. This aesthetic implies that the technology creating it is naturally ghosting and specterizing. In addition, this aesthetic demonstrates how 20th century communicative technologies have manipulated and formed the ways in which we remember. The hauntological aesthetic also requests that we mourn the passing of these technologies into obsolesce even as we perch on the threshold of the digital age. By analyzing the aesthetically hauntological music of the producer-musician—the musician who manipulates the production of his recordings and holds a stake in the aesthetic as an heir-ethnographer—one can understand that hauntological music is calling not only for a revision of hierarchical aesthetic practices, but also of how we perceive and qualify sound.

113 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 61. 114 Toop viii.

CHAPTER 4 THE SOUND OF AESTHETICALLY HAUNTING RECORDED MUSIC

The hauntological aesthetic effect articulates a disconnect with an idealized representation of the past when it is viewed through the context of the present. This aesthetic effect is characterized by a ghostliness and may be expressed in various modes of art but arguably exercises more power when conveyed through technologically mediated art such as photography and recorded music. Already ghosted by the sound‘s nature—being an event that is transient and unseen but operates through a ―body‖ to be perceived by the senses which generates a temporal disjuncture, a sense of spectrality, and triggers feeling of uncertainty that if explored can lead one to a certain sentience concerning his spatial and intellectual orientation—the technologies of the phonograph and recorded music further ghost sound and humanity. As relics of the past, older phonograph recordings demonstrate the hauntological aesthetic effect simply by being replayed and heard in the present. Because 78 RPM phonograph recordings sound old and of the past, they seem ghostly and strange. By exhibiting aural crumble and sonic ―dirt‖ or ―grit,‖ phonograph recordings reflect the sound of the past. In The Second Sense: Language, Music, and Hearing, Robin Maconie describes surface noise as a record‘s ―sense of pastness‖ and further notes that, ―dirt corresponds above all to surface noise and, to a lesser degree, to the coloration of sound introduced by horn resonances.‖115 Aural crumble is sonic residue created by age, wear-and-tear, material decay, and the outmoded and now virtually extinct recording technologies of phonography. Phonograph records express the hauntological aesthetic effect, first of all, because they are old and therefore sound old. A 78 RPM phonograph record pressed in the 1920s or 30s has travelled a long way from the past. The passing of a record through many hands (and many phonograph needles) leaves its mark. Age, wear-and- tear, dirt, and decay create surface noise or ―grit.‖ Grit adds aural texture to a recording and evokes a sense of the past. Because it evokes the sound of the record‘s journey

115 Maconie, Robin. The Second Sense: Language, Music, and Hearing. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2002. Print. 313.

57 through history, the presence of aural crumble and surface noise created by wear-and- tear and material decay intensifies the strangeness and remoteness of its sound. In ―Sound, Knowledge, and the ‗Immanence of Human Failure:‘ Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano,‖ David Suisman describes how phonography created an index of music that, as the medium ages, reflects its historicity. Suisman notes, ―A vinyl LP record that has been played a hundred times sounds different—with its pops, clicks, and surface noise—than one whose historical journey has been shorter or loss momentous.‖116 Static, pops, and crackle in the sound of a recording exhibit grit. In Recorded Music and American Life, William Howland Kenney notes how repetition and replay contributes to a recording‘s wear and therefore adds more surface noise saying, ―When one side or the other turned out to offer the significant musical material, one often played and replayed just that part […] until it was nearly worn out.‖117 The more a record is played, the more damaged it becomes and the more surface noise it acquires. Playing a record ―puts age‖ on it. The aural crumble created by grit enhances the other-worldliness of older recordings and contributes to a sense of pastness, remoteness, and distance in sound. Playback devices are one of the main generators of surface noise. In his ―Notes on Technology‖ from the CD companion to his book Lost Sounds, Tim Brooks notes how the needle pick-up apparatus damages a recording each time it is played, saying, ―[The] phenomenon [of scratchiness] is most likely the result of the process of ‗breaking in‘ steel needles on acoustic talking machines—wearing in of new needles caused the wearing out of the initial grooves of disc records.‖118 As the playback apparatus rolls back over a record that has been historically modified through age and wear, it picks up the sound of these physical remnants of the past. In Defining Phonography, Rothenbuhler and Peters add, ―The scratches on a vinyl disk modulate the phonograph stylus in a manner that produces a sound at the speakers that can reasonably be

116 Suisman, David. “Sound, Knowledge, and the „Immanence of Human Failure:‟ Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano.” Social Text 102 28.1 (2010): 13-34. Print. 15. 117 Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890- 1945. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. 18. 118 Brooks, Tim. Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1890-1919. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. CD. 58.

58 understood as the sound of [the wear and tear of age].‖119 Grit is age, wear, and trauma—the very life of the record—indexed there on the record for one to hear. Grit is the sound of the past. Furthermore, grit‘s ―sound of the past‖ is sonically expressed in crackle, static, and pops. Grit‘s crackle and static may sound like rain, snowfall, folding a blanket, scattering papers, water boiling, faint footsteps, breath, the barely audible presence of another person, or the dim white noise of a machine running. In return, the grit muffles, mutes, fades, and obscures the music over which it is layered. Re-released on The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, Mississippi John Hurt‘s ―Spike Driver Blues‖ exhibits a powerful sonic quality of surface noise as Hurt muses on the implications and importance of John Henry‘s hammer as an artifact. As Hurt repeats that John Henry‘s hammer will not ―kill him‖ and that Hurt himself ―is gone,‖ the further repetition of the recording‘s surface noise—the sound of the record rotating—enhances the incantatory nature and spell-like sound of the recorded song.120 The surface noise of the record rotating also sounds like wheels turning or the distant sound of a train rolling through town in the night. Another railroad ballad featured on the HSA that displays the poignancy of grit is Furry Lewis‘s ―Kassie Jones, Parts 1 & 2.‖ Lewis‘s tracks (compressed here into one) recount the events surrounding the death of railroad brakeman John Luther ―Casey‖ Jones.121 Lewis‘s hushed vocals rise and fall gently as the surface noise muffles the song in a wooly roar sounding somewhat like rain—which Lewis mentions in the second half of the song. All of these extra noises contribute to the grit and ground the sound in the past. The repetition of static grit in the recording‘s surface noise—the sound of the record rotating or the ―swish‖ of worn grooves— enhances the incantatory nature and spell-like sound of the recorded song. The surface noise of the record rotating may sound like rain, wheels, or a train. Grit places layers of sonic texture and a sense of the past on a recording.

119 Rothenbuhler, Eric W. and John Durham Peters. “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory.” The Music Quarterly 81.2 (1997): 242-264. Print. 259. 120 Hurt, Mississippi John. “Spike Driver Blues” (Okeh 1928). The Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 3: Songs. Ed. Harry Smith. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1997. CD. 121 Lewis, Furry. “Kassie Jones, Parts 1 and 2” (Victor 1928). The Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 1: Ballads. Ed. Harry Smith. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1997. CD.

In addition, phonograph records sound gritty because of the old technological processes used to record them. American phonograph recordings express the sound of their time by reflecting their technology. Acoustic recording processes, record speed synchronization, and the pre-amplification method of singing from the diaphragm are all technologies that contribute to the creation of grit on these recordings. In ―The Revenant,‖ an essay accompanying Revenant Records release American Primitive Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939), Dean Blackwood describes what an acoustic recording session was like. Blackwood says: […The operator of the] machine that is connected to the horn, [winds] a small handle in the machine‘s side. A platen at the base of the machine has a flat wax disc on it. The man releases a lever and the disc starts to spin. […] When the [operator] likes way the wax disc is spinning, he lowers [the recoding apparatus] in place […and signals the performers to begin…]. A sharp wire connected to the narrow end of the horn traces out a circular pattern in the spinning wax surface, vibrating all the while, etching a code of tiny zig-zags within each groove. The singing men can see little wax shavings falling like snow onto the floor. […] After three minutes of singing, the [operator signals them to wrap it up…]. The singers know they have 15, 20 seconds, tops, to finish.122 Acoustic recording processes involved a great deal of physicality and technological imprecision. The spinning motion of the wax disc is triggered by a cranked lever that begins too fast and is then monitored and measured by a recording technician in order to begin at the moment of the most correct speed and end when the disc begins to spin too slowly. If the disc is spinning too fast when the recording begins, the voices will sound too high-pitched and sped up. If it is spinning too slowly, the vocals will sound too deep and too slow. If one of the performers or technicians makes a mistake, the record reflects it. Any extra noises made in the recording room are captured on the disc. While the recording device is preserving the voices and musical accompaniment, it is also preserving other sounds: the space and the air in the room, the people‘s

122 Blackwood, Dean. “The Revenant.” An essay accompanying liner notes. American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939). John Fahey‟s Revenant, 2005. 8-14. CD. 8-9. 60 breath, the movements of the performers and record technicians, and the sound of the technology working itself. In addition, the wax disc was a very sensitive recording medium. Used because it is so easily impressed, wax also readily warps and melts (especially considering its usage before refrigeration and air conditioning). In this regard, grit corresponds to the ambient sound ―accidentally‖ picked up on the wax disc during the recording process and those resulting from any damages it incurs before being stabilized in shellac. The physicality and nearly impossible precision of acoustic recording processes contribute to the grit of the sound or a recording. Before 1927, all songs were recorded acoustically, and even the early electric recordings were recorded without a calibrated recording speed or amplification. In order to secure ―complete‖ recording pick-up, singers utilized the forceful, projected singing style previously used in stage performance. In his description of a hypothetical acoustic recording process, Blackwood notes, ―The [performers] begin to sing into the horn, their voices weaving, buzzing. […] Once, while they are singing, the [operator] has to gesture at them to move back a bit from the horn.‖123 Without vocal amplification, performers must sing into the horn of the recording phonograph in order to generate enough vibration to move the needle on the end of the recording apparatus. This allows the vocals to move to the forefront of the recording while the accompanying instrumentation resonates from farther away in the room. Singers must not be too close or too far away from the recording horn but at just the right distance. If they were too far away, the vocals could not be adequately captured. Tim Brooks also describes how acoustically recorded discs ―were recorded by singers and musicians performing into a large horn. The vibrations from their singing and playing etched sound waves into the [discs…]. Since no electricity was used, the dynamic range of the recordings is something like the sound of a telephone receiver: the extreme highs and lows are lost.‖124 As the performers project their voices into the horn, the needle on the end of the apparatus physically carves the vibrations of the performers‘ sounds into the wax disc, physically leaving grit—traces of technology‘s processes. The intended recorded

123 Blackwood, Dean. “The Revenant.” An essay accompanying liner notes. American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939). John Fahey‟s Revenant, 2005. 8-14. CD. 8-9. 124 Brooks, Tim. Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1890-1919. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. CD. 58.

61 sound—the voices and instruments of the performers—sound far away, as if on the other end of a telephone, a long-distance call from another time. Performers‘ voices sound ghostly, like aural photographs decayed to only the traces of the sound image. Brooks also notes that ―[particularly] loud passages may cause ‗blasting,‘ in which the original recording apparatus could not pick up [the entire] signal.‖125 If they are too close, the intense volume of their singing might create extra surface noise or ―blast out‖ the vocals. Through ―blasting,‖ recorded voices may even recede or disappear and then reappear throughout the song, further contributing to the strange and ghostly sound of the recording. Acoustic recording practices then, necessitated a delicate balance between not singing too closely to the recording horn while still projecting one‘s voice from his diaphragm in order to be loud enough for the recording apparatus to pick up his vocals. Furthermore, this forceful, pre-amplification singing style—utilized by early recording artists—also contributes to the strange sound of the recording. In his ―Notes on Harry Smith‘s Anthology,‖ an essay to accompany the 1997 reissue of The Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, Neil V. Rosenberg says, ―[Singers] and musicians used to singing and playing without amplification sounded forceful and piercing because that was how voices carried best when one was trying to reach an audience without using a microphone‖ (Rosenberg 37). This style of singing is not used anymore and has not been used since the advent of the electric microphone in the mid- to-late 1930s. Rosenberg notes how those listening to the 1952 release of the HSA reacted to the raw, pre-amplification singing style of these pre-war performers by saying, ―[By] the early 1950s all popular music singers depended on the microphone to carry their voice, and this made the old approaches sound odd.‖126 The forceful method of singing from the diaphragm sounds weird because current technology has afforded singers with the nuanced stylings made possible by the electric microphone. The voices on older recordings of the 1920s and 1930s exhibit a ―holler‖ or ―roar‖ of vocal sound. Syllables are not nuanced, are somewhat staccato, and are sometimes almost

125 Brooks, Tim. Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1890-1919. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. CD. 58. 126 Rosenberg, Neil V. “Note on Harry Smith‟s Anthology.” Essay accompanying the compact disc box set. The Anthology of American Folk Music. Ed. Harry Smith. Smithsonian Folk Ways, 1997.35-37. CD.37.

62 completely unclear. Such is the case with Charley Patton. Accompanying the Revenant Records release “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues:” The Worlds of Charley Patton, Rev. Booker T. Miller, in an interview with Gayle Dean Wardlow, describes Patton‘s voice as sometimes so ―growly,‖ people could hardly understand just what he was saying.127 With his growl, Patton‘s blues singing style is intense and visceral. Patton‘s voice is that of an auger, omen, or ghost—moaning from somewhere beyond the grave. With surface noise layered over the singer‘s vocals, the listener may get the sense that the song is a long-distance message from across time, beyond the grave, and barely coming through. Accompanying the 1997 reissue of the HSA, Greil Marcus‘ essay ―The Old, Weird America,‖ observes the strange sound of early recording artists. Marcus notes, ―[…One] quality that unites the singers here is that they sound as if they‘re already dead […].‖128 Marcus notes that the pre-amplification singing style— articulated through the acoustic recording processes of eliminating extreme highs and lows—made singers sound like prophetic spirits, shouting broken warnings from beyond the grave. The forceful pre-amplification singing style of Patton and other early recording artists gives their voices an emotive, gritty sound, and the pre-amplification singing method is a technologically influenced manufacturer of aural grit. Expressive howling, growling, and moaning vocals produced by the pre- amplification singing style add yet another layer of sonic grit to a recording. Re- released on John Fahey‘s collection American Primitive Vol. I: Raw Pre-War Gospel (1926-36), William & Versey Smith‘s ―Sinner You‘ll Need King Jesus,‖ ―When That Great Ship Went Down,‖ and Jaybird Coleman‘s ―I‘m Gonna Cross The River of Jordan Some O‘ These Days‖ express the unnatural sound of the pre-amplification singing and ―blasting.‖ On both William & Versey Smith‘s tracks, Versey half- echoes her husband‘s dictating, sermon style singing in her high-pitched, yelping moan.129 William‘s voice maintains a steady volume and seems to resonate from his stomach whereas Versey‘s does not rise and fall harmonically so much as it appears and disappears jarringly as a

127 Wardlow, Gayle Dean. “Rev. Booker Miller.” An interview accompanying compact disc box set. Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, Disc 7: Charley’s Orbit—Interviews. John Fahey‟s Revenant, 2001. CD. 128 Marcus, Greil. “The Old, Weird America.” Essay accompanying compact disc box set. The Anthology of American Folk Music. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1997. 5-25. CD. 17. 129 Smith, William and Versey. “Sinner You‟ll Need King Jesus” (Paramount 1927). American Primitive, Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel (1926-36). John Fahey‟s Revenant, 1997. CD. 63 pained wail or bleat.130 The sound of Versey Smith‘s impassioned holler enhances the unnaturalness and other-worldliness of these recordings. In Jaybird Coleman‘s ―I‘m Gonna Cross The River of Jordan Some O‘ These Days,‖ Coleman‘s strong and forceful singing is staccato, disjointed, and almost lack-breathed as he repeats, ―Hallelujah.‖131 Another example of the forcefully strange pre-amplification singing style can be found on Blind Willie Johnson‘s ―John the Revelator,‖ (featured on Harry Smith‘s Anthology of American Folk Music). Johnson sounds as growly as Patton, and his voice seems to be emerging from deep within the core of his body.132 In this regard, singers sounded like sibyls and prophets—their voices commanding, intense, and mystical. While the physicality of acoustic recording processes manipulates the vocals by causing them to sound far away and disappear (then reappear) and the pre- amplification singing style makes vocals sound forcefully mystic and odd, the lack of speed calibration (for both acoustic and early electric recording processes) further ghosts a recording. Varying of recording speeds on early electronic recordings affect both vocals and instrument accompaniment sound. Of recording speed variations, Neil V. Rosenberg says, ―[Standards] of recording speed in the twenties had varied, so that some of the recordings were faster than their actual performance, giving them an unnaturally shrill and hurried sound.‖133 The lack of a standard recording speed not only contributes to tracks being unnaturally sped up or slowed down but can also cause speed to vary on the record (even from line to line) creating a sort of strange ―stutter‖ in the recorded sound. The ―stutter‖ sound created by speed variations further enhances the disjointed sound of vocals, making performers‘ voices sound disconnected, hurried, shrill, and overall unnatural. Just as actors in ―uncorrected,‖ non-synchronized sound (or silent) film move in a strange hurried pace—as if pieces of their movements are missing—the musicians of pre-war 78 RPM recordings sound hurried, strange, and disjointed. In these recordings, varying speeds can render the recorded sound ghostly

130 Smith, William and Versey. “When That Great Ship Went Down” (Paramount 1927). American Primitive, Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel (1926-36). John Fahey‟s Revenant, 1997. CD. 131 Coleman, Jaybird. “I‟m Gonna Cross the River of Jordan Some O‟ These Days” (Silvertone 1927). American Primitive, Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel (1926-36). John Fahey‟s Revenant, 1997. CD. 132 Johnson, Blind Willie. “John the Revelator” (Columbia 1930). The Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 2: Social Music. Ed. Harry Smith. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1997. CD. 133 Rosenberg, Neil V. “Note on Harry Smith‟s Anthology.” Essay accompanying the compact disc box set. The Anthology of American Folk Music. Ed. Harry Smith. Smithsonian Folk Ways, 1997.35-37. CD. 37.

64 like a decaying and warped photograph. In his ―Technical Note‖ from the 1997 reissue of The Harry Smith Anthology, Pete Reiniger notes how speed variations alter the recorded sound of pre-war 78s, and one can hear moments when ―a voice [sounds] unnatural because of the record‘s speed being too fast or too slow.‖134 In Dock Boggs‘s ―Pretty Polly‖ (re-released on John Fahey‘s collection Dock Boggs: Country Blues, Complete Early Recordings (1927-29)), Boggs begins by strumming an almost ―off-kilter‖ sounding banjo melody, giving the song a foreboding sound. This strange speed offers the listener a premonition that something bad is about to happen. From the voice of ―Willie,‖ Boggs recounts the story of a man who murders his pregnant girlfriend because he is not ready to be a husband and father. Willie takes Polly down to the river and shows her where he has already been digging her grave. Through Boggs, Willie replies, ―‘Pretty Polly, pretty Polly, you guessin‘ about right…I dug on your grave 2/3 of last night,‘‖ and as Boggs repeats Willie‘s words ―‘you guessin‘ about right,‘‖ Boggs‘s voice gathers speed with an almost maniacal affirmation of the act Willie is about to commit.135 Boggs‘s voice gathers speed just as his narrator Willie begins to reveal that he is going to murder his girlfriend Polly. The unnatural, otherworldliness of Boggs‘s sped up voice sounds as cruel and evil as the act his narrator is about to commit. In addition, the crackle of surface noise sounds like footsteps through the dry brush, the rushing currents of the river, or even the steady shoveling of dirt onto Polly‘s grave. Varying recording speeds of early recording processes (both acoustic and electric) alter the voices of performers to yield yet another layer of sonic grit. Older recording technologies and wear-and-tear leave the sound of grit— evidence of the past on a recording. Old recording technology also sounds old due to obsolete recording devices, processes, and players. The gritty sound of an older recording reflects the technology of its time, This compels a listener to consider that there was a time when a particular recording‘s sound was modern. The grit obliges the listener to place the recorded music of the past within the context of the present. In this

134 Reiniger, Pete. “Technical Note.” Essay accompanying the compact disc box set. The Anthology of American Folk Music. Ed. Harry Smith. Smithsonian Folk Ways, 1997. 67. CD. 67. 135 Boggs, Dock. “Pretty Polly” (Brunswick 1927). Dock Boggs, Country Blues: Complete Early Recordings (1927- 29). John Fahey‟s Revenant, 1997. CD. 65 regard, the grit enables old phonograph 78s to exhibit the hauntological aesthetic effect. Because a process of recording music, sound, and the human voice or image is always ghostly, contemporary recording artists seek to create the hauntological aesthetic effect in their recorded music by synthesizing the old sound or grit normally exhibited in older recordings. In an effort to make digital recordings sound analog, these newer recording techniques utilize older recording styles. While older recording technology generates the sound of history by being old and time-weathered, newer recording process that elicit the sound of the past do so by synthesizing the sound of age and wear. Through the use of obsolete electronics, cassette tape and analog recording, old synthesizers, intentional sound degradation, layers of surface noise, static sounds, pops of vinyl sound, and by recording outside the controlled environment of the studio in other spaces (old houses, forests, and under overpasses), change the sense of space in the recorded sound by making it sound far away and distant, new recording processes that sound old synthesize aural grit. The idea of ―distant music‖ is key to understanding the hauntological aesthetic effect in modern recorded music. In Sinister Resonance, David Toop says, ―Distant music is […] a reaching back into the lost places of the past, the slippages and mirages of memory, history reaching forward in the intangible form of sound to reconfigure the present and future.‖136 Distant music is haunting. It evokes the distance of the past by articulating the distance of sound in space through the ―distance‖ in the technological production processes of recording music. Distant music is recorded music that expresses the hauntological aesthetic effect. In ―Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present,‖ Adam Harper says that the hauntological aesthetic effect ―can be achieved using ‗lo-fi‘ effects ([…] noise, reverb, filters and audibly decaying or broken technology in music) and various forms of ‗unprofessionality,‘ surrealism, fragmentation and collage, all of which is analogous to a traditional ghost‘s ectoplasm, pale colour and binding chains, signifying undeath.‖137 To communicate a certain aural memory associated with the sound of older recordings, newer recordings that sound old affectively do so by employing processes that

136 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. ix. 137 Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics. 27 October 2009. WEB. 13 January 2012. 4.

66 synthesize the past. This synthesis of the past is effectively a sonic synthesis of distance, space, and absence. Toop further notes, ―Contemporary artists working with sound tend to be preoccupied with auditory absence […] as a haunting, a memory of sound that is pulled back by various techniques of technological invocation, reconstruction or allusion into the present world of forms.‖138 Using obsolete electronics, lo-fi recording techniques, layers of intentional surface noise or grit, and alternative recording spaces, the recorded music of underground D.I.Y. producer- musicians like Greg Ashley, Jason Quever, Tim Presley, and Ariel Pink re-imagines the aural memories of an intrinsically timeless American music. In addition to crafting gritty, 1960s-inspired garage psych with his bands Gris Gris and The Mirrors while producing albums for other musicians in the Bay area, Texas turned San Francisco producer-musician Greg Ashley creates airy and haunted folk- pop. One of the stand-out features of Ashley‘s sound is his ghostly sense of space in each track, a sound Ashley primarily achieves by recording on relatively simplistic multi- track recording technology in alternate soundscape environments. For his 2003 solo release, Medicine Fuck Dream, Ashley produced and recorded the entire album himself on 8-track. While the majority MFD was recorded in his parents‘ League City, Texas home from fall 2001 to summer 2002, several tracks—including ―Karen Loves Candy,‖ ―Mona Rider,‖ and ―Deep Deep Down‖—were recorded in a parking garage off Reynolds Street in League City. While MFD is completely drenched in reverb, these three tracks have a particularly haunting quality. Both ―Mona Rider‖ and ―Deep Deep Down‖ sound older than they actually are—a quality due to the tracks‘ spacey, airy sound created by recording in the open, sound reflecting, and resonating acoustic space of a parking garage.139 Ashley‘s vocals and instruments (guitar and piano) exhibit heavy reverb and echo—a principle effect upon which his principles of auditory space pivot.140 In The Second Sense, Robin Maconie describes reverb as, ―When the reflecting surface is at a considerable distance the reflected sound will consist only of that part of the original voice signal that survives the journey […and] in a more expansive acoustic what comes

138 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 228. 139 Ashley, Greg. “Mona Rider.” Medicine Fuck Dream. Birdman Records, 2003. CD. 140 Ashley, Greg. “Deep Deep Down.” Medicine Fuck Dream. Birdman Records, 2003. CD. 67 back is a different voice at a different pitch: a higher, disembodied voice answering back.‖141 On ―Mona Rider,‖ the reverb on Ashley‘s voice creates the sensation that his voice is coming from all around, and for ―Deep Deep Down,‖ Ashley piano reverb produces the spectral sound of the song. Both tracks sound murky, distant, and dim, demonstrating that as a producer-musician, Ashley‘s most evocative instrument is space, and the spaces he utilizes present their own acoustic resonances and nuances. Toop says, ―Space itself is an instrument in which the background sound of subtle auditory shifts, singing resonance and dead echoes fills the air so completely that this peripheral sound seems to personify the place itself, a ubiquity of such familiarity that it fades into nothing.‖142 Recording processes will pick up all the sound surrounding its pick-up apparatus, and the acoustics of space produce their own sound to be manipulated and recorded. For ―Karen Loves Candy,‖ the track‘s tumultuous intro might suggest that a person experiences the world as an auditory conglomeration of sonic debris hurdling toward their vulnerable ears. Beginning with the shrill and unnerving sound of a girl giggling—who sounds as if she is being tickled—and continues to giggle to the point of screaming, ―Karen Loves Candy‘s‖ intro is unnerving and strange. The girl‘s giggles warp and swirl—emerge, recede, and reemerge—all while a discordant saxophone begins to wail with a host of other sounds (percussion, low end piano reverb, dissonant violin bowing, and firework pops) rising to a crescendo and falling back to just the sounds of the girl giggling.143 This collection of strange sounds exhibits a quality of drugged-induced madness and asks the listener to consider the difficultly in sonically deciphering between ecstatic joy and frenzied fear. David Toop says, ―In this world of lingering sonic debris and inaudible music, there is rich potential for confusion between externally generated signals and auditory hallucinations.‖144 The intro to ―Karen Loves Candy,‖ conveys how visceral, human sounds can cause emotional confusion. In turn, the soothing calm melody that follows is slightly disquieting and unsteady as the next

141 Maconie, Robin. The Second Sense: Language, Music, and Hearing. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2002. Print. 72-73. 142 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 147. 143 Ashley, Greg. “Karen Loves Candy.” Medicine Fuck Dream. Birdman Records, 2003. CD. 144 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 153.

68 segment of ―Karen Loves Candy‖ moves to express resonating piano strains followed by Ashley‘s quavering voice. This shift suggests that even the traditionally soothing sounds can evoke confusion and anxiety. Both Ashley‘s voice and the piano muddle together as if they are underwater or far away but moving nonetheless, toward the listener from a secret room hidden chamber inside one‘s stereo. The recording haunts the record player. Dreamy and drugged out, Medicine Fuck Dream resonates with the spaces in which it was recorded. David Toop notes, ―Places are saturated with unverifiable atmospheres and memory and these are derived as much from sound as any other sensation.‖145 The atmospheric and acoustic properties of a place affect the sounds created and recorded in that place. In It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music, Amanda Petrusich explores the importance of place in American music and asserts, ―[…All] American music reflects the landscape from which it springs […].‖146 For Greg Ashley‘s Medicine Fuck Dream, the musical landscape is the ghosted symbol of American sprawl—the parking garage— obliterates nature as a construction of transient progress and entombs sound. Likewise, the landscape for Ashley‘s 2007 album Painted Garden—the lonely and isolated roads and motels of the American highway—is perhaps articulated by the opening track ―Song from Limestone County‖ which begins with a segment recorded in a railroad tunnel in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area and then shift to a vocal clip recorded in Room 33 of the Flamingo Motel in Ensenada, Mexico.147 The track‘s ―clicking‖ of a train wheels rolling down the tracks while someone runs their fingers over the strings of an autoharp or dulcimer in a non-specific strum then cuts to clock-like or metronome percussion and a tape recording of a person saying, ―It was a near-death experience,‖ as other fingers discordantly pluck at an untuned guitar culminates then in the whole recording collapsing into warping and melting like a damaged cassette tape. ―Song from Limestone County‖ definitely haunts. Using the spaces of the American highway to record pieces of ―Song from Limestone County,‖ Ashley indicates that sounds elicited by that lonely and expansive network of American roads can incorporate

145 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. ix. 146 Petrusich, Amanda. It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and The Search for the Next American Music. New York, NY: Faber and Faber, Inc, 2008. Print. 260. 147 Ashley, Greg. “Song from Limestone County.” Painted Garden. Birdman Records, 2007. CD. 69 into our emotional and national headspace. In addition, sounds of technological decay in the warping cassette noises also intentionally express the grit of age and wear. The exaggerated sound of the recording and playback technologies is also displayed in Ashley‘s ―Won‘t Be Long,‖ which begins with the blurred and distorted sound of a tape being fast-forward and rewound.148 Ashley‘s technique of including the sounds of the generally hidden and removed processes of recording makes the listener aware of the machinations behind the art and construction of a recording and can be as demystifying as showing the audience the man behind the curtain. By drawing the listener‘s attention to the apparatus, Ashley suggests that even the most highly regarded forms of aesthetic expression are concerned with some manipulation or trickery, and within the medium of recorded music, there is certainly no exception. This idea is exemplified even more in ―Fisher King,‖ a track that hearkens to the production style sound of Van Morrison‘s 1970 album Moondance—particularly songs like ―Moondance‖ and ―Into the Mystic.‖ ―Fisher King‖ features a distant jazz piano and mellow saxophone solo but really impresses with the barely audible, hazy yet smooth ―vinyl sound‖ created by the faint clicking and shaking of micro-percussive instruments (sounding like the instruments made from clusters of nutshells), mimicking the surface noise of vinyl.149 On ―Fisher King,‖ Ashley once again demonstrates how recorded music always supports itself with some technological manipulation. With both Medicine Fuck Dream and Painted Garden, Greg Ashley reveals how the atmosphere and acoustics of a space can be utilized as instrumentation on a recording and how recording machinations ultimately determine what one hears in a recording. Another producer-musician who molds aesthetically hauntological recordings is Northern California native Jason Robert Quever. Having produced such gorgeously- crafted albums as Cass McCombs‘ A and Not the Way and Donovan Quinn & the 13th Month‘s Self-tiled and Your Wicked Man, Quever‘s production techniques revolve around fashioning a delicately textured yet ―cozy‖ sound. In many ways, Quever‘s sound seems condensed and compressed—each song exists in its own frame, each track is like a small sonic painting or a world unto itself. With his band Papercuts,

148 Ashley, Greg. “Won‟t Be Long.” Painted Garden. Birdman Records, 2007. CD. 149 Ashley, Greg. “Fisher King.” Painted Garden. Birdman Records, 2007. CD. 70

Quever constructs blissful yet elegiac, 60s Baroque chamber pop akin to The Left Banke‘s 1965 hit ―Walk Away Renee,‖ The Yardbirds‘ ―For Your Love,‖ Procol Harem‘s ―A Whiter Shade of Pale,‖ and the music of bands like Love and The Moody Blues. Quever‘s sound is cool and blithe yet plaintively beautiful—like crystallized, frozen tears refracting shimmering glints of light. On his 2004 release Mockingbird, Quever‘s title track ―Mockingbird‖ exhibits 18th century military drums, layers of reverberating Baroque keyboards, and sweet 60s pop vocal harmonies all through the filter of the lo-fi recording process.150 The result is a shimmery drone that still allows the intricacies of the song to stand out. Quever synthesizes 1960s producer Phil Spector‘s ―Wall of Sound‖ technique where each individual sound is audible but the production volume is so evenly spread out that the song has a sense of ―big‖ quiet. The collection of delicate sounds, in effect, creates a ―loud quiet.‖ Quever primarily utilizes the resonating quality of the piano and organ to add texture and fullness to his sound. The sound of a piano can carry throughout a room and even travel through the walls and floor. The power of piano‘s sound is in its ability to resonate. David Toop notes, ―Of all instruments, the piano is most conductive to this ghostly activation.‖151 On ―A Fairy Tale,‖ the piano is dramatic and rapturous and the vocals are melancholy yet ecstatic, which expresses a precocious innocence—a sense that contrary to its convictions, the song does not really believe in all the beauty that it manifests.152 Unassuming in its bashfulness and modesty while at the same time being swallowed in an emotional wave of reverb, the song becomes a victim of the contradictions between its own sound and meaning. Quever‘s sound is not the 1960s but evokes a mood that is of the 1960s, an innocence and idealism now lost. Unlike the Baroque pop of the 1960s though, Papercuts articulates a vaguely ambivalent perception of the vulnerability of its sound—an impending doom on the horizon that is coyly disregarded. Quever‘s employment of the 60s chamber pop style insinuates a longing; it expresses a skeptical heart that, even as it asserts that it does not believe in love, wants nothing more in the world but to love. Just as Quever affirms that the innocence of the 1960s cannot ever exist again, he is

150 Papercuts. “Mockingbird.” Mockingbird. Antenna Farm Records, 2004. CD. 151 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 145. 152 Papercuts. “A Fairy Tale.” Mockingbird. Antenna Farm Records, 2004. CD. 71 carving out a world for it to exist as a possibility—as a sound. Moody tracks like ―December Morning‖153 and ―Poor and Free‖154 are enveloped in warm, wooly layers of dreamy organ reverb. Though Quever‘s music is full of empathy and purity, because of its ghostliness, it treads on treacherous ground. It may seem that Quever‘s sound necessarily typifies an obstinate refusal to be awakened into the context of the present, but his records with Papercuts are better characterized as expressing a waking dream of the past—of placing the dream of the past within the context of today. In this sense, Papercuts create sonic depictions of collective cultural memories. For Papercuts‘ more cohesive 2007 release Can’t Go Back, Quever reminisces about simpler times. Both ―Take the 227th Exit‖155—a fun little piano rag that, with its forlorn yet unabashed lyrics concerning attending the wedding of former lover, could have easily appeared on the soundtrack to The Graduate in a parallel universe—and ―Unavailable‖156—a more despondent musing on human connectivity and rejection— recall the mood of the days before cell phones and social media. The brooding yet dynamic ―John Brown‖157 recollects the folk music of fervent political activism, and ―Dear Employee‖158 explores dark romanticism in the relationship between employer and employee. While ―Outside Looking In‖159 channels the sound of The Byrds, Gram Parsons‘ idea of ―cosmic American music,‖ and a certain rural earthiness exhibited by 60s country pop, the glitteringly ornate ―Found Bird‖ sonically conveys the magical innocence of youth. By marrying the 18th century military percussion of ―Mockingbird‖ with sublime cascades of piano and ethereal whistling melodies, Quever‘s ―Found Bird‖ evokes images of tin soldiers, a young girl‘s crystal collection, sunlight glinting through trees, nursery rhymes, and the solitary discoveries of childhood.160 By sonically painting a beautiful image of childhood memory, Quever expresses the archetypal idealized past. Because Quever‘s Utopian sonic imagery contradicts the present context of these cultural idealizations; none of the songs on Can’t Go Back mean exactly what they say.

153 Papercuts. “December Morning.” Mockingbird. Antenna Farm Records, 2004. CD. 154 Papercuts. “Poor and Free.” Mockingbird. Antenna Farm Records, 2004. CD. 155 Papercuts. “Take the 227th Exit.” Can’t Go Back. Gnomonsong Recordings, 2007. CD. 156 Papercuts. “Unavailable.” Can’t Go Back. Gnomonsong Recordings, 2007. CD. 157 Papercuts. “John Brown.” Can’t Go Back. Gnomonsong Recordings, 2007. CD. 158 Papercuts. “Dear Employee.” Can’t Go Back. Gnomonsong Recordings, 2007. CD. 159 Papercuts. “Outside Looking In.” Can’t Go Back. Gnomonsong Recordings, 2007. CD. 160 Papercuts. “Found Bird.” Can’t Go Back. Gnomonsong Recordings, 2007. CD. 72

Quever‘s productions suggest that poignancies of these ideas exist in their vagaries. On these contradictions, Amanda Petrusich notes: [Artists like Quever] are as concerned with the future as they are with the past, unapologetically embracing the strange synergy of the organic and the synthesized, the beautiful and the hideous, the real and the imagined. The resulting sounds are the best possible reflection of the juxtapositions—factories perched on riverbanks, purple peaks interrupted by Shell stations.161 Producer-musicians like Jason Quever utilize production methods (the component of the recording process that most consumers forget to consider) to manipulate and form their own particular aesthetic message. Because the production acts as a lens through which listeners are asked to consider recorded music, production functions as an invisible layer that nonetheless shapes the perception of the audience. Aesthetically hauntological, the recorded music production of Jason Quever evokes the sound of the idealized past and estranges the present context from it. Through his record production and arrangements, Quever aurally communicates sonic images which characterize and color cultural memories but assert nothing other than the emotional rhapsody of being human. In addition to both Greg Ashley and Jason Quever, California producer-musician Tim Presley creates aesthetically hauntological recordings as moniker White Fence. Although Presley plays with bands Darker My Love and The Strange Boys, White Fence is entirely his project. Presley, wrote, played, recorded, and produced the music for each of his albums, and as White Fence, Presley manufactures some of the most aesthetically hauntological recorded music today, all from his Los Angeles apartment bedroom. Without contribution from any other musicians, Presley constructs 60s- inspired garage psyche similar to that found on the Elektra and Rhino Records‘ ―Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968‖ and ―Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond 1964-1969‖ box sets. Because his sound is so uncannily similar to the original 60s psyche, Presley could honestly be mistaken for a now obscure and forgotten teenage garage band that never made it.

161 Petrusich, Amanda. It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and The Search for the Next American Music. New York, NY: Faber and Faber, Inc, 2008. Print. 7.

When listening to White Fence, one may find it hard believe that Presley is acting alone. By using a drum machine and a multi-track recorder system to record guitars, keyboards, other percussion, and multiple vocals (that are often skewed and manipulated to sound like different people), Presley builds his strange and spectral 60s- inspired pop tunes and expresses his own particular style of aesthetically hauntological recorded music. By manipulating his vocals to sound old, far away, warped, nuanced, and multiplied, by producing his music to sound older than it actually is, and by exaggerating the sound of the recording technologies Tim Presley sculpts haunting, 60s psych pop as White Fence. For his self-titled debut, White Fence, the majority of Presley‘s songs are three minutes long or under and hinge on Presley‘s repetition of a particular beat or melody as he tweaks the frequencies, effects, and speed of the production while singing very simple songs through layers of reverb and vocal delay. On White Fence, Presley samples 60s pop beats like the drum break from Tommy Roe‘s ―Sweet Pea,‖ and he synthesizes vocal and guitar styles of artists like John Lennon, the Beatles, and Link Wray. In addition, Presley exaggerates his production technology and allows the listener to hear its normally hidden processes. In this regard, he uses the sounds of slurred or warped technology to express how human behaviors and concepts are similar to recording production processes. On ―Who Feels Right?‖162 Presley begins with a repetition of a break-beat drums sequence similar to the drum break in Tommy Roe‘s ―Sweet Pea.‖ Then he adds a fuzzed-out electric guitar rift while he layers his vocals with lots of reverb and delay somewhat akin to the vocal delay effect used by John Lennon. By assimilating memories of recorded sound into his contemporary work, Presley suggests how the incorporation of cultural memories can reference feelings evoked by the past. Tommy Roe‘s innocent bubblegum pop expresses an innocence of the early 1960s while John Lennon‘s vocal delay suggests the drug-induced experiences that characterize the culture of the latter half of the decade. Presley‘s incorporation of both these components in ―Who Feels Right?‖ sonically explores the duality of innocence and experience within the 1960s, America, and humanity. Presley further ghosts these concepts as he, in his spirit-like or witch-like vocal delay, asks,

162 White Fence. “Who Feels Right?” White Fence. Make A Mess Records, 2010. CD. 74

―Who feels right?‖ In this regard, Presley asks the listener which memory of the 1960s is right—he questions which memory feels truer. For the majority of the tracks on White Fence, Presley utilizes the sonic cultural reference to express differing conceptions of the past. On the longer track ―I Follow You,‖163 Presley adds a creepy toy piano, a haunting segment of whistling, incantatory bells, and then more fuzzed out electric guitar, to his serene, almost British-folk stylized vocals that now have less reverb and no delay but seem to be layered in multiple voices. The bells and toy piano add extra texture to the song and sound broken and cheap, so that one can imagine a child‘s nursery toys coming to life and being animated by some ghost. Sonically, ―I Follow You‖ finds Presley exploring America‘s constant state as the child of Europe—a follower of the parents‘ ideas while simultaneously rebelling against them. ―I Follow You‖ sonically follows in the 1960s psychedelic folk rock traditions while rebelling against them its reverb and texturing sound effects. With ―Ring Round a Square‖ Presley meditates on the past and the present of California and, more specifically San Francisco, as the 1960s and current American frontier for manifesting on artistic destiny. Not only did creative types flock to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 1960s, but even today artists still view the city as the quintessential place of creative conglomerates in America. Presley begins with static discordant noise then soon moves into a break-beat drum and sunny guitar melody with Presley singing about California and San Francisco first in high-pitched, tweaked, and nasally vocals reminiscent of The Beatles ―Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds‖ then in a low deeper voice that sounds like an uninvited and intruding presence. Presley sings ―California why you leave me […] spend the day with legendary optimistic sights […] it‘s in your soul‖164 and then strangely says the phrase, ―Ring round a square, San Francisco air.‖165 Here Presley places his work within the long lineage of the American west‘s ―Manifest Destiny‖ and alludes to the intrinsically American idea of California as the geographic location of the American Dream. With ―Ring Around a Square,‖ Presley communicates the different artistic and entrepreneurial incarnations of California. Sonically, he conveys this idea through using the sound of 1960s psychedelic rock while

163 White Fence. “I‟ll Follow You.” White Fence. Make A Mess Records, 2010. CD. 164 White Fence. “Ring Around a Square.” White Fence. Make A Mess Records, 2010. CD. 165 White Fence. “Ring Around a Square.” 75 placing his own millennial perspective on it. Presley‘s production technique of incorporating comparative sonic cultural references expresses the dualities of an idealized collective memory of the 1960s. Presley also uses his production skills of warping the sound of the recording to create the sound of broken, dated, or outmoded recording technology in order to express human dualities. Interestingly, the song ―A Need You‖ begins fast with a steady break-beat, then slows down and seems to vary between speeds. Accented by more fuzzy guitar, Presley‘s vocals shift back and forth between a desperate tone like, ―I need you to stay, but if it‘s on your way, come right down to me,‖ and an apathetic one, saying, ―I don‘t care if it‘s over, because I‘m over me.‖166 Not only does this song sound like it is being played through a broken record player, but the variation between speeds and the shifts in tone suggest a contradictory nature of humanity doubled in the record‘s sound—as the voice in ―A Need You‖ seems conflicted in an ―I love you, I love you not‖ way. Presley‘s ―Be Right Too‖ is a strangely muted rock march beat like a slowed-down and ghosted version of The Beatles‘ ―St. Pepper‘s Lonely Hearts Club Band,‖ with multiple reverb-drenched vocals and a synthesizer warble that emerges and recedes after Presley repeats, ―I could be right, too, yeah I could be right, too.‖167 ―Be Right Too‖ sonically conveys a political activist attitude that seems to lose speed—a concern many scholar have when studying the activism of the 1960s. When retrospectively viewing the early to late 1960s, one can wonder what contributed the each movement‘s loss of momentum. The simple answer is drug use—an idea that Presley also sonically articulates in his records. Presley‘s production techniques focus on integrating sonic cultural collective memories—sampling beats, synthesizing 60s psyche rock guitar, organ, and vocal styles—while layering sonic textures (vocals, reverb, micro- percussion, dissonant and droning instrumentation and effects), manipulating and warping vocals, and exaggerating the sound of old production technology. The combination of these techniques expresses how Presley expresses the present context‘s perspective of disparaging images within the past, more specifically the 1960s.

166 White Fence. “A Need You.” White Fence. Make A Mess Records, 2010. CD. 167 White Fence. “Be Right Too.” White Fence. Make A Mess Records, 2010. CD. 76

For his second White Fence album, Is Growing Faith, Presley expands his methods of using sonic cultural memories and exaggerating his production technology in order to continue crafting his own aesthetically hauntological 60s-inspired bedroom psyche. On Is Growing Faith, Presley improves his practice of varying record speeds on a song. As ―And By Always‖168 begins, the record speed is quite fast and warps and blurs several times before the song completely cuts out and then begins again at another tempo. Even though the song has begun again, seemingly to start over and reassert some normalcy, the speed continues to fluctuate all the way to the end of the track. The majority of the melody in ―And By Always‖ is the repetition of one guitar rift and drum beat over and over again with Presley‘s ―Beatles-esque‖ vocals and discordant frequencies of guitar feedback emerging and receding. In ―And By Always,‖ Presley questions the use of generalizing temporal language as he sings, ―I see you always and by always I mean […].‖169 It is difficult to understand what he sings at the end; he may be saying ―generally‖ or ―gently‖ or ―carefully.‖ In any case, Presley‘s exaggeration of the record‘s processing sounds provoke the listen to ask what ―always‖ means, especially in reference to the recorded artifact. Toward the end of the track, the warbling, psychedelic, organ synthesizer grows louder with an altered melodic phrasing until the song ends abruptly, further suggesting that even ―always‖ and ―forever‖ find some end. Presley‘s other main technique of exacerbating the synthetic characteristics of technology on Is Growing Faith, is his manipulation of vocals. Not only does Presley multiply and layer his voice, he also warps his vocals to sound like other people and to draw attention the fallibility of the production apparatus. In ―The Mexican Twins/ Life is…Too $hort,‖ Presley compresses his voice to sound like an elf or as if he had ingested helium and then gives a strange diatribe about a pair of sideshow twins while strange carnival music fluctuates and distorts in the background. The song then shifts to a melody with lots of vocal delay and arpeggios of psyche flute/recorder as Presley repeats, ―The days keep marching on.‖170 ―The Mexican Twins/ Life is…Too $hort‖ is a track that doubles. It is a combination of two songs, the first suggesting oration or the

168 White Fence. “And By Always.” Is Growing Faith. Woodsist Records, 2011. CD. 169 White Fence. “And By Always.” 170 White Fence. “The Mexican Twins/ Life is…Too $hort.” Is Growing Faith. Woodsist Records, 2011. CD. 77 voice of a soapbox preacher or sideshow ringmaster while the second conveys the rapturous and repetitive emotion of religious ecstasy. In this regard, ―The Mexican Twins/ Life is…Too $hort‖ expresses the structure of the American relationship between commerce and feeling. In the track, ―Art Investor Collector,‖ strange voices rise and fall, whisper and yelp, echo the vocals and repeat seemingly non-sense phrases throughout the song. As Presley sings, ―It‘s the wrong race, but you can still run‖171 expresses his perceptive on the unnatural nonsense in delineating occupations in the realm of aesthetics. The essential role of a musician used to involve doing it all: playing, producing, archiving, investing, and collecting. Here Presley communicates his own position as an artist, collector, investor, and archivist and questions society‘s estrangement of these occupations from one another. For Is Growing Faith, Tim Presley finely tunes his production methods of sampling sonic cultural memories while exaggerating the synthetic sound that technology creates when it warps, breaks, and fails. The varying record speeds and vocal modulations of dying technology make music and the human voice sound unnatural, yet these quirks in turn make technology seem more human. On White Fence‘s current release Family Perfume, Vol. 1 & 2, Presley tones down his production techniques to a much more subtle inflection, only using varying speeds sparingly and not so grotesquely modifying his voice. Tracks like ―Be at Home,‖ ―It Will Never Be,‖ and ―King of the Decade‖ demonstrate a smoother continuity of sound and aural fullness that is both aesthetically hauntological and more accessible. One new component of his aesthetic is the use of sound effects and early videogame noises. On ―Be At Home,‖ Presley slows down the speed of the song at times, but when he does, it seems more purposeful and dramatic—once at the beginning of the song and then gradually at the end. ―Be At Home,‖ does however, exhibit vintage video game lasers and strange early electronic bleeps and sounds. By adding a layer of early computer and electronic noises, Presley alters the historic context of the song‘s sound. Because ―Be At Home‖ sounds like 60s psychedelic pop and also displays sounds of early computers—a sonic component belonging to the 1980s, not the 60s—Presley is compressing and combining these cultural markers in time. As he sings, ―And I know

171 White Fence. “Art Investor Collector.” Is Growing Faith. Woodsist Records, 2011. CD. 78 that you will always be at home,‖172 his vocals are punctuated by computerized laser sound effects. This suggests a science fiction narrative that questions what ―always‖ and ―home‖ will mean in the future, particularly when viewed as another step in procession from the 1960s to 1980s to today. For ―It Will Never Be,‖ Presley muses on the problem of retrospectively wishing for a different outcome of a situation that has already come to pass. Presley sings: You can count of every sign, oh baby, but it will never be […] I heard you had a baby and you said you wished it was mine […] beyond repair and it will never be […] everything‘s a young man‘s dream […] a Detroit factory so black and melted stands a better chance than the farmer‘s calling in the field of gray […] and you know it will never be.173 The music stutters and slurs as Presley articulates how memory creates a strange relationship with the past. In the last line that compares Detroit factories and farmers, Presley suggests America‘s lamentations of the ills of industrialization. In the end, however, he asserts that one can mourn these losses, but nothing will ever change. On ―King of the Decade,‖ Presley communicates the idea of spectral time as he analyzing decade of the past century. The track begins with tape slurring and slowed vocals. Then when Presley sings, ―And the rolling 20s‖ and remarks on ―the digital paper‖174 he alludes to the 1920s and the millennial. In addition, Presley sonically alludes to the 1960s with the music‘s psychedelic rock sound and also does so with the line, ―Rock and roll forever.175‖ By collapsing the decades, Presley asks the listener to consider what sets one decade apart from another and who could be qualified as its ―king.‖ Presley furthers his image of spectrality with the line, ―The happiest you‘ve ever been hasn‘t happened yet.‖176 In addition, Presley expresses how the recorded artifact is truly the ―king of the decade as he sings, ―Sometimes the mirror is the decade‘s god.‖ This communicates how the record mirrors not only the voice but the time in which it was recorded—the decade. On White Fence‘s Family Perfume, Vol. 1 &2, Tim Presley collapses time and decades both lyrically and sonically. By incorporating various sonic

172 White Fence. “Be At Home.” Family Perfume Vol. 1 & 2. Woodsist Records, 2012. CD. 173 White Fence. “It Will Never Be.” Family Perfume Vol. 1 & 2. Woodsist Records, 2012. CD. 174 White Fence. “King of the Decade.” Family Perfume Vol. 1 & 2. Woodsist Records, 2012. CD. 175 White Fence. “King of the Decade.” 176 White Fence. “King of the Decade.” 79 cultural memories and having them rebel against and contradict each other in each song, Presley demonstrates spectrality and the integration of collective cultural memories into the present consciousness of Americans. Of all the producer-musicians mentioned here, Ariel Pink is probably the most well-known. A native of Los Angeles, Pink has been making aesthetically haunting recorded music for virtually his whole life. As a child of the 80s, Pink‘s sound obsession began with playing with tape recorders and boom boxes. In 2004, Pink sent his demo to Animal Collective‘s own Paw Tracks Label and became the first non-Animal Collective member to have material released on their label. His first official album The Doldrums, was released under his moniker Ariel Pink‘s Haunted Graffiti and featured Pink making beats and other sound effects with his mouth. The title track ―Haunted Graffiti‖ sounds like an apocalyptic, 80s sci-fi movie theme. Beginning with destroyed, reverb-layered guitar and Pink‘s ―shhhhing‖ vocal noises, two garbled layers of Pink‘s voice begin to sing—one voice is a high-pitched whine that sounds like a man trying to imitate a little girl‘s voice and the other is a deep, throaty growl of talking. While the track begins sounding dark as Pink broodingly says, ―This is the end,‖177 a steady beat livens the mood. Then with rapturous, surging synthesizers and vocals, the song reaches moments of sheer listening bliss. The melody is driven by old keyboards, and bells accent Pink‘s voices which undulate with modulation. By popular standards, the production is very cheap but actually sounds smooth and evocative. In ―The Past Inside the Present,‖ Adam Harper notes Pink‘s production techniques, saying: Most this is technological and down to Pink‘s use of an aging 8-track tape recorder, which furnishes his songs with attenuated high and low frequencies, headroom-exceeding, audible tape-editing and an overall wash of hiss and crackle, but the use of closely-miked oral sound effects in place of a drum set, the often wildly heterogeneous song structures, the peculiar vocal stylings and the less-than-metronomic playing also add to the overall sense of an all-too- human imperfection.178

177 Ariel Pink‟s Haunted Graffiti. “Haunted Graffiti.” The Doldrums. Paw Tracks, 2004. CD. 178 Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics. 27 October 2009. WEB. 13 January 2012. 47.

Pink makes the song‘s beats with his mouth and elicits ―shhhhing‖ noises that sound like surface noise on a record. These layers of noise are further amplified by Pink‘s production techniques of utilizing vintage equipment, making the song sound distant— like it is being played on an 8-track tape or cassette player. By developing alternative techniques of adding surface noise and employing obsolete recording devices, Pink effectively evokes the sound of the past. To say that Ariel Pink‘s Haunted Graffiti sounds odd is an understatement. The song, ―Haunted Graffiti‖ seems like the perfect pop song that never was made and sounds like a demo that was lost back in 1981 and is just now being heard. By using production to actually trick the listener into believing his songs are older than they really are, Pink is the quintessential crafter of the hauntological aesthetic effect in recorded music. Harper discusses the romantic irony of Pink‘s music noting that listeners wonder ―if his releases were now-dusty, labour-of-love demo tapes made in 1983 and then forgotten, found in some basement and now poignantly summoning the ghost of a young man who had a minimum of means and a big dream to become a lycra-clad pop star, but never ‗made it.‘‖179 Ariel Pink is a sonic trickster. By producing recorded music that sounds so believably older than it actually is, Pink‘s version of the hauntological aesthetic effect does not merely suggest the past inside the present but forces the listener to question his own perception. In doing so, it affirms that technologically mediated arts are always concerned with some sort of manipulation. Harper also says, ―Pink‘s songs can seem to speak to a past that disappeared and a future that never came—we no longer live in a world […] in which […] Pink‘s gleefully glammy music feels ‗true,‘ and that the lo-fi qualities seem to undermine and contradict the idealistic gusto of the songs reinforces the impression.‖180 Because Pink‘s music makes the listener question when it was made, it completely goes against the contemporary aesthetic standard of reflecting the most current sound. In this regard, Pink not only disavows preconceptions of what is sonically ―true‖ but also what is aesthetically ―true.‖ Through his production of aesthetically hauntological recorded music, Pink collapses and crumbles pop music and all conceptions of it.

179 Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics. 27 October 2009. WEB. 13 January 2012. 47. 180 Harper 47.

In ―Hypnagogic Pop: Childhood‘s End,‖ an article in The Wire about the sub- genre called Hypnagogic pop, David Keenan addresses Ariel Pink‘s goals in producing pop music, saying, ―Pink talks of pop as a music that had been successively degraded across the decades, and of his desire to degrade it even further.‖181 Pink degrades pop music by crumbling and ghosting it so much that the listener cannot even discern from what decade it originated. In effect, Pink uses sound technology to manipulate one‘s sense of time. Sonically, he makes the listener believe that he is hearing the music from the 70s and 80s. His music creates a temporal disjuncture. His sound is spectral—one cannot decipher from where it is emerging—and it is familiar— reminiscent of one‘s broken memories of a movie seen in pieces or his attempt to recall an old pop song heard on the radio years ago. By producing his 70s and 80s pop style songs through his lens of now obsolete recording devices from the era he is channeling melodically, Pink degrades pop music‘s sounds and concepts. At the same time Pink degrades pop, he is humanizing it. Modern commercial music—with its slick production and eradication of human error—can seem cold and synthetic. With its lo-fi sound, Ariel Pink‘s Haunted Graffiti evokes a warm, personalized, and intimate sound that offers comfort in the imperfectness (or even fallibility) of machines. Machines do not make mistakes; humans do. Thus, the lo-fi sound seems more than contemporary commercial music‘s perfect and synthetic slickness. Harper notes, ―[The] lo-fi aspect of the music is a means to Pink‘s end of producing warmly human pop‖ (Harper 48). There is an intimacy to Pink‘s sound—a feeling that he has a view into one‘s obscured memories and wants to help people remember their cultural history. For this reason, David Keenan places Ariel Pink within the sub-genre Hypnogogic pop, explaining: Hypnagogic pop is pop music refracted through the memory of a memory. It draws its power from the 1980s pop culture into which many of the genre‘s players were born […]. Hypnagogic realms are the ones between waking and sleeping, liminal zones where mis-hearings and hallucinations feed into the formation of dreams.‖182

181 Keenan, David. “Hypnagogic Pop: Childhood‟s End.” The Wire. August 2009: 26-31. Print. 31. 182 Keenan “Hypnagogic Pop: Childhood‟s End” 26. 82

Hypnagogic pop expresses the vague cultural memories of a 1980s childhood. The idealized memory of childhood is always obscured, but because so much cultural debris from the 1980s survives to constantly trigger memories, children of the 80s (now in their late 20s and 30s) are continuously encountering cultural revenants of their childhood— grainy VHS tape movies, warping cassettes, vintage commercials, and forgotten television shows. One need not visit a flea market to find these artifacts because they are right at his fingertips on the internet. Whether or not the proliferation of hypnogogia has more to with a generation growing sentimental in their age, one cannot deny that technology‘s rapid growth (from 1980 to now) provokes the return of these cultural revenants. Affecting the style of innocuous, generic, and non-copyrighted radio music in the background of 80s movies, Pink‘s songs also have the quality of sounding like the soundtracks to low-budget, straight-to-video movies—weird, obscure films found on VHS tapes at thrift stores, flea markets, yard sales, and in bargain bins. Pink also uses a sonic effect similar to film montage—inspiring one to hear (rather than watch) images unfold to the music. With its driving guitars and dark, gritty rock textures, a track like Before Today‘s ―Butt-House Blondies‖183 could easily have been on an old motorcycle film—the rebel teen on the run. Complete with moments of sweeping synthesizers and 80s electronic sound effects, Scared Famous‘ ―Politely Declined‖184 sounds like the background noise of an arcade in a teen romance movie. For songs like Worn Copy‘s ―Creepshow‖185 and Before Today‘s ―Fright Night (Nevermore),‖186 airy synthesizers conjure images of slightly silly, pre-CGI, 80s horror movies like Evil Dead or Phantasm. On an instrumental track, Before Today‘s ―Reminisces,‖187 wonky, innocuous keyboards sound like elevator music, grocery store music, or the ―hold‖ tune of a telemarketer. As Pink synthesizes the sound of VHS imagery in his songs, he reckons with the revenants of an 80s childhood—cultural artifacts that are spectralized by layers of vague memory.

183 Ariel Pink‟s Haunted Graffiti. “Butt-House Blondies.” Before Today. 4AD Records, 2010. CD. 184 Ariel Pink‟s Haunted Graffiti. “Politely Declined.” Scared Famous. Human Ear Music, 2007. CD. 185 Ariel Pink‟s Haunted Graffiti. “Creepshow.” Worn Copy. Rhystop Records, 2003. CD. 186 Ariel Pink‟s Haunted Graffiti. “Fright Night (Nevermore).” Before Today. 4AD Records, 2010. CD. 187 Ariel Pink‟s Haunted Graffiti. “Reminiscences.” Before Today. 4AD Records, 2010. CD.

Furthermore, Pink‘s music also contemplates not only the record, cassette, and VHS tape but also any recording as cultural artifacts. On Worn Copy, Pink‘s song ―Artifact‖ does so both lyrically and sonically, as the song becomes a metaphor for a tape recording. Pink narrates the song as his future self talking to his younger, past self. In the song he warns his younger self that the apocalypse is coming, to enjoy the ―golden age,‖ and to be concerned with his health, mother, and aspirations. Sonically, Pink‘s tiny yet shimmering guitar melody is a constant loop punctuated by a metronomic clock beat. Occasionally strange noises hiss in and out of the song like flying saucers— spectral sonic visitations. As Pink talks to his younger self on the track, he says that the very recording on which he is speaking is an artifact. He asks, ―Don‘t you hear that this song is forever?/ Notice it didn‘t remain as remembered.‖188 Essentially, Pink is lyrically expounding on what his music does sonically. In the chorus, Pink sings, ―It never used to make you sad, but now you‘ve lost what you never knew you had. This is an Artifact of that.‖ In respect to hypnogogia, Pink‘s music is an artifact. If one cannot remember what he has lost—except through some trace—then then trace of the memory is the only remaining artifact of what has been lost. ―Artifact‖ is also an artifact in the sense that it is a recording. His voice is preserved in time on the recording. ―Artifact,‖ along with Pink‘s other recordings, evokes the idea of the recording as the cultural artifact. Of ―Artifact,‖ Adam Harper says, ―It‘s lyrics imply that the recording itself is a sort of time capsule, an ‗artifact‘ of a previous, happier era or ‗golden age,‘ now consigned to history by some cataclysm, and yet it‘s simultaneously a time-travelling warning from the future to its past, the present.‖189 Each time one listens to a recording, he is transported to the past—both of his own and the recording‘s. So in this way, the recording resurrects the past. It disinters the ghost and specterizes it in the recording. The recording gives body to ghost to speak. The recording thus becomes specter. ―Artifact‖ furthers this idea of the record as ―specter being conjured or resurrected‖ in its intro. ―Artifact‖ begins with a sound clip of a man saying, ―Let your voices shout. […] Remove the rock. Open the sepulcher.‖ Harper explains the origins of this opening, saying:

188 Ariel Pink‟s Haunted Graffiti. “Artifact.” Worn Copy. Rhystop Records, 2003. CD. 189 Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics. 27 October 2009. WEB. 13 January 2012. 48.

The song opens with a sample taken from ―Paul Simon Nontooth,‖ a track by the musician and Bahamian émigré […] Exuma from his 1970 album Exuma II. Exuma‘s records […] have a strong sense of Bahamian national identity and heritage and are full of reference to Afro-Caribbean magic, ritual and spiritual culture, in particular Obeah […]. In ―Paul Simon Nontooth‖ he performs a zombie revival ritual, calling from the dead the spirit of Paul Simon Nontooth […]. Appropriately enough, ―Artifact‖ uses the point in the revival ritual where the grave and the coffin are being opened […] as if the song is being summoned from the grave into a state of undeath.190 With his sample of Exuma raising Paul Simon Nontooth‘s dead spirit, Pink alludes to the importance of the revival ritual in re-experiencing and understanding the cultural relic. Here the revival ritual corresponds essentially to discovering the artifacts, searching them out so that they may be allowed to speak. In ―Artifact,‖ Ariel Pink expresses that in order to reconcile the cultural revenants that appear, one must engage them and let them speak. If the cultural revenants can communicate truths about the past, so too can they communicate truths about the future. Producer-musicians like Ariel Pink, Tim Presley, Jason Quever, and Greg Ashley search for and listen to cultural revenants. This allows them to synthesize and thus, reckon with the past. While the vagaries of memory might evoke anxiety or uncertainty, one cannot avoid dealing with them because revenants always return. Producer- musicians operate as hauntological scholars of the recorded music revenant. As both musicians and producers they remain conscious of recorded music‘s expression of the ghosted relationship between technological synthesis and history. By crafting recordings that express a discourse on the historicity of recorded music, producer- musicians act as ―heir-ethnographers‖ who bridge technological realms. In Cultural Haunting, Kathleen Brogan defines heir-ethnographers as ―those who stand both inside and outside traditions.‖191 As musicians, they are heirs—members of a tradition—and as producers they are ethnographers—scholars with enough distance from a tradition to

190 Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam: Excessive Aesthetics. 27 October 2009. WEB. 13 January 2012. 50. 191 Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Print. 171.

85 provide discourse on it. Producer-musicians understand both the emotional power of music and the manipulation of production. They are aware of the disconnect between a song and a recording of a song. A recording immediately constructs multiple layers of distance—distances in time, intimacy, space, and sound. Producer-musicians like Greg Ashley, Jason Quever, Tim Presley, and Ariel Pink not only understand these distances, they exaggerate and articulate them in their aesthetics. By using the language and machinations of recording, these producer-musicians communicate the cultural inheritance of recorded music. Derrida describes the person most suited to study the ghost as ―the scholar or the learned intellectual, to the man of culture as a spectator who better understands how to establish the necessary distance or how to find the appropriate words for observing, better yet, for apostrophizing the ghost, which is to say also for speaking the language […] of the dead.‖192 As heir-ethnographers, producer-musicians speak the language of the dead. They apprehend that recordings are of the past and so, are dead. For producer-musicians, communicating with the dead involves reckoning with the cultural revenant. In order to speak with the ghost (sound) and convey its message (in an aesthetically hauntological recording), the producer-musician must conjure the ghost (sound) into the specter (the recorded artifact). Producer-musicians search out and discover old records. They listen for surface noise and recording techniques. They listen to the ghost, speak to it, and translate its message. Not surprising then, producer- musicians are record collectors and hoarders of culture. Derrida says, ―The hoarder behaves then like an alchemist […] speculating on ghosts, the ‗elixir of life,‘ the ‗philosophers‘ stone.‘‖193 Producer-musicians learn from their record collections. They reckon with the cultural revenants and let the records communicate about the past. Producer-musicians learn about recorded music‘s sound from records. Amanda Petrusich elaborates: By circumventing traditional folk avenues—wherein songs are passed down from parent to child, neighbor to neighbor—and learning, instead, through scratchy old LPs and mixtapes and thrift store 78s, […] artists are reclaiming a past (and an

192 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 12. 193 Derrida 57.

oral folk tradition) that‘s been lost, at least in part, by suburban sprawl, technology, isolation, change.194 Producer-musicians learn from the bits of cultural debris they collect. They discover and revive the cultural revenant in order to listen to it and learn about the past. Necessitated by technology‘s near obliteration of an oral tradition, record listening has now become the producer-musician‘s oral tradition. In ―The Fire Down Below,‖ an article featured in The Wire, David Keenan notes how current musicians‘ are learning from their record collections. Keenan recalls MV & EE‘s Matt Valentine saying, ―‘I think the music just exists, it‘s out there and you‘ve got to find it,‘ […] ‗There‘s like a cosmic warehouse full of this stuff and you‘ve got to jack into it. And, man, it‘s a maze when you get in there.‘‖195 Cultural revenants return from beyond the grave. Reconciling them means discovering them and taking responsibility for the history they convey. Record collecting is an ethnographic act of reconciling the ghost, and anyone one who assumes the responsibility becomes an heir to the cultural inheritance of recorded music. By knowing how to read and manipulate the recording, producer-musicians communicate with and about the dead, and what the dead have to say is especially important during a dramatic change in culture. Necessary for the cultural transition, Brogan says, ―The heir-ethnographer, the insider who also stands between cultures, recognizes both continuity with and distance from the collective traditions consolidated by social memory.‖196 Heir-ethnographers facilitate the transition from one era to the next. This is especially important now. As we stand on the threshold of the post- millennium, we must negotiate our transition from the electric age to the digital era. If spiritualism expressed how those of the late 19th and early 20th century negotiated the move from a mechanical era to an electric age then the hauntological aesthetic negotiates the transformation from the electric age to the digital. Like those before us, we must sift through our cultural inheritance—reckon with ghosts—decide what is kept and what is discarded. As a ghost, recorded music can help us reconnect with our

194 Petrusich, Amanda. It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and The Search for the Next American Music. New York, NY: Faber and Faber, Inc, 2008. Print. 252-253. 195 Keenan, David. “The Fire Down Below.” The Wire. August 2003: 30-41. Print. 37. 196 Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Print. 134.

87 cultural inheritance, and this inheritance shows us what makes us essentially human and essentially American.

CHAPTER 5 MANNERS AND AMERICAN IDENTITY

Producer-musicians who craft aesthetically hauntological recorded music consider cultural revenants when creating their art. By collaborating with ghosts, they seek to reconcile with their cultural pasts. In this regard, producer-musicians act as heir-ethnographers who sift through cultural inheritance and decide what relics will be retained and what will be discarded. The function of the heir-ethnographer grows even more important as society shifts from the electronic age to the digital area. Because digital technology‘s hyper-visibility contradicts with the vague and interpretive character of our national ideologies, the need to negotiate this transition becomes even more imperative in America today. Americans are confronted with questions about what components of our cultural inheritance will endure and what will fall into obsolescence. As a ghost, aesthetically haunting recorded music can facilitate a reconnection with our cultural inheritance, and rediscovering this inheritance allows us to recognize our own ghostly American identity. Upon its invention, the phonograph asserted itself as a memory-aiding technology. For Americans, phonograph records inspired memories of simpler, pre-industrialization times while also constructing a subjective, private listening world where one could contemplate his desires and identity. In Recorded Music and American Life, William Howland Kenney discusses Evan Eisenberg‘s idea of Americans performing ―‘ceremonies in solitary‘‖ with their phonographs.197 Kenney notes Eisenberg‘s description of phonograph listening as ―ritualistic observances in which the listener summons forth the sound of voices and musical instruments of his or her own choosing […creating] an impression of ‗private music‘ […constructing] a hermetic world walled by favorite recorded sounds.‖198 By converting music into a commodity, the phonograph established a private world of listening, separate from the previous exclusively public world of live music. In turn, the phonograph contributed to the idea of private time. Because listening to music is a contemplative process, it thus initiates self-reflection. In The Old, Weird America, Greil

197 Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890- 1945. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. 3. 198 Kenney 3.

Marcus discusses how the phonograph‘s ―distancing‖ of music ignited self-reflection, saying, ―[You] could have heard [a song] next door, or even played it yourself [on your own instrument]—but not with the distancing of representation [provided by the phonograph], which made a magic mirror and produced the shock of self-recognition. What one saw in the mirror was a bigger, more various, less finished, less fated self than one had ever seen before.‖199 When Americans listened to phonograph recordings, they not only heard the songs of their culture, they were confronted with all of the images of their cultural identity. In these recordings they recognized not just themselves as individuals but also themselves as Americans. In listening to recorded music, Americans found a private sphere in which they could consider their desires and identity. Americans could dream. They could ponder their future aspirations and investigate their identity. Peering into one‘s identity often means excavating the memory. In turn, the phonograph obliged Americans to remember their own individual pasts as well as their collective, cultural pasts, and when the phonograph compelled Americans to remember, they remembered their childhoods, youth, and the traditions of their parents and grandparents. Kenney says, ―[Folk records of the 1920s] had the power to awaken powerful emotions capable of stimulating recollections and dreams of departed family members, kin, hearth, soil, rural and agricultural activities, cultural community, past lifestyles, and special family mentalities.‖200 Music stirs emotions and memories. It evokes personal past experiences and conceptual notions of the past. If Americans considered both their personal and national history and identity as they listened to their phonographs, then they experienced these ―‘ceremonies in solitary‘‖ collectively. Kenney explains, ―Not simply solitaries, phonograph record lovers listened ‗alone together,‘ discovering in mediated engravings of past musical expressiveness parallel avenues to shared social and cultural circles of resonance, ones that led them to active forms of musical knowledge and involvement.‖201 So as Americans listened to phonograph records and contemplated who they were and what they wanted out of life,

199 Marcus, Greil. The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York, NY: Picador, 1997. Print. 121. 200 Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890- 1945. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print.4. 201 Kenney 22.

90 they were drawn sequentially to the ethereal realm of collective memory and their idealized past. At the time the phonograph‘s advent, America was undergoing a dramatic cultural transformation. Not only was technology changing rapidly, so too were America‘s municipal, popular, and communal structures. Kenney further explains: Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, many Americans felt that they had been torn from the social and cultural worlds in which they once had sunk roots. […] Among the social forces that led many Americans to welcome recorded music, none were more powerful than the wrenching historical changes of urbanization, domestic and international migrations, and social dislocations that resulted from World War II.202 In order to cope with all these changes, Americans used phonograph records to sonically escape into their memories of pre-industrialization agrarianism. Kenney notes that American folk records of the 1920s and 30s could ―elicit memories of a golden mountain past, repeatedly reviving recollections of the past in the present.‖203 In this regard, the phonograph not only marked America‘s cultural shift into the electric age but also negotiated this transformation by stimulating memories of American‘s agrarian past. Kenny also says that these records could ―stimulate collective memories among Americans […that] were […] caught up in the swiftly changing patterns and politics of national life.‖204 By conjuring their pasts with phonograph recordings, Americans assuaged their anxieties about the dramatic alterations in their culture. They also reconnected with what they believed it meant to be American. During the swift changes of the early 20th century, phonograph records aided Americans in sifting through their cultural inheritance, and what Americans discovered and decided to retain was an idealized, mythic American past. The mythic American past is composed of idealized images of American identity and the American Dream. These idealized images of American identity are what Morton L. Ross, in ―‘Manners‘: An Addition to a Vocabulary for American Studies,‖ calls

202 Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890- 1945. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. 182. 203 Kenney 147. 204 Kenney 182.

―manners.‖ According to Ross, Manners are ―the distinguishing mark of a particular culture or subculture—the shared forms or patterns of behavior that give specificity to the group life of a particular time and place,‖205 Manners are the exaggerated characteristics and behavior patterns of national character and historical trend—images that combine ―social fact and aesthetic quality‖—for a culture.206 Manners are historical and aesthetic images that determine national character. In The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, Greil Marcus describes American manners as ―certain images, certain acts and postures, expressions and movements, framed and allowed to hold a moment of time, [that] can embody very nearly the whole of a country‘s identity, or its fantasy, its received but still felt and imagined self, the self the country believes [or suspects] it has.‖207 Manners are iconic images that combine history and aesthetics to determining national character. Some examples of American manners are: the American work ethic, the importance of the family, the sacredness of faith, and the ability to manifest one‘s own destiny. In Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity & Exclusion Over Four Centuries, Cal Jillson unpacks the foundation of the American Dream. Jillson notes the tenets of the American Creed—the inalienable rights and liberties promised by The Declaration of Independence—as ―liberty, equality, individualism, populism, laissez-faire, and the rule of law under a constitution.‖208 Even more idealistic is the vision through which Americans direct their creed: The American Dream. Jillson describes the American Dream as ―the promise that the country hold out to the rising generation and to immigrants that hard work and fair play will, almost certainly lead to success.‖209 The American Dream is the optimistic driving force of American manners. It insists that the idealized images of America‘s historical aesthetic are attainable, that the American myth is a true history. In American, our manners are those timeless images that converge to form the American myth. Some images that comprise the idealized, mythic American past—a

205 Ross, Morton L. “‟Manners‟: An Addition to a Vocabulary for American Studies.” The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 22.1 (1968): 15-22. Print. 15. 206 Ross 21. 207 Marcus, Greil. The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print. 115. 208 Jillson, Cal. “The American Dream and Its Role in American History.” Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity & Exclusion Over Four Centuries. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 1-14. Print. 4. 209 Jillson 7.

92 family farm, community connectivity, education, commerce, fair regulation, law, and freedom—are so truly American and characterize the goal toward which we are moving and the Utopia at which we are looking back and trying to regain. Marcus says, ―[That idealized past] way of life is so familiar—as […] naturally American—that it seems not only still present but in the future, a promise that what is truly American will never change, that the future will resemble the past.‖210 That the best possible future of America will resemble our idealized past expresses America‘s own hauntology. America defines its notions of Utopia as a lost past that we must recover. In this sense, America‘s unspoken quest to journey into the past to reach a better future suggests spectrality and the work of mourning. Perhaps America has to reconcile those spectral visions of Utopia because we know those idealized images of the past were ―untrue‖ from the beginning. When considering the contradictions between America‘s mythic, idealized past and what is presently known as the facts of American history, one cannot conjure away the uncertainties generated by this disconnect. Cal Jillson elaborates on these contradictions saying, ―Equality has been variously argued to mean equality in the eyes of God, before the law, or opportunity, and of outcomes. […Liberty] can conflict with equality, constitutionalism can constrain democracy, and lassize-faire competition can conflict with the rule of law.‖211 America‘s core ideas of inalienable rights stand in constant opposition with one another, placing an American Utopia somewhere between the dichotomous rhetoric of its vague and yet sanctioned documents of our confederation. In Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier, Hampton Sides celebrates and critiques America‘s reinventing powers. Of the U.S., Sides says, ―The United States is such a glorious mess of contradiction, such a crazy quilt of competing themes, such a fecund mishmash of people and ideas, that defining us is pretty much pointless.‖212 Because America‘s ideologies are based on such grand ideas that lack clear definition and often contradict one another, then America, as an idea, can only

210 Marcus, Greil. The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print. 119. 211 Jillson, Cal. “The American Dream and Its Role in American History.” Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity & Exclusion Over Four Centuries. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 1-14. Print. 4-5. 212 Sides, Hampton. Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2004. Print. xii.

93 maintain itself with some ghost. In ―The Spirit of Place,‖ the first chapter of his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence says of American liberty: ―Americans have always been at a certain tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension.‖213 American liberty is tension between two dichotomous definitions of liberty as ―liberty to‖ and ―liberty from.‖214 American liberty is a ghost. In addition to the unalienable right of liberty being rendered ghostly by constitutionalism, other essential American ideologies are ghosted by the very rhetoric of early America political documents as well. In his ―Introduction‖ to the Penguin addition of Charles Brockdon Brown‘s Wieland; or The Transformation and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, Jay Fliegelman discusses the contradictions of American government and its rhetoric and the early national period‘s ―conflicting claims of authority and liberty.‖215 Fliegelman also discusses the vagaries of language in early American documents and notes that ―life and liberty were conceptualized in the eighteenth century not only as rights but as a form of property.‖216 By giving a tangible dimension to such intangible ideas as life and liberty, the rhetoric is of constitutionalism (in that it conventionalizes ideas as tangible objects) expresses the ghosting and misrepresentation of language. In this regard, the unalienable rights secured to Americans by the American Dream are properties any American can possess. The American Dream thus specterizes these rights into the forms of intangible property. In addition, Fliegelman describes America as, ―a republic in which power had been redefined as the rhetorical ability to secure consent of the governed or to ventriloquize public opinion.‖217 American constitutionalism asserts that the definition of power rests in the government‘s potential to seduce the governed into submission. Fliegelman furthers this point with, ―[The] silver-tongued seducer is a silent model for the new republican leadership. For the problem of politics is how to convince people freely to

213 Lawrence, D.H. “The Spirit of Place.” Studies in Classic American Literature. The Viking Press. New York, NY: 1923. 1-8. Print. 5. 214 Jillson, Cal. “The American Dream and Its Role in American History.” Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity & Exclusion Over Four Centuries. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 1-14. Print. 4. 215 Brockden Brown, Charles. “Introduction.” Wieland; or The Transformation, Memoirs of Carwin The Biloquist. By Jay Fliegelman. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1991. vii-xlii. Print. vii. 216 Fliegelman xxxix. 217 Fliegelman xxxv.

94 surrender themselves to one‘s leadership and will.‖218 Essentially, Fliegelman is alluding to the idea that even freedom is a ghost. Freedom is a construct based on the conditional relationship of power between the government and the governed. Fliegelman also notes constitutionalism‘s rhetorical practices of denying agency to the conditions under which one makes a political decision as he states, ―Jefferson‘s ‗When in the course of human events it becomes necessary,‘ for example, hides the agent and submerges in a sea of seemingly mechanical necessity the fact that the ‗when‘ is a specific politic decision.‖219 In Jefferson‘s disavowal of a politicizing force is the unsettling notion that the political decision is an involuntary reaction to the indifferent and panopticonic hand of fate. Subjective and easily misrepresented views of freedom, liberty, authority, power, and consent express how American ideology is a ghost, and how politically, ―[language…has] severed us from reality rather than attached us to it.‖220 While the power in constitutionalism‘s vague rhetorical language allowed space for laws to always be interpreted, it nonetheless created the sense that America has strayed from it original meaning or that our national identity rests on the fanciful and ephemeral wordplay of our forefathers. Not only are America‘s contradictory ideologies ghosted by political rhetoric, but the more pathological cousin of constitutionalism—the American Dream—has proved itself ambivalent and exclusionary as well. Not everyone has been afforded the optimistic effervescence of the American Dream. Many Americans have been completely excluded. Cal Jillson lists some of these exclusions, saying, ―American Indians were removed, slaves were imported, women were legally subordinated, and the federal constitution acknowledged and entrenched these patterns of privilege and exclusion.221‖ That many of these exclusions were once justified with constitutionalism reasoning only furthers Fliegelman‘s analysis of Brown‘s suggestion that ―the most tyrannical passion [is] ‗reason,‘ a faculty that, rather than dispassionately seeking truth,

218 Brockden Brown, Charles. “Introduction.” Wieland; or The Transformation, Memoirs of Carwin The Biloquist. By Jay Fliegelman. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1991. vii-xlii. Print. xxxv. 219 Fliegelman xxi. 220 Fliegelman xxxi. 221 Jillson, Cal. “The American Dream and Its Role in American History.” Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity & Exclusion Over Four Centuries. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 1-14. Print. 8.

95 rationalizes (finds reasons to indulge) determinant and a prior passions.‖222 The exclusions of certain ―others‖—women, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants—from the American Dream express how manners have become so important to American identity, as the Dream can cease to function entirely when it refuses to operate consistently. For example, the image of the frontiersman can empower nearly anyone (man or woman of any race) to manifest his dreams in new, untapped territory, but the image of the frontiersman is still essentially a white man. In this regard, the manner of the frontiersman can encourage and yet exclude people from the American Dream. In addition, today, when people see that a manner that exalts the American Dream seems to exclude people from the Dream because they do not fit into the historical and aesthetic framework, they will maintain that the dream is unachievable and therefore a lie. In this regard, the dream seems to lose its powers when it does not consistently operate. Yet the power of the American Dream hinges on its very vulnerability. Greil Marcus notes that ―where it is only the betrayal of a promise that proves the promise was worth making.‖223 Thus, the American Dream further maintains itself as a ghost—existing on the grounds of contradiction—where the possibility of its absence determines its presence and the possibility of its loss determines its value. While this hauntological reading delineates the American Creed and American Dream as ghosts, the concern is not just with discovering and affirming the ―true‖ history of all the atrocities and exclusions, but also communicating with and reconciling the idealized, mythic American past. Although the American myth is fiction, it exists and operates as powerful, transformative fiction. Furthermore, American political language most notably finds specterization in America‘s founding documents and oration. With oration, the words of constitutionalism take flight and can be imbibed with all the lofty possibility of the American Dream. Through oration‘s specterization of American ideologies, the politician could manipulate emotions and thus seduce the people into consent. Fliegelman notes how, during the era or early Americanism, ―the oratory manuals from the period were often

222 Brockden Brown, Charles. “Introduction.” Wieland; or The Transformation, Memoirs of Carwin The Biloquist. By Jay Fliegelman. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1991. vii-xlii. Print. xxiii. 223 Marcus, Greil. The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print. 150.

96 indistinguishable from acting manuals. The line between expressing emotion and counterfeiting it was blurred, and with it the line between theatrical performance and natural behavior.‖224 As orators could used emotional manipulation—and thus obscure and mask their agendas in theatrics—to secure political dominion over the governed, there developed a two-fold ghosting of America ideologies. In one regard, the vagaries of language ghosted the meanings and provisions quasi-secured by the American Creed. In another sense, the political agendas of politicians and the varying levels of skill they affected in orating American ideals (probably in some instances clarified creeds but in others) only further ghosted meaning. Fliegelman mentions both Thomas Reid and John Quincy Adams‘s notions about how affective oration expresses a need for a musicality in political oratory practices. In discussion of Thomas Reid‘s idea of natural language, Fliegelman says: Reid distinguished between artificial language, ―whose meaning is attached to words by compact and agreement,‖ and natural language, ―whose modulations of the voice, gesture, and features […].‖ […] Reid sought to turn oratory into oratorio, somehow empower language such that it could, like music, communicate pure emotion from one heart to another unmediated by the head. […] The wish for an infallible language of sound and gesture […].225 Interestingly, Reid saw more power and truth in communicating with the natural forms of sound and gesture than by employing conceptually-indentured systems of words. History‘s most talented and convincing orators have utilized sound, gesture, and musicality in their speeches, but to imagine a body politic purely articulated by the aesthetics of music and dance is truly revolutionary even if inevitably impossible. Such notions recall ideas concerning art‘s function as a revolutionizing, political tool that sways the emotions and transforms the hearts of the people, thus coaxing them into a soft consent. In this regard, Fliegelman describes John Quincy Adams‘s image of oration as: Orpheus‘s lyre. It‘s mesmeric power to induce receptivity or […] was a symbol of a new hegemony whose authority derived from the power to ―charm consent,‖ to

224 Brockden Brown, Charles. “Introduction.” Wieland; or The Transformation, Memoirs of Carwin The Biloquist. By Jay Fliegelman. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1991. vii-xlii. Print. xxxiii. 225 Fliegelman xxx-xxi.

effect what Adams called ―soft compulsion.‖ Silent heartfelt listening became a new model of political submission, a submission that represented not rational assent but a new mixture of voluntarism and involuntarism.226 Complimentary to political oration being characterized by musicality, the idea of concentrated and earnest listening of the audience also explores how aesthetics might better convey (or manipulate) the ambiguous and nebulous language of American politics. Furthermore, as oration can assume the aesthetic techniques of acting and music, so too can music assume the agenda of politics. In this regard, Greil Marcus affirms, ―Music can make a Utopia that shames life with its beauty.‖227 If a politician can communicate the mythic, all-inclusive freedoms of America in his emotive speeches that hinge on a certain musicality, then arguably, a phonograph record can stimulate memories of America‘s idealized past while still revealing contradictory national values. By analyzing aesthetically hauntological American recordings, the ghosts of American ideologies and values (particularly those of representation and commerce) speak and thus, transform American identity. For example, Clarence ―Tom‖ Ashley‘s recording of ―The Coo Coo Bird‖ (or ―Cuckoo Bird‖) expresses an obscured and sometimes overlooked view of the American as a destructive intruder in the New World. Ashley‘s performance of this traditional folk song depicts the American settler building his log cabin high in the mountains, keeping vigilance over his neighbor, playing cards, gambling and losing. Ashley‘s hushed yet quick-tempo banjo sounds like the rolling currents of a distant river or the gently fall of rain on the densely-wooded hills of the timeless Appalachians. On the chorus, Ashley sings, ―Oh the coo coo is a pretty bird. She wobbles as she flies. She never hollers ‗coo coo‘ til the 4th day of July.‖228 In The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus explains the character of the cuckoo bird: The cuckoo—the true, ―parasitic‖ cuckoo, which despite [Oliver Wendell] Holmes‘s choice of it for national bird is not found in the United States—lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. It is a kind of scavenger in reverse: violating the

226 Brockden Brown, Charles. “Introduction.” Wieland; or The Transformation, Memoirs of Carwin The Biloquist. By Jay Fliegelman. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1991. vii-xlii. Print. xxxvi. 227 Marcus, Greil. The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print. 175. 228 Ashley, Clarence “Tom.” “The Coo Coo Bird” (Columbia 1929). The Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume 3: Songs. Ed. Harry Smith. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1997. CD.

natural order of things, it is by its own nature an outsider, a creature that cannot belong. Depositing its orphans, leaving its progeny to be raised by others, to grow up as impostors in another‘s house—as America filled itself up with slaves, indentured servants, convicts, hustlers, adventurers, the ambitious and the greedy, the fleeing and the hated, who took or were given new impostors‘ names—the cuckoo becomes the other, and sees all other creatures as other. If the host bird removes a cuckoo‘s egg from its nest, the cuckoo may take revenge, killing all of the host‘s eggs or chicks; in the same manner, as new Americans drove out or exterminated the Indians, when the cuckoo egg hatches the newborn may drive out any other nestlings, or destroy any other eggs. As a creature alienated from its own nature, the cuckoo serves as the specter of the alienation of each from all.229 Just like the cuckoo bird, Americans built their homes in a land that did not belong to them. They removed the Native Americans violently, usurped their homes, and obliterated their culture. The American secretly intrudes under the guise of innocence (a not yet hatched egg). In the song, Ashely‘s narrates from the perspective of a gambler who hustles money from other people in card games. Because of his own impure motivations, he is suspicious and distrusting of everyone else. High on a mountain top sits his log cabin, isolated and far away from anyone else. Like the cuckoo bird, the American does not show his true colors until he ―hollers‖ on ―the 4th day of July.‖ The intruder, the cuckoo bird, does not reveal its identity until it speaks. Likewise, the isolated American operates unnoticed until he—through voting and representation—speaks. Thus, at the heart of the track there is an American allegory of representation. In addition, the recording itself is like the cuckoo bird, entering uninvited into one‘s sonic landscape, playing tricks on the listener, and only asserting its presence by sounding out. In the same token, Papercuts‘ ―Mockingbird‖ expresses a ―voice‖—that for this argument—exhibits the voice of American representation. Quever sings, ―Hey mockingbird, you have not said a word. All of your friends have flown, left you all alone.

229 Marcus, Greil. The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York, NY: Picador, 1997. Print. 19-20.

Once you ran wild. […] But oh mockingbird, you have not said a word.‖230 The mockingbird mocks the calls of other birds. Because mockingbird babies learn their ―mocks‖ from their parents, they are the only bird that has an oral tradition. This mockingbird, however does not speak. All the mockingbird‘s friends have left, migrated to another clime. In this regard, the song suggests the idea of ―ubi sunt,‖ or ―where have they all gone?‖ Metaphorically, the silence of the mockingbird could coincide with lack of representation, a halt in oral tradition, or the loss of community. Mockingbirds are very social birds and remain with one mate for the entire mating season, even if the chicks die. The silence of the mockingbird could also allude to being silenced by the loss of cultural memory. David Toop says, ―A loss of memory is a silence, often accompanied […] by a loss of hearing, so as events of the past speak only intermittently, scattered by the cold winds of age, sonic events of the present grow fainter. Loss of cultural memory is a silence, also—the so-called failed states and collapsed ideologies that are treated as mute spectres gathered at the global feast.‖231 Mourning this silence and loss—waves, textures, and undulations of sonic emotion drift through the percussion‘s funeral procession. Also, just as the cuckoo bird represented the record itself, so too does the mockingbird. Like the mockingbird, the record ―mocks‖ the cultural revenants that inform it. Furthermore, both Clarence ―Tom‖ Ashley‘s ―The Coo Coo Bird‖ and Papercuts‘ ―Mockingbird‖ demonstrate the revolutionary powers of art, and both readings exhibit the hauntological approach in analyzing ideas about American representation in recorded American music. Also, two records that express the ghostly nature of American commerce are The NuGrape Twins‘ ―I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape‖ and Greg Ashley‘s ―Legs Coca-Cola.‖ In the NuGrape Twins‘ ―I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape,‖ the song begins with strains of saloon, ragtime piano. Two men begin singing, harmonizing their high and low buzzing voices. The song is about a grape soda, but suddenly the product transcends its value as a drink. By the second verse, a NuGrape is as sanctified as the Holy Eucharist, will cure your depression, and restore your energy, and charm Sister Mary into marrying her

230 Papercuts. “Mockingbird.” Mockingbird. Antenna Farm Records, 2004. CD. 231 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2010. Print. 220.

100 beau.232 By the end of the song, a NuGrape has become much more than just a soda. Concerning the specrtalization of the commodity, Derrida says, ―[As] soon as there is production, there is fetishism, idealization, autonomization and automatization, dematerialization and spectral incorporation.‖233 The commodity is transformed into something beyond its material value. Conjured by the market‘s agenda and the desire of the people, the commodity takes on a value far beyond its material. If American political rhetoric could specterize intangible ideas like liberty and freedom by redefining them as property, then so too can the material good transcend its value and become more than a mere object. Derrida uses the example of the table, acquiring more meaning than the wood of which it is constructing. Another parallel would be the rocking chair: while the rocking chair is simple a chair that rocks, culture place many more implications and values on it—motherhood, grandparenthood, old age, and reflecting on life in one‘s twilight years. In ―I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape,‖ the commodity—the soda—becomes much more than a drink. It becomes symbol for the American Dream—the fruits of one‘s hard labors, a temporary pleasure in a long line of pleasures, and worth every penny. The system of commerce is specralizing; by placing values on objects, commodities come to represent something more complex that their actual materiality. In America, commerce specterizes both market products and our inalienable rights. In addition, the record also acts as a commodity that transcends its essential material value. Because the record can stimulate memory, it becomes much more valuable that the piece of shellac of which it is composed. For Greg Ashley‘s ―Legs Coca-Cola,‖ has a similar theme concerning the transformative value of commodity. Airy and spaced guitar feedback characterized the beginning of this track as Ashley then sings a list of ―Legs, coca-cola, abstinence and skin […]‖—fetishes of youthful boredom.234 By listing them all together, the commodity of the soda seems to hold the same weight and value as parts of the body (―legs‖ and ―skin‖) and the concept of ―abstinence.‖ None of the entities have any hierarchical value over each other. In this regard, either the commodity of the ―Coca-Cola‖ is just as

232 The NuGrape Twins. “I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape” (Columbia 1926). American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939). John Fahey‟s Revenant, 2005. CD. 233 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York, NY: Routledge Classics, 1994. Print. 209. 234 Ashley, Greg. “Legs Coca-Cola.” Medicine Fuck Dream. Birdman Records, 2003. CD. 101 important as the ―legs,‖ ―skin,‖ or ―abstinence,‖ or the ―legs,‖ ―skin,‖ and ―abstinence‖ are just as commercially commodified as the ―Coca-Cola.‖ Fliegelman notes that during early Americanism, ―Productions of the mind as well as the hand were [recently redefined to be…] judged [as] a species of property as well as of self-expression.‖235 (Fliegelman xxxix). In reference to aesthetic originality, Americans structured new definitions of value around the language of property. This suggests that certain priceless, ineffable, and eternal conceptions were situated within the definitions of commerce. Ashley‘s track ends with the strangely surreal lines, ―When all the songs get tired. When all the women turn to bread. When all the seedlings start to sing like the choir. Baby, baby could we be dead? Or lying in bed?‖236 These lines imply a futility of and indifference to the cycles of culture, life, and values. In addition, the record suggests that it too is a commodity without hierarchical value and could just as easily be committed to the dust bin of history or to the mountains of human refuse. Both readings of The NuGrape Twins‘ ―I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape‖ and Greg Ashely‘s ―Legs, Coca- Cola‖ express the hauntological approach to American ideas of commerce and market values in recorded American music. Just as recorded music can be produced and analyzed through the lens of hauntology, so too can American ideologies. Furthermore, the American Dream functions as the ghostly, hauntological lens through which endowed American freedoms may be viewed. Cal Jillson says, ―The American Dream has always been, and continues to be, the gyroscope of American life‖237 and is also ―the spark that animates American life.‖238 All American rights and values are glimpsed through the lens of the American Dream. In addition, the Dream also specterizes American life. By ―animating‖ American life, the American Dream gives ―body‖ and life to the ghost. It specterizes the ghost (the American concept of any inalienable right) within the American life. Though the American Dream optimistically maintains that all the privileges promised by The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights are guaranteed to

235 Brockden Brown, Charles. “Introduction.” Wieland; or The Transformation, Memoirs of Carwin The Biloquist. By Jay Fliegelman. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1991. vii-xlii. Print. xxxix. 236 Ashley, Greg. “Legs Coca-Cola.” Medicine Fuck Dream. Birdman Records, 2003. CD. 237 Jillson, Cal. “The American Dream and Its Role in American History.” Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity & Exclusion Over Four Centuries. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 1-14. Print. 5. 238 Jillson 7.

102 everyone and that the tenets of the American Creed are absolute, one knows that the American Dream is ambivalent and not a guarantee. Through the informed viewpoint of the contextual present, the idealized notion of the American Dream becomes ghosted— and a ghosting of the American Creed. Jillson says that the American Dream informs one on ―[how] to balance liberty against equality, individualism against the rule of law, and populism against constitutionalism.‖239 As a hauntological lens, the American Dream reveals that, in order to balance American ideologies, one must avow their ghostliness. Only then can one interpret American rights and values realistically. Once one removes the shackles of dichotomous language from the American Creed, only then he can balance American values and rights. Jillson affirms that this balance requires constant work, and says, ―The American Dream demands that we constantly balance and rebalance our creedal values to create and preserve an open, competitive, entrepreneurial society in which the opportunity to succeed is widely available.‖240 In order to maintain balance of American ideologies, one must use the American Dream as a hauntological lens for viewing said ideologies—for they can only maintain themselves as ghosts. To view America through the hauntological lens of the American Dream involves mourning all those excluded from the Dream. In turn, taking this approach to American identity, one recognizes that possibility of inclusion also exists, and that the prospect of a reenactment and revision of history is likely. In ―Culture, Myth, and Popular Song,‖ an introduction to his book Born in the U.S.A: The Myths of America in Popular Music from Colonial Times to the Present, Timothy Scheurer, discusses how the American myth seeks to reconcile and recover from exclusions. Tilted to operate as revision of the past, the American myth can aid in the morning process. Scheurer says: The myth of America is able to explain ―aberrations‖ in cultural behavior (war, slavery, rebellion, etc.) by showing how they are part of a large plan. This plan, moreover, helps individuals understand and have faith that the country is on the right course at that precise moment in time and is also guaranteed success in the future. Myth deals with the here and now, but in order for the here and now to

239 Jillson, Cal. “The American Dream and Its Role in American History.” Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity & Exclusion Over Four Centuries. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 1-14. Print. 5. 240 Jillson 5.

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have significance, it must collapse history—past, present, future—into that moment; it therefore validates the national telos by reaffirming tradition and heritage.241 Through the American myth, the possibility of inclusion can be re-imagined. The American myth collapses history into cultural memory. Once one reconnects with cultural memory, he is then assured that the future holds a second chance (or reenactment). This reenactment is expressed in the myth of the American West. Characterized by, ―[the] images of the woodsman, the mountain man, the wagon master, the trail boss, the ‗49er, and the riders lined up for the Oklahoma land rush,‖242 the manners of the frontier express that ―people be judged on results, not status, which produced a strong commitment to equality of opportunity, competition, and achievement.‖243 The frontier provides an ―endless‖ conduit for the American Dream because, as Hampton Sides says, Americans have ―a confidence that […] is also cut with an extraordinary openness to change, a youthful embrace of new ideas and new people and indeed, anything new [,and…] our confidence comes from our openness.‖244 The notion of the frontier is even more valid because it does not necessary constitute the western states but the next space—be it geographical or social, real or imaged, virtual or physical—for American manifestation. Sides says, ―We‘re still a country living on the frontier […] only the frontier is less geographical than it is social. Having pushed our physical borders, we‘re now pushing the boundaries of how we live, lighting out for uncharted territory.‖245 In the digital era, the possibility of the frontier opens exponentially. New virtual spaces and frontier promise to allow Americans to actualize the Dream more readily than before. Although the digital age promises to supply America with new frontiers in which we may actualize our dreams, we nonetheless feel anxiety and uncertainty about

241 Scheurer, Timothy E. “Introduction: Culture, Myth, and Popular Song.” Born in the U.S.A: The Myths of America in Popular Music from Colonia Times to the Present. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1991. Print. 13. 242 Jillson, Cal. “The American Dream and Its Role in American History.” Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity & Exclusion Over Four Centuries. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 1-14. Print. 13. 243 Jillson 13. 244 Sides, Hampton. Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2004. Print. xiii. 245 Sides xiii.

104 entering into the next era. Because American ideologies are based on vague concepts that lack clear definition, we fear that the house of ideas we have constructed around ourselves may one day come toppling down. In order to negotiate the cultural transition to the digital era, we must converse with certain ghosts. In Spectral America, Jeffrey Weinstock says, ―Examining our ghosts tells us quite a bit about America‘s hopes and desires, fears and regrets—and the extent to which the past governs our present and opens or forecloses possibilities for the future.‖246 By acquainting ourselves with America‘s ghosts, we become better-equipped sort through our cultural inheritance and decide what we will carry on into the next century and what we will leave behind. Listening to recorded music of the past century (and the recorded music created just across the threshold of the digital age) proves to be a very effective way of understanding our cultural heritage and collective memory. Recorded music that expresses the hauntological aesthetic effect expresses how cultural revenants enable us to better understand the contradictory and ghostly character of America. Ghostly in both rhetoric and aesthetic, America demands a constant balancing of its creeds, rights, values, and dreams. This balance expresses a reckoning with the ghosts of our culture, language, and politic, and without this balance, America may surely resign herself to be forever haunted by the return of her ghosts.

246 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. “Introduction: The Spectral Turn.” Spectral America:Phantoms and the National Imagination. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 3-17. Print. 8.

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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION

As America stands just within the threshold of the digital era, America must consider how this next technological shift is going to change us—even how it has already begun to change us. Less than fifteen years ago, most people did not have cell phones. Text messaging did not exist. Social networking websites like Facebook did not exist either. Excluding the people who specifically worked with computers, most people did not really use email. Lap top computers existed, but would be laughable by today‘s standards. The idea of a ―portable screen‖ to carry around for talking ―face-to- face‖ with people was the stuff of Sci-Fi movies. But here we are in 2012, and we have and use all these gadgets and communicative tech gear. It is all so overwhelming— enough to make even the most sturdy time traveler feel a little ―disjunctural lag.‖ For all the technological enrichments the digital age has brought forth, Americans wonder how technology will change us. Despite any resignation to say, for better or worse, no looking back now, people feel uncertain about how culture will transition completely into the digital age. Already, many worry that technology is breeding laziness, narcissism, stupidity, and lack of discipline. People also fear obsolescence of the media modes to which they have grown accustomed. As society moves deeper into the digital era, the longing to save older media intensifies. In the case of recorded music, the value of analog sound seems to have spiked and continues to rise. Audiophiles plumb thrift store record crates for lost sounds, distant music that has been forgotten over time. The discovery of these cultural revenants constructs a scrying mirror for gazing into the past. Inspired by discoveries in revenant music, a group of producer-musicians have set out to make their own distant music. Using alternative recording spaces, lo-fi recording techniques, and obsolete recording devices, producer-musicians Greg Ashley, Jason Quever, Tim Presley, and Ariel Pink create music that exhibits the hauntological aesthetic effect. Greg Ashley plays psychedelic folk music and creates the hauntological aesthetic effect in his recordings by selecting alternate recording spaces with resonating acoustics and using a lot of reverb on his guitar, piano, and vocals. Jason Quever creates lo-fi, 60s Baroque

106 pop and employs Phi Specter‘s ―Wall of Sound‖ recording style. Tim Presley crafts lo-fi and destroyed, psychedelic garage rock that exaggerates the fallibility of recording and playback devices. Using vintage recording gear and surface noise layering production techniques, Ariel Pink constructs devious, lo-fi, degraded, 70s/80s pop that actually sounds like a lost demo from the early 80s. In their manipulations, the producer- musicians of aesthetically haunting music seek to synthesize analog sound. Like the spirit photography of William Mumler, aesthetically hauntological recorded music expresses a dissatisfaction with or a hesitancy toward modern communicative technologies and laments the rapid passing of the previous era. Just as contemporary Americans struggle to negotiate the transformation from the electronic age to the digital, so too did the Victorians as they moved from mechanization to the electric age. Both Mumler‘s spirit photography and the aesthetically haunting recorded music of producer musicians seek to negotiate a transformation of culture. The lens through which this negotiation is best expressed is Jacques Derrida‘s theory of Hauntology. Hauntology suggests that the ontological essence of language to define entities by their dichotomous opposites becomes problematic when trying to describe ghosts. Ghost exist between two opposites—life and death, presence and absence, past and future. When discussing complex ideas, it becomes necessary to maintain a complex entity with a ghost. Ghosts allow one to give power to an entity even when definite meaning cannot be given. Derrida‘s theory of Hauntology becomes constructive when discussing any complex idea or system that denies clear definition but is even more effective when analyzing the entities that comprise American political identity. American ideologies like ―liberty,‖ ―freedom,‖ ―authority,‖ ―equality,‖ and ―individualism‖ are complex entities that lack clear definitions. Because America‘s forefathers wrote these ideas into the very core of American political thought, America exists in a vague, open to interpretation, ghost state. Thus, in order for Americans to better understand who they are and what their society has conditioned them to desire, it would be best of to apply a hauntology to American identity. Using the American Dream as the hauntological lens, one can interpret and balance the tenets of the American Creed—―liberty,‖ ―freedom,‖ ―authority,‖

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―equality,‖ and ―individualism‖—so that he may better understand his own American identity. Furthermore, the theory of hauntology may be employed to analyze American collective cultural memories expressed in recorded music. As the invention of the phonograph coincided with society‘s transformation from the mechanical age to the electric era, the phonograph helped Americans negotiate the technological and cultural transformation they were undergoing in the early half of the 20th century. Industrialization, urbanization, mechanization, electricity, world war, and depression marked the early 20th century as a time of swift cultural change. The phonograph helped Americans remember collective cultural memories and ushered them into the electric era. 78 RPM records made in the 1920s and 1930s exhibit aural resonance and form the basis for current ideals in music. In addition, the aesthetically hauntological recorded music of producer-musicians like Greg Ashley, Jason Quever, Tim Presley, and Ariel Pink seeks to synthesize the sound of older recordings that exhibit analog texture and ―grit‖ or surface wear just as the 78 RPM phonograph recordings do. 78 RPM phonograph records express the hauntological sound because of their surface noise. The surface noise or ―grit‖ is created by wear-and-tear, the use of acoustic recording techniques, and the employment of pre-amplification singing style. Each of these components adds a layer to the surface noise of a phonograph record. The layers of surface are what create the hauntological aesthetic effect. This effect is a sonic quality of recorded music, in which a recording sounds old. In the case of a 78 RPM phonograph recording, the record sounds as old as it actually is. This forces the listener to contemplate the past of the artifact, and in return, the sound of the recording creates a temporal disjuncture within the listener. In this respect, the listener feels that he is having an encounter with the past. Phonograph records then express ghostliness and inspire a hauntological reading of their history and aesthetics. Contemporary aesthetically hauntological recorded music that expresses the aesthetic effect by sounding older than the recording actually is. Producer-musicians craft aesthetically haunting music by layering a recording with aural crumble to synthesize decay, by recording in alternate spaces and thus capturing the specific acoustics of the recording environment, by using obsolete and vintage recording gear,

108 and by utilizing lo-fi recording techniques. In doing so, producer-musicians like Greg Ashley, Jason Quever, Tim Presley, and Ariel Pink create aesthetically haunting music that sounds older than it actually is and creates an eerie feeling of temporal disjuncture. Aesthetically haunting recorded music of producer-musicians also asks that a listener consider the technology creating the sound. With their music, these producer- musicians also ask that one consider the production of a recording. A recording‘s molded sound suggests that technologically mediated aesthetics are always concerned with some sort of manipulation and trickery. In addition, by discovering and incorporating cultural revenants into their sound, producer-musicians act as heir-ethnographers. Producer-musicians draw inspiration from cultural revenants like records, cassette tapes, VHS movies, and other bits of cultural debris from the past. By utilizing these cultural revenants, producer-musicians (operating as heir-ethnographers) create a framework for mourning the ghost while simultaneously sifting and sorting through cultural inheritance. By organizing and integrating cultural inheritance, heir-ethnographers/ producer-musicians help negotiate our transition from the electric era to the digital age. As heir-ethnographers of cultural revenants, producer-musicians serve very important roles in the mourning process and the transformation of the ghost. As the heir-ethnographer, the record collector plays a very important part in periods of cultural transformation. He entombs and preserves the cultural revenant for future generations. In this way, the record collector acts a cultural embalmer. By preserving cultural inheritance, record collectors act as scholars who speak the language of the dead. While they remain outside the realm of academia and archival work, record collectors function as preservers of cultural. The interdisciplinary studies or American Studies scholar can utilize the unsung work of the record collector, silently preserving the wonders of our culture in isolation and reverence. As artifacts, records express American manners—cultural images formed by a combination of history and aesthetics. We can access, experience, and thus, learn about American identity from these American manners each time we listen to record. Hauntologically aesthetic recordings—record music that express the ideas of the past within the context of the

109 present—are culture transforming art that communicates who we essentially are as Americans, throughout the span of time. As culture transcends the next technological phase, it becomes more important for the American Studies scholar to understand what essentially comprises American identity. We can learn more about American identity in the study American manners. Existing somewhere between history and aesthetics, American manners cannot clearly be defined, but must nonetheless be considered when evaluating our cultural identity. Through the structures of sound and song, the recorded artifact collects, preserves, and transmits American manners the intimate, sensorial, and emotional structure of listening. In this regard, the recorded artifact operates as a technological aid to the oral tradition, passing customs and systems of belief on to the next generations. For the American Studies scholar, the record stands as a combination of history and aesthetics—a multidimensional view for comprehending who we are and where we are going.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jacklyn Attaway is a Florida native and confessed audiophile. While she was born in Tallahassee, she grew up in the small community of Clarksville in Calhoun County and attended Jr. College at Chipola College in Marianna. She has volunteered for Florida State University‘s radio station, WVFS Tallahassee, 89.7 FM since May 2004. She also worked several years for Fiction Collective 2 (FC2), a nonprofit, experimental fiction publishing collective and the 621 Gallery, a nonprofit experimental art gallery in Tallahassee, Florida. In addition, she enjoys collage, film photography, making and listening to music, making field recordings, and writing music reviews and flash fiction.

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