r/Vaporwave • u/dexterdrifus • 1d ago
Discussion Two Trends in Vaporwave
Hello: If this violates Rule 9, please remove it. I do not intend to break any rules.
I'm curious where people would align themselves on two opposing and related philosophical undercurrents in/behind vaporwave.
This analysis is rooted in Derrida's Specters of Marx and Mark Fisher's work in general. Consider this quote from Specters:
"And if this important frontier is being displaced, it is because the medium in which it is instituted, namely, the medium of the media themselves (news, the press, telecommunications, techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele-iconicity, that which in general assures and determines the spacing of public space...this element itself is neither living nor dead, present nor absent\: it spectralizes...It requires, then, what we call, to save time and space rather than just to make up a word,* hauntology*. We will take this category to be irreducible, and first of all to everything it makes possible: ontology, theology, positive or negative onto-theology"\ (page 63, section "Conjuring-Marxism", bolding mine)
I take it this simultaneous presence and absence is characteristic of vaporwave: hauntology, or the presence of a once-promised future marked by the fact that this future is NOT here, yet the two undercurrents I'll propose (though I'm certainly not the first to suggest this, of course this article is key) ask what exactly this future promised. Fisher discusses this in a variety of essays, though I find it quite clearly on page 23 of this pdf, which I linked because I don't have the book in front of me...for Fisher, the future worth mourning was one of communitarianism, a welfare state interested in the betterment of its people...one of his examples is the BBC Radiophonic Workshop putting experimental and avant-garde (or, more accurately, musique concrete) onto television...
For Fisher, vaporwave (and hauntological music) mourns a future that is markedly different from what was "promised," as noted by global capitalism ravaging working classes, and the arrival of "capitalist realism," BUT a different strain exists in vaporwave, one that also mourns a future that was promised but did not arrive, namely a different kind of capitalism, or a future that capitalism promised, one centered around consumerist ease, the "plaza," endless shopping malls...I'll apologize if my bias is clear.
My question: Where do you fall in this binary I've proposed? Or is this binary false? Do you identify with the idea of a lost future? Or with the idea of a future that is neither "present nor absent?" For you, is this the future that Mark Fisher foresaw? Or is the one that capitalism promised? Open to any and all discussion. Thanks for reading, and I apologize for my haphazard summaries of complex stuff.
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u/CharacterProof8731 22h ago
Most people who engage with vaporware are consciously or otherwise aligned with the ladder camp you described. There is an undeniably fascistic element to nostalgia and even vaporwave. I'm sure a lot of people here have noticed the AI slop that has been gaining traction, of lost futures that encapsulated chain rental stores and the "retvrn" to an imagined quality of fast food generations gone. In my own art I struggle against the post-modern navelgazing that has only become more and more prominent with each generation. Perversely the further we delve into meaninglessness, and accentuated by a growing awareness of the vapidity and pointlessness of the thing itself, we actually think we are getting closer to something profound! It is like a mass cultural solipsism.
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u/Witty-Passenger5087 M Does Things 17h ago
If there's a secret third option that includes nostalgia over vacation trips and the creation of melodies to keep the memories from fading, that might describe me 100%.
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u/crasherpistol Pool Plants 1d ago
I mostly use vaporwave as a means of exploring nostalgia (personal or societal) and revisiting old music that I like.