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Against The Grain: What’s wrong with hauntology?

October 2025

In The Wire 501, Robin James argues that the influential cultural theory of hauntology does not account for developments in Black creative practices and music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries

I have never found the concept of hauntology (discussed in Against The Grain, The Wire 500) particularly helpful. A riff on Jacques Derrida’s riff on Karl Marx’s claim that “the spectre of communism haunts Europe”, hauntology is the name Mark Fisher and his colleagues gave to their perception that “what haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the 21st century is not so much the past as the lost futures the 20th century taught us to anticipate”. Beginning from their perception that (Anglo) electronic music of the early 2000s had been unable to innovate, artistically or technologically, on that of the previous century, hauntology suggests that cultural production keeps recycling the past rather than imagining something new – kids these days might call it ‘reheating nachos’.

As a philosopher of popular music who got her PhD right at ‘peak hauntology’ in the mid-00s, you would think I would be into the idea. But I’ve never felt or understood myself to be a member of the ‘us’ Fisher evokes in the quote above.

Like Fisher, who died in 2017, my training is in continental philosophy (French and German philosophy; think Marx, existentialism and phenomenology); but given the differences between the institutionalisation of continental philosophy in the US and the UK, I also have a background in feminist philosophy, the critical philosophy of race, and African-American philosophy. My professors in these latter three fields hammered home the lesson that whenever anyone speaks for or invokes a ‘we’ or an ‘us’, the first question you should ask is: “So who do you mean by ‘we’?” For example, just as the ‘we’ in the US Constitution’s “We, the people” originally referred to white men, patriarchal racial capitalism continues to encourage people to use and hear these pronouns in ways that mistake the most privileged groups for the universal we and us. Americans often invoke terms they intend to be universal but which misrepresent America and Americans as the whole of humanity. Though I share many of Mark Fisher’s privileges – white, cis, with advanced degrees and English as a first language – the American-ness of my philosophical training has shaped my perspective such that it lies outside Fisher’s ‘us’.

McCarthyism left an indelible mark on academic philosophy in the US as fears of communism and atheism drove anything that smacked of Marxism or existentialism out of philosophy departments. Continental philosophy has survived on the margins of the profession, mainly at Catholic schools like DePaul (my alma mater) or ‘pluralist’ departments at sub-Ivy League schools like Penn State, Stony Brook or Emory.

In academic philosophy, pluralism refers to a plurality of philosophical traditions: Anglo-American or analytic philosophy is the dominant one against which all other traditions such as continental, Africana, Asian, Latin American, African-American, Asian-American, Indigenous, feminist, etc, stand as a plurality. Beginning in the late 1970s, members of these marginalised traditions began to collaborate to build alternative institutions (societies, conferences, journals and academic departments). These institutions wedded the material interests of continental philosophers with philosophers working in non-Anglo and non-European traditions. As a consequence, many US-trained philosophers have been trained as pluralists.

In grad school, as I realised I wanted to write about popular music, I thought it was important that I take advantage of the courses on the critical philosophy of race and Africana philosophy because I needed to understand something about Black aesthetics and racial politics if I wanted to have anything meaningful to say about 20th and 21st century American popular music. The programme for this autumn’s Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), the main American continental philosophy conference, features work on Angela Davis, Maria Lugones, Native American philosophy, decolonial theory and the like. SPEP has hardly fixed the field’s issues with whiteness, patriarchy and Eurocentrism. But it puts the white men who have traditionally dominated the profession in conversation with the people and traditions historically excluded from the field. There is huge value in understanding continental philosophy, feminist philosophy and non-white/non-Western philosophies to be in the same boat, institutionally: if one of us sinks, we all do.

James Snead’s 1981 article “On Repetition In Black Culture” contrasts European approaches to repetition with ones found in Black cultural practices: the former devalues and tries to hide repetition, whereas the latter treats it as an explicit and central creative premise. As Snead puts it, “What recent Western or European culture repeats continuously is precisely the belief that there is no repetition in culture, but only a difference, defined as progress and growth.” Treating repetition as the absence of progress, hauntology is grounded in precisely such a Western, European belief. Snead argues that unlike capital, which circulates in order to accumulate, Black cultural repetition circulates for its own sake. The breakbeat sampling at the foundation of the jungle and drum ’n’ bass music whose stagnation Fisher et al lamented is a prime example of such circulation. From my perspective, the problem hauntology was invented to name just didn’t seem like a problem, especially in the context of Black Atlantic popular musics.

As Kara Keeling has argued, these Black cultural approaches to repetition offer musicians like Grace Jones strategies for working both with and against the homogenising and extractive forces of the patriarchal, racist, capitalist music industry. Interpolating bits of her earlier work into the 2008 “Corporate Cannibal” song and video, Jones builds a formal structure analogous to the practice of algorithmic modulation used across tech and finance to continually redefine categories by feeding new data into them – both are forms of repetition with a difference.

Whereas those algorithms amplify capital’s extractive powers, Jones associates this repetition with what Keeling identifies as the fugitivity and “boundarylessness” of Black gender performance to create relations that are “beyond measure” and “incalculable”, and thus un-enclosable as property. Black creators – especially Black femme creators – have been so incalculably influential in the music industry that their historically uncompensated contributions are impossible to fully repay precisely because they can’t be definitively calculated. According to Keeling, in “Corporate Cannibal” Jones approaches her work and legacy by “[giving] knowing that what she’s given can never be repaid”. Instead of acting like an aggrieved property owner whose losses must be compensated, Jones situates herself as the steward of an artistic tradition where creative ideas circulate as something other than private property that accumulates value.

This circulation calls together a community that collectively looks after their common creative tradition(s). Jones is reheating her own nachos, but in a way that exceeds the calculus of both European theories of repetition and capitalist enclosure.

This essay appears in The Wire 501. Wire subscribers can also read it in our online magazine library.

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