Thursday, August 25, 2022

chewing the hauntological cud

A Real Life piece by Chris Randle  on how "all recordings are also hauntings"

The rollcall of the over-cited:  Nigel Kneale, Mark Fisher,  Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, T.C. Lethbridge, Roland Barthes...

But at least one name I'd not heard of before: 

"With cinema, reanimation became possible. Promoting the Phonoscope, his film-projecting machine, the inventor Georges Demeny boasted he would reverse oblivion: “How many people would be happy if they could only see once again the features of someone now dead. The future will see the replacement of motionless photographs, frozen in their frames, with animated portraits that can be brought to life at the turn of a handle. We shall do more than analyze, we shall bring back to life.” 

Overall, though, this cud is starting to feel rather thoroughly masticated

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