Heart And Soul

Critical Essays On Joy Division

Martin J. Power, Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786603364
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Popular Culture

Led by the iconic Ian Curtis, Joy Division remains one of the most influential bands to emerge in the British Post-Punk Scene. In spite of Joy Division’s relatively short existence, their unique sound and distinct iconography have had a lasting impact on music fans and performers alike. This book disassembles the band’s contribution to rock music. Based on up-to-date original research, Heart And Soul brings together established and newly emerging scholars who provide detailed examinations the many layers of this multi-faceted and influential band and their singer, the late Ian Curtis, in particular. Given Joy Division’s complexities, the book draws upon a wide range of academic disciplines and approaches in order to make sense of this influential band.

Part 1

DEAD SOULS: HAUNTOLOGY AND FAUSTIAN CONTRACTS

Chapter 1

Missions of Dead Souls

A Hauntology of the Industrial, Modernism and Esotericism in the Music of Joy Division

Michael Goddard

Joy Division, relative to its Manchester post-punk contemporaries, has often been seen in proximity to industrial music, a perception reinforced by Genesis P-Orridge’s claims that Curtis was a Throbbing Gristle fan particularly appreciative of the former’s track ‘Weeping’ from their DOA: Third and Final Report album (1978). P-Orridge returned this fandom by referring directly to Ian Curtis in Psychic TV’s much later track ‘I.C. Water’ (Psychic TV 1990) and reiterating their personal connection in several interviews and other texts (see, e.g., Ravens and P-Orridge 2013). P-Orridge claimed to have been one of the last people to talk to Curtis on the phone and compared the misunderstanding of Curtis’s bandmates of the seriousness of his psychological suffering and epilepsy with his own treatment by the other members of Throbbing Gristle. However, the recently published and fairly damning account of P-Orridge’s own behaviour in Coey Fanni Tutti’s memoir Art Sex Music (Tutti 2017) casts serious doubt on this affinity.

This chapter will argue that beyond this purported personal connection between the two groups, and Ian Curtis and Genesis P-Orridge as individuals, the resonances between Joy Division and industrial music run deeper through the ways that both were haunted by postindustrial cityscapes, modernist literature (especially J. G. Ballard and Franz Kafka but also the proto-modernist Nikolai Gogol, the author of Dead Souls ) and a shared interest in esotericism and the occult. In fact, Joy Division’s track ‘Dead Souls’ (1979) has less to do with Gogol’s satirical portrayal of middle-class corruption and spiritual ennui (Gogol 2004) than with being haunted by past lives, an abiding interest of the vocalist: ‘Someone take these dreams away/That point me to another day’ (Joy Division, ‘Dead Souls’, 1979). This chapter will go on to argue that, more generally, Joy Division were haunted by the ruins of modernism whether in the form of decaying urban environments, or literary modernism, in ways that correspond closely with the ways similar environments haunted industrial groups like Throbbing Gristle, and perhaps with greater proximity, Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire. In both cases, we are confronted by ‘missions of dead souls’ (the title of the live album of Throbbing Gristle’s final performance in 1980) with profound resonances. Furthermore, it will argue that Joy Division’s music can best be understood as a form of sonic hauntology, a concept based on the concept of hauntology originally developed by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (2006 [1994]), which will be discussed in the next section. This concept was developed as sonic hauntology by the late Mark Fisher in particular, whose writing and untimely death resonate with Joy Division and Ian Curtis in untimely ways, to the extent of establishing ‘hauntological’ relations between these two lives and deaths. While this chapter was from the very beginning interested in Fisher’s work as one of the best contemporary music writers to engage with the work of Joy Division, and also as providing the clearest and most powerful articulation of the concept of sonic hauntology, his recent death makes the alignment of his work with Joy Division and especially with Ian Curtis both unavoidable and extremely awkward. Repetitions abound here, due to possible accusations of ‘cashing in’ on Fisher’s postmortem mythologizing just as many music critics, like Paul Morley, were accused of cashing in on Curtis’s death. This is very far from the intention of this chapter which seeks, above all, to demonstrate the resonances between Fisher’s writing and the music of Joy Division as being intricately bound up with multiple processes of haunting extending towards industrial modernity itself. Nevertheless, the fact of Fisher’s death, like Curtis’s before him, is inevitably caught up in these hauntological relations.

HAUNTOLOGY, SONIC HAUNTOLOGY AND THE SPECTRALITY OF RECORDED MUSIC

First used in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (2006 [1994]), hauntology refers to a specific relationship with the past, in which the past, specifically the past of labour struggle and communism is not dead and buried but exerts a call and an ‘injunction’ on the present. Reading Marx alongside Hamlet’s communing with ghosts and sense that time is ‘out of joint’, Derrida contends that Marx and Marxism also have a spectral logic. Derrida refers to the line in Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto ’s ‘a spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism’ (cited in Derrida 2006, 2) and goes on to argue that the project for communist revolution, seemingly relegated to the past, exerts a call on a future and a people to come. This is a decidedly Benjaminian formulation that is not without echoes in the thought of Deleuze, who similarly referred to Hamlet’s disturbance of linear temporality and the implications of a ‘time out of joint’ (see Deleuze 1994, 88–89). Hauntology is, of course, a pun on ontology, which it sounds identical to in French. As such, it was one of Derrida’s many puns with linguistic doubles, as an intrinsically parasitic concept implying a state that is less than, and other to, presence or being. But for Fisher, ‘hauntology’ is a distinctive term among Derrida’s other concepts, in that it points to a broken temporality that emphasizes the ‘ agency of the virtual. . . as that which acts without (physically) existing’ (2013, 18). If this is a way of communing with ghosts, this does not necessarily imply a belief in the supernatural in any naïve way but rather a sense that absent, past existence and experience exert a pressure on the present and call for an adequate response. Sonic hauntology as employed by Mark Fisher, in relation to forms of popular music and culture, attempted to hold on to this revolutionary call of the past on the present while relating it to the materiality of forms of music that inscribe or suggest an array of hauntings whether by past eras in general or spec [ific] elements of the sonic past or merely a disturbed temporal experience of the present invoking the ghosts of the past.

The approach to music – and more generally to culture – that uses the term ‘hauntology’ was especially associated with the writer and blogger Mark Fisher (a.k.a. K-Punk), in dialogue with various others such as the music critic Simon Reynolds whose book Retromania is especially engaged with this term (see Reynolds 2011, 311–361). Sonic hauntology both extends and focuses the term ‘hauntology’ in relation to the spectral qualities of recorded sound, intensified through contemporary practices of sampling which literally transport sounds from past contexts into new recordings, in a manner echoing the calling-up of dead spirits at seances. As Reynolds puts it, ‘[r]ecording has always had a spectral undercurrent’ (Reynolds 2011, 312). According to Reynolds, sonic hauntology was:

a term that critic Mark Fisher and I started bandying around in 2005 to describe a loose network of mostly UK artists, central among them the musicians on the Ghost Box label [who] explore a zone of British nostalgia linked to television programming of the sixties and seventies. Consummate scavengers, the hauntologists trawl through charity shops, street markets and jumble sales for delectable morsels of decaying culture-matter. (Reynolds 2011, 328)

Sonic hauntology at once refers to the practices of these artists and the critical approach to them developed by Fisher, Reynolds and others, who adapted the ‘high theory’ term ‘hauntology’, which was being liberally applied across a range of academic fields in the 2000s (see Reynolds 2011, 329) to the specific context of contemporary recorded music. Recorded music was in a sense already ‘hauntological’ due to the already mentioned spectral qualities of recorded sound, intensified by sampling practices. But as this chapter will argue, these hauntological aspects of recorded music were already highlighted in both industrial music and the music of Joy Division.

In the aftermath of Fisher’s suicide in January 2017, the term ‘sonic hauntology’ has itself become haunted, with a mythology quickly developing around Fisher and his interrupted project that is not without resonances with that surrounding Ian Curtis after his suicide, which brought a coda to the brief career of Joy Division in 1980. While infusing Fisher’s work in general, hauntology is especially apparent in his book Ghosts of My Life (2013) which begins its first section on the ‘Return of the 1970s’ (49–96) with a chapter on Joy Division (50–63), adapted from an earlier blog post ‘Nihil Rebound’ (2005). Given Fisher’s more than semiautobiographical concerns with depression and lost futures, which along with hauntology make up the subtitle of the book, it is perhaps not surprising that Joy Division would be a key reference point here, albeit among such disparate company as the TV adaptation of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979); the novels of David Peace; Life on Mars (2006–2007); and even that bête noir of UK televisual memory Jimmy Saville. Joy Division stand out among these ‘contemporary’ 1970s ghosts and is rather more connected to the second ‘Hauntology’ section of the book whose electronic music examples range between John Foxx (the former front person of Joy Division contemporaries Ultravox and best known for his debut album Metamatic ), Burial (a key figure in the post-EDM Dub-step genre) and Belbury Poly and related groups connected with the Ghost Box label, the latter as already mentioned being the contemporary examples of where sonic hauntology as an approach to music was first applied.¹ But whereas these contemporary examples are often haunted by the ambivalent legacy of the media and soundscapes of the 1970s, Joy Division was already plagued by ghosts in the 1970s, an experience they crystallized in such a way as to seem perennially relevant in the twenty-first century, in which the lost or perhaps rather cancelled futures they presciently foretold have been increasingly lived out in the dystopian present.

JOY DIVISION, THE 1970S AND THE CANCELLATION OF THE FUTURE

Hauntology is related by Fisher to the work of Franco Berardi (Bifo) whose work After the Future argues that the futurist orientations of modernity and modernism have become exhausted in a ‘no future’ contemporary world, sensed inchoately by both punk and autonomia movements of the 1970s: ‘In 1977, in places like Italy and Great Britain, this social instability was the incubator of a new sensibility’ (Berardi 2011, 46). For Berardi, writing thirty-three years later in the twenty-first century, the only possible response is to abandon the very concept of the future and its concomitant hardening of the present into contracted narratives of progress and sacrifice in the name of a now foreclosed future redemption: ‘Today, at the end of the first decade of the new century, we are in a way witnessing the realization of that year’s [1977’s] bad dream, the dystopian imagination coming true, . . . injected into the zeitgeist of the century’s end’ (Berardi 2011, 48). No future, no wave, terrorism and teenage suicide become enfolded in a passage beyond futurity itself, via the cancellation of the twin futures of modernity and modernism. What was already sensed and felt in 1977 is now realized as the dystopic imposition of what Fisher labelled Capitalist Realism (2009) and which is summed up in the neo-liberal Thatcherite slogan, ‘there is no alternative’. But hauntology, as a temporal mode, is already more oriented to the past than the future, or rather to an idea of the future predicated on a haunted relationship with the ghosts of the past. In Fisher’s hauntological terms, Berardi’s paradoxical insight that in some way fundamentally connected to the 1970s we are now ‘after the future’ becomes or rather became expressed by the sense of the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ (Fisher 2013, 13ff.). Fisher especially associated this cancellation of the future with popular music and its declining capacity to produce the new: ‘If the late 1970s and early 80s were the moment when the current crisis of cultural temporality could first be felt, it was only during the first decade of the 21st century that what Simon Reynolds calls “dyschronia” [the lived experience of temporal disjuncture or of time being out of joint] has become endemic’ (Fisher 2013, 13–14). Nowhere was this dyschronia, a condition that Fisher argues should feel uncanny but no longer does (14), expressed more powerfully than in the music of Joy Division, whose dystopian imaginary of the cancellation of the future has now become the matrix for the twenty-first-century retromanic culture of both the acceleration of everyday life and the exhaustion of cultural innovation.

But what would it mean to see Joy ...