by We are excited to share Issue 16 of the Reform & Revolution magazine, Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo. Find here our letter from the editors and the digital version of the magazine – The Editorial Board.
The Vaporwave Fever-Dream
Letter From The Editors
In his 1993 work Spectres of Marx, French philosopher Jacques Derrida countered the liberal-triumphalist ideas put forward by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. In contrast, Derrida introduced the term “Haunt-ology” to suggest that quite the opposite was true, that the present continues to be dominated by the haunting ideological specters of the past.
In the early 2010s, before he died, Mark Fisher popularized the theory of Hauntology as applied to culture. The issue, Fisher said, was the slow foreclosure of the future. The suffocating, universalizing liberal capitalism had won, but there was no glory in the victory. It was getting harder and harder to imagine change, and at the same time it became clearer that society was getting worse, not better. In that dying climate, citizens of Western capitalist states began grasping for the future by looking to the past. Politics and culture became overrun by half-remembered pastiche. The box office was flooded with sequels, style became obsessively anachronistic, and culture became exclusively referential.
Around the same time, a musical and artistic movement emerged which simultaneously embodied and was informed by Fisher’s theory. Vaporwave, with its music produced from the sampling of elevator music and 80s pop hits, and its visuals based on mixed collages of 90s internet aesthetics, iconic consumer items, Greek busts, and anime characters, was an artform built entirely out of remixing anew the cultural hauntings of the past.
Vaporwave was seemingly the archetypical meme, self-conscious of its own existence as a meme. And at the same time, it was political, a critique of late-capitalist consumerism by an ironic embrace of a simpler consumerist time.
But just as the art movement was gaining the attention of the mainstream, it was being declared a dead genre, even as the memes kept coming.
Around the same time, in the realm of actual politics, three visions of the future emerged, each themselves an effort to recapture the past. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn offered Modernist Welfare State nostalgia. Elon Musk mixed mid-century dreams of space travel and flying cars with the industrial capitalist dogma of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. And Donald Trump tapped a reactionary nostalgia, reviving Reagan’s slogan, ‘Make America Great Again,’ while somehow also tapping into internet virality.
Trump’s odd blend tied together an anti-establishment ethos around the most establishment of figures: an 80s businessman spending billions to co-opt anti-consumerist rhetoric and populist styling. And Trump gained ground on the same internet locale where Fisher first observed the Vaporwave revival. Message boards, eclectic online social and quasi-political social networks searching for an avatar to give voice to their malaise. And so in this great nostalgic flux there was a moment—the internet calls it the ‘Great Meme War’—when Trump’s rise and Vaporwaves’s fall coincided. And at this inflection point, the two aesthetics gave birth to a misbegotten horror—TrumpWave. It was a flicker in time, a couple months at most. But the more this moment in time fades into the past, the more it feels permanent.
Sanders and Corbyn failed. But Musk and Trump were on a shared trajectory for power. Now Musk—who revived TrumpWave with his DarkMAGA—increasingly owns the internet infrastructure on which memes are made and spread, waging a global culture war by flooding our feeds with endless far-right misinformation.
At the same time, the ‘dead’ aesthetic of Vaporwave—and the hopes of the Bernie moment—refuse to die, haunting us as a good dream in a waking nightmare.
Welcome to the fever dream.
