Salvage

Calder-Williams' concept of salvage punk reminds me of Derrida's idea of hauntology. "Derrida's prior work in deconstruction, on concepts of trace and différance in particular, serves as the foundation of his formulation of hauntology, fundamentally asserting that there is no temporal point of pure origin but only an "always-already absent present.."" (a) This description of hauntology seems to chime with Calder-Williams' assertion that the present we are living in is already the apocalyptic world that might occur as a result of capitalism. Calder-Williams writes: "In my consideration of salvage punk, a proposed cultural "movement" not yet fleshed out but present in scattered antecedents, the cataclysmic catastrophe (figured as a potential apocalypse whose revelations have been forgotten) has already happened." (b11)

Similarly, in the 2000's, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds used the term hauntology to describe art preoccupied with "temporal disjunction and defined by a "nostalgia for lost futures." (a) "[A] reference to paradoxes found in late modernity, particularly contemporary culture's persistent recycling of retro aesthetics and incapacity to escape old social forms." (a) The nature of salvage punk, of unearthing buried revelations that had never previously shown themselves, and as a way of "dealing with buried use-values, alternative histories, and false starts." (b11) again, seems to parallel hauntology as used by Fisher and Reynolds.

Do then the ideas of salvage punk and hauntology describe the same thing? What is the difference between the two and are we really stuck in a melancholic apocalyptic present with no future?

a - “Hauntology.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 11 Feb. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology.
b - Calder-Williams, E. 2010. ‘Introduction’ from Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. Winchester: Zero Books.

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