Postmodern citation replaces the uncanny with a knowingness that kills it.

Evidence

The affect produced by Ghost Box’s releases (sound and images, the latter absolutely integral) are the direct inverse of irritating postmodern citation-blitz. The mark of the postmodern is the extirpation of the uncanny, the replacing of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness with a cocksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Ghost Box, by contrast, is a conspiracy of the half-forgotten, the poorly remembered and the confabulated. Listening to sample-based sonic genres like Jungle and early hip-hop you typically found yourself experiencing déjà vudu or déjà entendu, in which a familiar sound, estranged by sampling, nagged just beyond recognisability. Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial déjà vu, where you are duped into thinking that what you are hearing has its origin somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s: not false, but simulated, memory. The spectres in Ghost Box’s hauntology are the lost contexts which, we imagine, must have prompted the sounds we are hearing: forgotten programmes, uncommissioned series, pilots that were never followed-up. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 310

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes simulated memory (Ghost Box) from false memory, and defines postmodernism as extirpation of the uncanny.
• XREF: Echoes Fisher’s recurrent theme that audio degradation and ghostliness preserve evocativeness (ch13 dub acousmatics), here extended to samples of imagined archive rather than real ones. — connects to: What looks like nostalgia for the past can actually be a longing for modernism. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 317; Postmodern culture suppresses the angelic and numinous more than the demonic — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 358; Confessing fragmentary knowledge legitimizes a postmodern aesthetic of the fragment. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 237 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Knowledge becomes idées reçues when it detaches from reality and circulates anonymously between texts. #expands (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 321
• Intellectual work must produce new knowledges rather than recirculate known conclusions #corroborates (0.78)
• Confessing fragmentary knowledge legitimizes a postmodern aesthetic of the fragment. #expands (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 237