Full text loading...
-
Vapor Memory, or, memory in the ruins of history
- Source: Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 9, Issue Popular Culture and Nostalgia, Sep 2020, p. 165 - 178
-
- 14 Jul 2020
- 03 Sep 2020
- 01 Sep 2020
Abstract
This article explores vaporwave’s appropriation of the past and future to constitute a (non)-site for the displacement of the present. In doing so, vaporwave – an electronic music genre that samples sights and sounds from 1980s and 1990s popular culture – masquerades itself as a radical project that decentres the subject’s location within the linear matrix of time (Tanner 2016) and houses the potential to oppose the humanistic territorializations of late capitalism (Killeen 2018; Whelan and Nowak 2018). I argue that these arguments focus too closely on vaporwave’s style and aesthetic dimension without considering its maintenance of various structures of oppression and appropriation indicative of globalized capitalism. The result is a misattribution of transgressive potential to vaporwave that ignores its incredibly conservative undertones. To engage with vaporwave then demands a bifurcation of its outward, rhizomatic veneer and the codes, conventions and axiomatics that underwrite it. I make this argument by drawing upon Jean Baudrillard’s (1981, 1993, 1994, 2010) scepticism of any accelerationist and technologist politics of subversion to mount effective sociopolitical change. Additionally, I make use of many feminist and critical race approaches to highlight the affinities between vaporwave’s appropriate style and the logics of late capitalism.