"I Exist on the Best Terms I Can"

Joy Division's Closer and Hauntology

 

Ian Mathers

 

I haven't really been paying much attention to the various discussions about hauntology, but this chimes with what I like about people like Burial; the eeriness that time adds to what would previously have been a trivial part of the everyday background.[1]

 

The problem with ghosts is not that they won't shut up, but rather that it took death to get them to speak up in the first place.[2]

 

 

1.  "The gaps are enormous, we stare from each side"

            When we talk about hauntology, the study not of being but of absence and the perception of that absence, the recorded must be of urgent concern to us.  It might sound trivial, but there is a very real sense in which Derrida could not have had his insight about the need for a study of ghosts if he lived in a pre-recorded world – if, indeed, such a world has ever been real for us.  From cave paintings onwards humankind has always doubled and re-doubled reality, existing as much on the level of our own reflections of reality as the level of that reality itself.[3]  We deal at least as much in the not-actual as the actual; in a very tangible sense we exist there.  Note the persistent rumour that when the Lumire Brothers first showed a film of an oncoming train the audience ran for their lives,[4] or the way people tend to accept photos non-critically as "real," although this is changing in the age of Photoshop.  But even our increased awareness of the flexible nature of digital photography is only a prelude to realizing that even the un-retouched, the obsessively "authentic" image, cannot ever be real in the way our minds want it to be.  A photograph is a real thing, certainly; but it is not the real thing we take it to stand for.

            How much more powerful is similar the illusion of the voice?  Most or all reading this will have only ever lived in a world where the technology to duplicate, to make doubles or phantoms out of "real" of image and sound exists in fairly robust fashion.  What is interesting is that our co-existence with this technology, the processes and products that make hauntology more than an interesting intellectual parlor game, has resulted in differing outcomes for sound and image.  Perhaps because we exist primarily as sighted beings (try asking your friends whether they would rather be deaf or blind) we are fairly comfortable in the realm of the image.  Ignoring for the moment the various startling techniques employed by horror movies, it is relatively hard to come up with an image that we find genuinely metaphysically disquieting, one that brings forward the uneasy hauntological qualities of the image-ghost. 

 

2.  "So This Is Permanent"

            The voice, on the other hand, continues to easily disturb our sense of the real and the present.  The whisper in the ear is, if anything, more intimate and taken as more real than our vision of a face or of a body.[5]  It is not surprising that many fictional ghosts, spirits of the deceased, lack voices; if they make any noise at all it is inhuman.  The paralleling of the comforting image of those we lost with the kind of harrowing moan or scream the departed never made in life turns the vaguely unsettling into the unheimlich; an alien monster making such noise is off-putting, but your dead father making the same sound is truly haunting and terrifying, that-which-is(was) coupled intimately with that-which-is(was)-not.

            Generally if one were to enter a room and see a double of oneself, any nervousness would be temporary; surely there are mirrors[6] involved, or video.  Imagine instead entering a room to hear yourself speaking – how much more strange and disturbing that is.  Certainly the mechanism producing such an effect is just as mundane (if not more so) as that which would summon up your image, but the effect is nonetheless more unsettling.  Voices heard around a corner are always taken as real, until we turn that corner and find no-one there; a distant image may easily be taken for a blur or mirage instead of an actual thing.  The voice is both a more and less sure guarantor of presence than the image; if a loved one passes away their pictures may pain us, but how much worse is it to call their number one more time and hear their voice on their answering machine?  How much worse to hear that voice on the radio, sounding already gone?

            Music was originally (among other things) an incredibly robust guarantor of presence; the musicians stood in front of you, often the line between performer and audience was blurred.  Going all the way back to the Dionysiac/loss of individuation bacchanals Nietzsche justly lauds in The Birth of Tragedy music is a thing of drunkenness and unity, a communal rite.  Even in the more repressed Victorian era, the live and unrepeatable nature of music means that you experienced the actual event, went to a gathering, and heard the music in a relatively immediate way.  At some point the conception of the serious follower of music moved from someone who is social and present to the solitary young man (almost invariably a male), hunched in a bedroom, communing not with people and events but with recordings, individual performances frozen in media, polished and overdubbed until they are the "correct" version, the one true form of the music.

            The advent of recorded music accomplished much good as well, of course, but for the hauntologist something more interesting and maybe even a little sinister accompanies it.  Music and even sound as a whole is divorced from its presence just as the image was with silent film, and even as the account of events was with the novel and more generally the written word.  Again we find a way to delay and separate the event from our perception of it; we expand the number who can in some way participate and perceive at the expense of turning music from a living thing into a ghost.[7]  Mostly the music we divorce from presence in this way ignores this aspect of its existence, if it's even capable of noticing.  But the way to make music that reflects and even comments most fruitfully on this metaphysical divide, on the fact of its own absence, is not carefully considered academic work that explicitly takes on hauntology as its project.  Instead, we must wait, or have waited, until a group struggling with wholly distinct metaphysical issues would put the struggle between image and reality, the reality we want to attribute to the voice, in the forefront.

 

3.  "Here Are the Young Men, Where Have They Been?"

            This article is not a potted history of Joy Division, nor a piece of musicology; there are far better sources for that elsewhere.[8]  But the facts must be rehearsed again, just in case; formed in 1976 as the punkish Warsaw, renamed to avoid conflict with another, forgotten band; released the still-astonishing Unknown Pleasures (its cover "the final flashes of a dying star") in 1979, as singer Ian Curtis began to suffer epileptic fits on stage; May 18th 1980, the day before their first American tour Curtis hangs himself; Closer[9] released posthumously in June of that year, the members of the band having previously sworn to end the band should any members leave.  Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris go on, along with Morris' then-girlfriend now-wife Gillian Gilbert, to become New Order whose influence is nearly as important as Joy Division's, the eros to their thanatos.

            It is useless to talk about the hauntology in Joy Division's music, and most specifically Curtis' voice,[10] if you haven't heard it.[11]  Their two Martin Hannett produced LPs are still essential listening and unlike most music of the time carry a charge that defies description.  There are reams of material written (or to be written) on their sociological background, their political significance, Hannett's production, Hook's basslines, the stark day/night contrast of the two records and a million other topics.  But Curtis' voice offers something genuinely disquieting from a hauntological standpoint:  the sound of a man already gone, a ghost two (or more) times over.

            The records were as pent up as the band were ferocious live;[12] but as good as Unknown Pleasures is, Curtis still sounds human, identifiably a young man albeit one with weighty metaphysical and moral issues on his shoulders.  Even on the zombified "Day of the Lords"[13] Curtis sounds, at worst, gloomy.  The difference from what he would go on to do on Closer and other later-period material (particularly the now well-known "Atmosphere," once hidden away as an insert in a French magazine) is not damning to the more human feel of Unknown Pleasures, but it is a productive comparison for hauntological purposes.

            The recorded voice here is hauntological the way all recordings are; but it only begins to stretch towards the use Curtis would (intentionally or not) put himself to, of doubling or layering or commenting that absence.  Of course some degree of the power in that voice is a biological contingency; whether or not Curtis was ever reaching for effect the fact is he was born with that sound coming from his throat.  But that doesn't take away from his ability to use what in the hands of others might have been pedestrian to chilling or moving effect.  But early on that effect is that of the repressed and repressing young man rather than of the ghost.  Even in "Love Will Tear Us Apart," arguably the greatest moment of this first phase of the band, Curtis' vocals remain stubbornly earthbound – but listen in the third verse for when he sings "Is it something so good / Just can't function no more?"  On that 'good' there is an ache and an echo that is tantalizingly close.  Curtis would, of course, get much closer.

 

4.  "An Abyss That Laughs at Creation"

            Structurally Joy Division's second record is odd; the first side veers from the grinding, broken-glass guitar and tumbling percussion of "Atrocity Exhibition" through several relatively conventional (for Joy Division) rock songs, the almost synth-pop "Isolation" and the stiffly funky stomp of "Colony" before hitting the furious nadir ("I put my trust in you!") of "A Means to an End."  But even before we get to the real meat, the second side, listen to Curtis' voice: there is something strangulated in it that wasn't there before, something deadened.  It's too simple (although fitting) to call it artifice; perhaps there was some benign situational factor we don't know about that means as soon as Curtis takes us on a tour of asylums, gladiatorial pits, concentration camps and the end of existence in "Atrocity Exhibition" we have someone whose voice is both more "there" – closer to the listener in a real sense – and more gone than ever before.

            "Passover" alone returns to the fairly human sounding Curtis of the previous album, but the echoed Curtis of "Colony" quickly reminds the listener that our interlocutor here does not sound any more human than the ghost does.  The song sounds as if even if you could go back to the space where it was recorded Curtis wouldn't be there, only that chillingly hollow tone hanging in the air.  And the first song on the second side, "Heart and Soul," only increases the sense of dislocation.  Here Curtis' deliberate remove from reality is enhanced with simple echo, a technique the rest of the increasingly death-embracing and still side two (even the furiously contained "Twenty Four Hours") uses to great effect.  There are papers to be written about the odd properties of echo in terms of audible hauntology, but for now suffice it to say that Curtis sounds even less present through that effect.

            The final diptych of "The Eternal" and "Decades" are as dispiriting and spectral as music gets.  Deborah Curtis, Ian's widow, writes repeatedly in her biography Touching From a Distance that Curtis seemed to have planned his suicide for at least some stretch of time (her questioning of the possibly autobiographical nature of Curtis' lyrics dates back at least to Unknown Pleasures' "New Dawn Fades"), and nowhere does this claim make as much sense as the terminal point of Closer.  This is music as the absolute limit of possibility,[14] something there is no returning from.  Curtis himself can only sing about it because he's already left, and although in a sense the other humans of Joy Division are audible on these tracks via their work, the discernibly human aspect of them, the voice, is the least present.

            I almost can't conceive of these songs done live, with more energy, different vocals, or anything else, even though I've heard versions; but this more than anything else is my point.  The songs of Closer and the themes they grapple with demand to be sung by nothing more present than a recording, nothing more alive than a ghost.  To be rendered any other way is to undercut what Curtis was here singing about, possibly what he was preparing himself for.  You don't need to the knowledge of his suicide to feel unnerved when you look at the http://www.worldinmotion.net/joydivision/lyrics/closer.htm>lyrics; as Deborah Curtis put it, "His intentions and feelings were all there...  While he lived they were equivocal, but with hindsight all was disclosed when it was too late for anything to be done."[15] 

            Aesthetic hauntology rarely deals with actual instead of imagined death, but in Joy Division, and specifically Closer, it must.  Even to those who were fans of the band at the time, for whom Curtis' suicide represents a cutting off of potential rather than (to latecomers such as myself) a settled and inevitable part of the story, Joy Division's swan song must have been initially experienced with the knowledge that Curtis killed himself, that the already absent voice (doubly absent, through recording and through the remove that is the key effect of Curtis' voice) is absent once again at another remove through the things it sang about and the way even the person which the voice at the center of Joy Division tried to represent at present had withdrawn before other got to hear Closer.  Ian Curtis' performance is not merely haunting in the way that all recording become, sooner or later; almost certainly engineered to be postmortem from the very beginning, his voice makes absence the central sonic and thematic focus of Closer.

 

Postscript:

 

Talking to a friend a while ago, he expressed surprise when I said that I found, in sad music, not tears and catharsis, but an odd sort of strength, or even cheer. "But listen to Miles Davis playing Concierto de Aranjuez," he said; "how can you not feel the bleakness, the absolute despair in that record?" But what stops it short of being absolute despair is precisely the fact that it is a record. Its not simply the bleak fact of despair, but a representation of despair; hence proof that something can be done with sadness. This kind of sublimation is not a theodicy, at least not in the traditional sense. The brute fact of suffering is not justified by the brute fact of redemption, rather, redemption, or the closest we can get to it, comes through the fact that suffering can be interpreted, that the fact that we suffer never determines what we then do with that suffering.[16]


[1]Voyou Desvr, "There is Nothing More Inauthentic Than Authenticity," emphasis mine.

[2]Arthur Magazine Vol. 1 issue 25, the Center for Tactical Magic, "Calling All Ghosts."

[3]Although a more in-depth investigation of this area is beyond the scope of this paper, it would be remiss of me not to point out the tantalizing connection between this sort of idea and Nietzsche's conception of language as intrinsically, actually metaphorical in "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense."

[4]This story, as compelling as it is, has been debunked; still, the fact that it seems so plausible to us is suggestive in and of itself.

[5]Our sense of touch is even more misleading in this way, but as no large-scale art form exists on the purely or even partly tactile level it is hard to talk about it operating on a mass scale.

[6]"Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man."  Jorge Luis Borges, "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

[7]Despite the rather negative normative bent my vocabulary here might suggest, I am not interested in claiming that the recording process somehow dooms or even really diminishes music.  In this paper I focus on the disconnect that the recording provokes, and specifically (as we shall see) how this makes something out of Joy Division's music that was not there before; but this is as much a positive as a negative thing.

[8]Due credit must be given to Mark Fisher at k-punk for his astonishing paper "Nihil Rebound: Joy Division," which was certainly the grounds upon which my http://thefunkyfunky7.blogspot.com/2006/08/instincts-that-can-still-betray-us.html>own thoughts on the band rest, both initially and here.  Mark does not there dwell on the band's relation to hauntology, but his thoughts on, among other things, the band's debt to Schopenhauer and his injunction that "Its important to hold onto both of these Joy Divisions – the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were just a laff – at once," are crucial.

[9]As in "closer to you" or as in "one who closes?"

[10]This is not to overlook the contributions of Sumner, Hook and Morris, each of whom are utterly irreplaceable in terms of the band's sound.  But as previously discussed, nothing is so uncanny a figment of presence as the human voice.

[11]Poking around YouTube won't give you more than a cursory sense of the band, of course, but it's better than nothing; this particular UK television performance was chosen for the way it foregrounds both the miraculous presence of Stephen Morris (how many other bands have appeared so literally driven by the beat as Joy Division) and Curtis' stage presence.

[12]As I say elsewhere, they were "something primal and howling, expressed either through actual fury or negatively through the desperate show of abeyance Joy Division would put on."  The relatively recently released live album Les Bains Douches is a fantastically visceral portrait of how the songs Hannett so constructively stifled on record (and how fitting that a recording be cramped and distorted from the actual!) came roaring to life.

[13]Zombies are often taken now to be almost comical, but that chant of "where will it ennnnnnnnnnnd?" is maybe half a step from the classic, chilling "braaaaaiiiiiiinnns!" in terms of ravening, unappeasable hunger.

[14]My comic-book loving teenage self wants to bring in a concept from Jack Kirby's great, mad Fourth World books for DC:  The "Anti-Life Equation."

[15]Quotation reproduced http://www.iancurtis.org/records/closer.html>here, under "Memories."