| Chapter 1: | The Aesthetics of Spectrality |
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shuttle that takes one from past to present to future. Neither the intention nor the concept are, as Husserl might say, fulfilled. The phantasmiticity of art entangles the temporalizing of time; or, in another paraphrase, it shows its originary supplementarity, as John Berger so succinctly puts it: “the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction” (21). Following the aura of originality, he notes that this is “a perfectly rational consequence of the new means of production” (21), and he is undoubtedly correct about marking the emergence of mass production and the new media technologies as a signal interference in the history of the experience of art, originality, the genuine, the signature, and individuality. Original supplementarity fundamentally marks the very advent of both philosophy and the ghostly machine of the beast of technocapitalism as asymmetrical systems of exchange. These social powers are enormously effective, but what if, as Derrida suggests along a track of thought that I will follow along part of its trajectory, “all this knowledge, this know-how, this making known might well go via fable, simulacrum, fantasy, or virtuality might well go via the unreal and fabular inconsistency of media or capital?” (B&S 39). It is this knotting of cultural production, capital, media, philosophy, and the arts that the apparitions of the spectral will constitute and cut, embody while disembodying.
The temporality that disorganizes all narratives of the linearity of the primary and the secondary is reflected, for instance, in Martin Heidegger’s use of the term “whiling.” “There is no presencing without a ‘where-to’ [Wohin] of such presencing and tarrying [Verweilen]—of tarrying on [An-weilen],” he comments. “[T]hat is, it is a tarrying [Weilen] which approaches what lets itself be approached” (ZS 177–178). Referring to Heidegger’s meditations, in “The Anaximander Fragment,” on this whiling, Howard Eiland explains that