Zer0 Books Archive: Babbling Corpse with Grafton Tanner

Zero Books

description

On this episode of the Zer0 Books Archive, Will interviews Grafton Tanner about his 2016 book Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts. Grafton works at the University of Georgia, in the Department of Communication Studies, and has written two more recent books, apt for our contemporary moment: The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech, published with Zer0 in 2020, and most recently The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia, published in October 2021 with Repeater Books.

It is now over 10 years since the release of perhaps the most important work of the vaporwave genre, Macintosh Plus’s Floral Shoppe, whose influence on digital aesthetics, both sonic and visual, is today undeniable. This discussion is an attempt at reawakening of the theoretical and practical implications of Babbling Corpse, touching on concepts of the non-human, nostalgia, hauntology, and making reference to the work of Derrida, Fisher, Meillasoux, Eshun, Haraway and Deleuze. Towards the end, we try to think about what nostalgia could do for the left today.

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