Haunting futures: spectral value in retro semiocommodities

Abstract: Jacques Derrida’s hauntology has been explored on several occasions as a conceptual framework in the study of the production and consumption of retro themes in marketing and futures studies (see Ahlberg et al. 2021). Through this paper, we hope to contribute by outlining a speculative model for locating spectral semiotic values within retro-pop cultural consumer products. Guided by Mark Fisher among others, we will use examples of contemporary pop music culture characterised by postmodern retro-fascination in contrast with subversive countercultural music, and show that both are semiocommodities that homologously originate in the valuation and embodiment of the ‘haunting’ of abandoned futures and lost utopias of the past. The spectral presence of these abandoned futures grant retro pop culture its affective allure, but the process of this commodification is nebulous. For this we will turn to Jean Baudrillard’s political economy of the sign, to examine the different forms of value of sign commodities and the processes of their transformation. We wish to demonstrate that the haunting of such utopias and abandoned futures, which were earlier excluded from the present system (of signification, Being and value) are, in the case of retro semiocommodities, forcibly re-instrumentalised as semiotic exchange— values. We will thus develop a model of the spectral semiocommodity as one of dual values — a dominant differential value following the logic of sign-exchange, and a repressed spectral value which follows the logic of haunting as a trace-value of its previous form as an extrasemiotic Baudrillardian symbol.