Atemporal Twilight, Vampiric Hauntology and Transdeixic Artefacts

Hey, do you ever think about how Twilight is an incredibly intellectually stimulating work, tying together ideas from almost two centuries worth of philosophy, psychoanalysis and political theory? Would you like to think about that? Do you ever feel like time has gotten stuck at some point and like we are reliving the same moment in culture over and over again while you are being suffocated by all encompassing stasis? How did we get here? I′m Ouro and welcome to ″Atemporal Twilight, vampiric hauntology and transdeixic artefacts″! Now, Hauntology Is a term originally coined by Jaques Derrida to describe the intrinsic contextuality of an idea or object. Nothing is what it is, its perception and very being is haunted by that from which it emerged and that which it might become. We think of a meal, let′s say, not only as what it is right now, but as its preparation, how it came to be and also as it′s taste, what it will become when we consume it. It is at any point these things, characterized by their fundamental non-existence. Ghosts of what is no longer or not yet. Writers like the late Mark Fischer have transformed this idea into an analytical tool to examine cultural forms within neoliberal capitalism, a space which appears to degrade ever more as a true, independent object as it is endogenously colonized by specters of the past and futures which have passed us by without occurring, lost futures. Social phantasms superimposed upon a world that more and more fails to progress into the truly novel while regurgitating its past. The twilight saga, on the other hand, is a series of YA novels penned by Stephenie Meyer and later adapted to film. It follows Bella Swan, as she moves back to her hometown of Forks where she is introduced into the hidden world of supernatural beings when she uncovers that her classmate Edward Cullen, whom she falls in love with, is a vampire and that her childhood friend Jacob Black is a werewolf. While Navigating relationship drama and vampire politics, she eventually marries Edward, gives birth to a hybrid child and joins the ranks of the undead herself. Though the work is wildly popular, its critical reception is mixed to say the least and while I find the books genuinely enjoyable, they are by no means high art. I just want to examine some persistent themes that whether intentional or not, I find quite interesting and hope you will too. So let′s talk about ghosts.

Ghosts, Vampires and Francis Fukuyama

Specters, be they cultural or those of the deceased, are typically closely linked to a location or bit of infrastructure. A place they have failed to vacate in death and so make it uninhabitable to the living, what Freud called ″unheimlich″, that which is not of the home, alien, the oppressive presence of an imminent other or simply put haunted. A place which has become out of joint with the present surrounding it and instead remains a memory of its former inhabitant. We can easily imagine Forks to be haunted, a small timber town surrounded by the thick Hoh rainforest and so consistently overcast that vampires can typically walk the streets during the day without much worry. There′s good reason why it′s the same setting Lynch chose for twin peaks; what we find along with Bella is the kind of eerie place where one cannot help but encounter ghosts. Vampires of course are not ghosts. In some interpretations including Edward′s own they could be claimed to be the opposite: The body without the soul as opposed to the soul freed of its body. Both, however, are hauntological according to Fisher′s applying of hauntology to culture, in that they are forces which continue acting on the world beyond their historical place in it. They are atemporal. A photograph which no longer shows the way things are, snapshots frozen in time. Pictures, information, data in general typically (put a pin in that) corrupts. That sounds negative, but all our myths and stories and fairytales are products of corruption. Of oral traditions in which things are lost and changed from speaker to speaker, language to language epoch to epoch. Most do not change them willingly or even knowingly, but memory is imperfect, translation is imperfect, words shift in meaning and so the story around them does too. Slight changes in the connotation of terms are everywhere so nothing penned in the past will ever quite mean what it meant. Sometimes they are altered actively because the context of people′s life changed so significantly that the old tales must be renewed to explain the world around them lest they become irrelevant. That is the historical process: one where gaps form in the old and are filled by the new, our great cultural ship of Theseus... Until in 1991 history ended. A shock to many, but to no one quite as much as the Analysts, who discovered with horror and dismay that the capitalist paradigm had not only itself closed the gap which had opened within it, it emerged stronger. The system which had so fervently been insisted to be on its last legs, failing, self-devouring and decaying was using its cascade of crises based on just these things to further entrench itself. It had colonized the globe and left were only the future and our minds. The digital age hasn′t helped matters. Nowadays our symbolic world has become stuffy, brimming with ghosts because those gaps to be filled no longer form. Everything is saved. The pictures no longer fade and they show us not our world but a world of the dead which has refused to leave. All the samples one could want are already out there, every story already exists as it were. Implied is the idea of a complete cultural alphabet which we may merely rearrange. Take a bit of this trope, a bit of that style, process it though such and such method and don′t think about the fact that in the past people were inventing letters. Remix culture. The production of things which are ″new″ but not new forms. It is art made from corpses, from the cultural inventory we have been given. The joke of course is that it is not our cultural inventory, we did not make it, we did not choose it, it does not belong to or even into our historical frame, it is the past reproducing itself through our living labour. An alien force which feeds on our productive potential and haunts our lives. It should come as no surprise that postmodern neoliberalism creates an abundance of hauntological forms because capitalism itself refused to die. The living production of dead labour eternally haunting us.

Marx and the Living Production of the Undead

Let me take this opportunity to do the left-wing video essayist thing and quote Karl Marx. ″Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks″ This sentiment is often abbreviated by activists to the much more catchy ″Capital [...] sucks″. Don′t worry, the point isn′t just that he refers to vampirism, that would be a bit lazy, wouldn′t it. Capital here is dead labour in that the means of production in which it is invested were themselves created through labour. Living labour power, which is sold. These means of production are then used to create a surplus value that is invested by capital into industry which then again requires labour and produces profit. At no point does capital ″do″ anything. That is the sense in which it is dead, and yet from living labour which is not theirs, they generate profit like an economic parasite. That is the sense in which they are vampiric. So what we have is an entity that keeps itself alive and recreates itself through the lifeforce of another, an active being in the form of the worker. What we have in vampires are creatures which keep themselves alive and procreate through the bodies and literal life essence of people, and what we have in the hauntological are cultural forms which keep themselves alive and propagate through the minds of those to whom they are no longer historical. The terms may change, but you can hopefully see the pattern. Capital, Vampires and ″Ghosts″ all have the same type of relationship to the living, they exploit them to continue being. Vampires in the world of twilight are hard as though made of granite. A big point of emphasis is their inability to change in even minor ways. Their interests stay the same as those they had the moment they died forever. So they are not only in form living statues, iconographic impositions of the past onto the now, they are also through this cognitive stasis a direct way in which the past carries its interests, interests which are now out of joint with their context, into the future. I′m really glad that people are finally statue-pilled as it were, but at least our depictions of slavers rapists and murderers are not able to act in accordance with their beliefs anymore because they are properly dead. Statues do haunt the zeitgeist, but Vampires aren′t the subtle hauntology of objects implicitly suggesting the reprehensible values of a bygone era, they have fangs, and If you throw them into a river they′ll probably climb out. We′re all aware of the stats, how more and more wealth accumulates in the private gold diving vaults of fewer and fewer people, and that the amount of death associated with vampire mass production is bad should hopefully not be a hot take, but how does this feedback loop look like for hauntological forms? Well, the consumptive and creative potential of people is limited, that is a biological inevitability, and if dehistoricized forms just float freely in the aether now without ever vanishing or becoming truly inapplicable due to a cultural break akin to the end of capitalism, then there′s a good chance they will be consumed and form the basis for further creation. Not only will that creation then be, through the properties of remix culture, likely atemporal from its very inception, it too will stick around forever and a point will be reached where the number of ghosts is so great that the chances of consuming something new are infinitesimal. That is the point at which one has truly gotten stuck in a closed time-like curve, a looping record of culture. Linear Time holds no meaning at that point, it′s temporal apoptosis. This apocalyptic vision of hauntology may seem far off, but we must only look at the extreme case to appreciate the small-scale effect. Hauntology is a machine which builds consensus and brings the new in line with the now. It′s a stabilizing negative feedback loop to reinforce the world as it is. The kind of world in which capital accumulates. Capital, which funnily enough is often invested into atemporal art. Small wonder how aristocratic and rigid the Volturi, the more or less governing body of vampires in twilight are. They continue to be part of the paradigm from which they emerged and reestablish it in the present. Their effect is somewhat smaller than that of statues let′s say, because vampires at least have the decency to mainly exist at the periphery of society, but not all of them do and no one′s forcing them to. Inhuman lifespans have a habit of leaving you in a position of power, so imagine the stabilizing impact vampires would have on their paradigm. They are undoubtedly ghosts made flesh.

Thanatos Drive to La Push and the Yearning for Annihilation

″It′s all so... open. Just all sky. The plants are like modern art compared to the stuff here, lots of angles and edges, but they′re all open too, even if there are leaves, they′re feathery sparse things. Nothing can hide there. Nothing keeps the sun out.″ This is Bella Swan explaining what she loves about Arizona. A lot of arguments have been made about Bella being a Mary Sue, or aggressively ″not like other girls″, misogynist though both of these notions oftentimes are, since while there is certainly a large amount of self-insert wish fulfillment to her role in the story, we would accept the same without the blink of an eye for male protagonists, because apparently only boys get to have wish fulfillment fantasies. Video essays about this double standard already exist, so I′m not gonna make another one, but what I feel is far too little discussed is that whether Bella is or is not a Mary Sue there are some really interesting thematic motifs to her characterization, all spiraling out from a kind of existential claustrophobia. Readers and even the characters within the books themselves are prone to shrugging off Bella′s investigations into the supernatural as nothing more than a kind of morbid curiosity or a crush blinding her to danger, but there′s more going here. Bella hates mysteries. She rereads old books whose contents she knows by heart over and over again, she is deathly afraid of aging and the thing she loves most in the world are wide open spaces where nothing can hide. This is really weird and interesting characterization for a YA vampire romance protagonist, this intense craving for absolutes, for a world made of flat planes and granite where everything is known and nothing ever changes. Bella Swan is not a girl who just so happened to fall in love with a vampire, she is a girl who could only ever have loved a vampire and could only ever have become one. Let′s examine that really almost neurotic fear of aging a bit closer, because while such a fear is relatively common, it rarely manifests with such severity and even then, none of the reasons it usually has apply to Bella. It can′t be due to vanity because Bella doesn′t exhibit vanity in any other context, and while she is probably afraid of dying, the frequency with which she puts her life on the line seems to imply that she is less so than most people. It doesn′t appear reasonable for her to believe that Edward would lose interest in her as she ages because for all other aspects of herself that Bella thinks should be unattractive, she believes him when Edward tells her that they are not to him. There is no reason why aging should be any different. Now, Bella does use this line of argument, the one about attractiveness, a few times over the course of the books, but it rings hollow because even her own subconscious betrays her. When she has a nightmare about an old woman who later turns out to be herself, Edward is still with that old woman in the dream. She does believe him. What Bella is actually afraid of is the appearance, not of herself, but of the relationship. She is afraid of changing in a way that makes her no longer fit in with the vampire′s immortal stasis, rendering her own organic form the enemy since there are only two ways to never change. You die or you die. Luckily, the twilight books assure us from the start that these are the two most likely outcomes for Bella. Psychoanalysis has a term for the longing for annihilation, not necessarily for death but for un-living. It′s called the Thanatos or death drive or death instinct, after the personification of the end in Greek mythology. It is naturally juxtaposed to eros, the far more intuitive, far more human collection of productive rather than destructive drives; sex and art and procreation, the wild jouissance of the organic, the sprawling of the rain forest. Humans typically crave the new, we′re hard wired to be rewarded for novel experiences with a dopamine rush, and not only that; we create the new with every breath: that′s what life is, a highly effective change-machine, catabolism and anabolism, constantly repurposing materials, so Bella′s disposition, her craving for absoluteness and stasis could very easily be described as anti-human. It is, but it is not inhuman. All drives, paradoxically even the Thanatos, are human because desiring is human. The perceived strangeness of this wasn′t lost on Freud. He wrote: ″the improbability of our speculations! A queer instinct indeed, directed to the destruction of its own organic home″ and yet it was conjectured that the Thanatos was the first drive to emerge, simply because it was the first thing a being could desire. Imagine you have just become organic, a newly assembled change-machine and moreover you are conscious. You don′t know anything of the world, what things there are in it for you to desire or even that there are things for you to desire out there because you have only now started existing. You are simply conscious, that is the one thing of which you are aware and so the solitary thing you could want, the only thing you know you don′t have is a lack of consciousness. The first desire of the organic being is a return to an earlier, inorganic state. Thus holds psychoanalysis. While Freud thought the ego in conflict with its drives, Melanie Klein did not grant it quite so much autonomy, claiming instead that the drives of creation and destruction were in conflict with each other, the self pushed and pulled by them. I find this interpretation far more suitable to our purposes, so keep it in mind. If you haven′t heard about it before, some immense human drive to die seems ridiculous, death is if anything a last resort for most people, but think about it more abstractly. How often have you wished that things weren′t happening so much, that you could just not put up with reality′s unbelievably event-laden horror. We don′t act on that, typically, because some of the good things we like about existing serve to counterbalance it, but the impulse is indisputably there and not even just in our current era of dizzying sensory overload 24/7 it′s always been there. Here′s a passage from the Cincinnati enquirer February 21. 1947: ″The saying ″life is just one damn thing after another″ is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap″. A statement which I can only imagine would have been followed by a mic drop if it weren′t in print, but yeah, life is just really stressful pretty much all of the time, and while becoming a vampire doesn′t quite satisfy the Thanatos drive, it does get rid of a significant number of damn things, substitutes the thick forest for a bit of skeletal shrubbery that nothing can hide in if you will. Turns out being functionally immortal and frozen in one specific stage of your life takes care of anxieties pretty well. You just have to die a little as it so often goes.

Old School and High Contrast Polaroids

I hope you can see how hauntology is cultural Thanatos with ghosts as its inorganic end state. How the infinite repetition of the full alphabet of signs constitutes an escape from things happening. An escape from the influence of change-machines. Hell, the looping record itself is a voice made inorganic and in the same breath, or absence thereof, static. All of this is perfectly copacetic with hauntology as a stabilizing function meant to ossify structure and therefore opposed by nature to life′s propensity to degrade and rebuild, overgrow and mold away, perpetually negating any real notion of permanence the paradigm attempts to uphold. Life turns statues into fertilizer if given the chance, but we shouldn′t draw too much comfort from that since the will of the inorganic is always channeled through the living. The fact that dead labour is dead has done very little in the way of actually rotting it away and we find vampires so very appealing, so the marble′s haunting gaze might yet persist as people find ways to justify it. It can come as no surprise that we encounter the Cullens in

A backwater town rife with antiquated cultural forms to perpetuate and
A school

I′m convinced that it′s accidental, but the idea that vampires, beings literally incapable of changing, would be able to attend high school over and over again, year after year, while fitting in perfectly is biting social commentary on Stephenie′s part. The education system is an odd place, it′s far more overtly authoritarian than we are usually comfortable with in structures that are public-facing, assumably to prepare children for the more subtle and unspoken variety to be found everywhere else. ″Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.″, as Foucault said, and classifying requires categories, preexisting signs to be bound by. Clothes and lingo may change but the alphabet of classification remains carved in stone. Nowhere has history ended more than in schools, making them the ideal place for blood suckers to hide in. It is already an institution in which the paradigm is meant to colonize your mind and a specter more or less is barely noticeable. More than that: students are for the most part living and therefore carry the spark of novelty. Subjugating them to the despotism of classification is a deeply violent act causing much rebellion and suffering as they are mangled and squeezed into ill-fitting boxes. The vampire on the other hand is a static archetype of self, a remnant of the past which history has turned into an ought-statement of personhood, the exact same kind, coincidentally, which is enforced in the education system. The Cullens fit their boxes perfectly, making them almost revered not just by Bella but a significant portion of the student body. We can again link this perfection back to ghosts, lingering memories and their physical counterpart in the form of statues, because there too do we see this archetypification that pervades schools. Memories age as though someone were slowly turning up the contrast on a picture: the details fade, all texture is lost as the central idea, the reason for you to remember in the first place grows stark and tangible, shifting from an idea into a statement. That is part of why monuments are so effective politically, so good at conveying a message: They have long since stopped resembling something real, a person to evaluate neutrally, or an event to simply be reminded of. During the recent uptick in iconoclasm one talking point oft trodden out by right wing pundits was the idea that a statue is not an endorsement but rather merely a reminder of a historically significant thing or even more hilariously just a piece of art which happens to resemble someone. These are of course technically correct but they betray the sort of blatant feigning of ignorance about human psychology that ideologues make their living off of since I′m rather certain if I were to threaten or insult someone, the excuse ″I was merely showcasing a statement for your consideration, you can decide for yourself what to think of it and how dare you interpret me saying it at you as an endorsement″ would convince just as few. Historical figures stop being people and start being a statement, sometimes a threat, which we typically conceptualize as ″what they stood for″. That is what a statue shows: propaganda, not a person. Similar for ghosts: while they start out as humans with a quirk or two, they soon become beings of single minded focus, the way no actual person could ever be. Being dead strips one of nuance and reduces to an amplified version of the most relevant conceit or desire and the fact that becoming a vampire literally increases your colour-contrast in the twilight films is just another in a long line of coincidences. It is however not completely tuned up. The sort of ghost story in which the specter has entirely become a symbol after death and now exist solely as the manifestation of an obsession from their human life is rarely one in which the ghost is mistaken for a person by the living. The ones in which this does occur tend to feature ghosts who are still more nuanced and textured. They also behave more like vampires, often misleading deliberately in order to lure their victim into their doom. Turn the contrast too high and people start seeing the inhuman for what it is, so the vampiric mode includes the play acting of imperfection, the feigning of breathing and the mimicking of nervous ticks. Believe it or not, this too is a feature of hauntology. Mark Fisher, having been a music blogger, wrote a lot about the use of vinyl crackle as a stylistic flourish in the songs of Tricky and others. This was of course after the era of vinyl records so the sound was recorded and used as part of the music itself, more pronounced even than it would have been for the genuine article. It′s a flaw turned aesthetic drawing attention to itself, to the sort of warmth we associate with analogue. It is breathing to seem human. We see the same with vintage furniture featuring deliberately peeled paint and with clothes that look worn right out of the factory because we quite like it when things pretend to not be sterile, cold, and fundamentally inhuman. The lie isn′t convincing of course. It doesn′t have to be. That the jeans you buy at the store weren′t actually worn before is just as obvious as that the vampires are still far too strange to be people even if they blink occasionally. These are excuses for our brain to not question something it knows to be false. Completely subconsciously. We just find the crackle comforting and we like to not think about sweatshops when we see clothes. That is why retro is popular: The past will always be made of memories and statues, of pristine little things that have faded in terms of the tedious complexities that worry us so. Oftentimes they′re statues of slavers, tyrants and rapists, but for the most part people successfully evade that particular revelation if they′re pretty enough and if they don′t they can take comfort in the idea that these were problems of a bygone era.

Eternal Eschaton and Vampiric Disavowal

Let′s say they can′t though. It does happen, but there′s yet another insidious lie to tell in these instances: ″there is no alternative″. Words that ring and echo as a warning engraved authoritatively on the gravestone of history, finally: the last line of defense against those who have strayed a few steps too far from the path of acceptable questioning. You have recognized that the vinyl crackle is the cold imitation of a lingering specter, you have recognized that there is no escape from the brutality of capitalism in consumption that shows it less and you have recognized that vampires are a threat and don′t look at all like people if you force yourself look closely. The inhuman face turns slightly and responds in one harrowing word. ″yes″. ″Yes, these are unfortunate circumstances, I truly wish there was something to be done about it.″ This line of argument comes up a lot in times of crisis like the currently still ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Where capitalism was seen during the golden age as this great force of material improvement, we nowadays hear people proclaiming to be its advocate say that it is in fact quite bad but at least better than the alternative. Resignation and cynicism. When history is over there is nothing left to hope for and the end of our economic framework has grown more difficult to fathom than the end of the world itself. Not shocking, since we are rapidly approaching the latter. As stated earlier, we are never truly fooled by these lies, only placated. We know that a system predicated on infinite growth is unsustainable. Ecologically and in general. The apocalypse is easy to imagine because we are all perfectly capable of drawing a simple line of extrapolation from here to there. Capitalist realism. But let′s back up a little to ″I wish there was something to be done″ because we are far too quick to believe it even if there really was no alternative. How come billionaires always profit from crises that us common folk get to suffer from? How come Bill Gates urged oxford to sell a vaccine they were about to make open source to a pharma company, costing untold amounts of human life and benefiting them handsomely. One should display a fair bit of skepticism when people keep coming out on top of catastrophes they say were unintended. Perhaps they have not stopped because they don′t truly wish them to at all. Perhaps there is nothing more to it than disavowal. The almost human, friendly face of modern capitalism helps the lie go down of course. Well publicized philanthropy and small acts of government aid ″doing one′s best to reign in the most destructive impulses of the least bad system out there″. If one company brands itself as the good megacorp that helps us tolerate the others even though they are all interlinked and it helps us accept the myth of a few bad apples or of unforeseen negative side effects which in truth are the intended outcome. Similarly the Cullens are vampiric disavowal personified. They don′t kill people, currently, and it is oh so tragic that other vampires do. They don′t act against them though, they even keep friendly relations, they simply disavow the actions of those bad elements and try not to fall into murderous frenzies themselves. Living on animal blood is the best they can do. And one has to ask: Is it? Is the constant threat of man-eaters in a school the best one can do? Or moving away in case a little accidental murder does occur without any repercussions? Keep in mind that Edward did have a short stint as a serial killer. Even if one were to say that it is cruel to cut someone′s life short purely because they themselves had the misfortune of being bitten, and note the parallels to ″we can′t take all the stuff away from billionaires, that would be unfair″, the question bears asking if that act outside their control should allow them to live forever as a menace to society and if they are now eternally absolved from the standards of decency we hold regular people to as this does not appear all too fair either. When the inhuman face claims that there is no alternative the response is simple: ″Oh isn′t there? I think I could quite do without vampires. I could quite do without dead labor draining my productive capacity also and while I′m at it I would very much prefer history to continue, it is far superior to this resigned static cynicism. It has come to my attention, mister ghost, that when you say ″there is nothing to be done″ you mean that there is nothing to be done which would not pose a danger to you.″ We ought accept the fact that nothing is being done not because it can′t be but because history is stuck in a position that just so happens to be very comfortable for those who disavow its failings.

Translucent Skin and the Panopticon-Mind

The paradigm eats itself for breakfast. That′s what a paradigm is: An eldritch ouroboros eternally voring the shit out of its own point of origin, so it has more ways of perpetuating itself than the memory-fication of reality and nauseating repetition of preexisting forms we talked about earlier. In order to invade the future it is necessary to invade the mind since that is where the future is produced and again we can clearly see the nefarious function of schools. Oftentimes it is not even necessary to truly lie. Framing is sufficient. Preferable even, because any attempt to debunk it appears overly pedantic. As soon as a category exists it is already restrictive in that it forces its acknowledgement even by those to whom it does not apply. You fit it or you don′t and are thus already framed in terms of it, whether you want to or not. Your space of existence has been exogenously and maliciously delineated and you can no longer self-express on your own terms. You will be treated in relation to categories which do not apply to you by placing you in a semiotic field not of your own making. Framing is the art of narrativizing reality, and becoming-narrative is necessarily a becoming-memory, a becoming-statue, a dialing up of contrast to reveal patterns you wish to be seen even if they are nothing but noise. This is unfathomably useful, since if you can instill certain categories and relations in people, those will guide their thought and actions, their creations. If you can limit the field of framings people will be exposed to, you make them predictable and thus controllable. It is very easy to guess what note a looping record will play next. Modern data collection has undoubtedly come a long way in terms of predicting our actions and stabilizing power, but there are more factors at work. The volatility of the organic is tackled from both directions, not only through predictive models, but also in that time isn′t the only thing that has undergone homogenization, space isn′t safe either. Where the influences and forces of exposure were greatly variable by location before the end of history, with local shops, newspapers, dialects, languages, economic systems even before the fall of the soviet union, all of those have lost prominence significantly and our points of reference have become one shared monoculture, making predicting outcomes far easier. There′s burger kings everywhere. Our ability to imagine alternatives is limited in part through a shrinking number of alternatives we are exposed to. If we return to music we can see this predictability quite clearly. ″It was through the mutations of popular music that many of those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the passage of cultural time. But faced with 21st-century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared [...] Play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be [...] the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn′t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn′t feel as if the 21st century has started yet.″ Keep in mind that this doesn′t mean that nothing interesting has been done in the past few years, especially in the underground it has, but it is popular culture that contributes most to our understanding of what can be. It′s not that mainstream music hasn′t changed at all, but rather that if someone from the past were to listen to it, they could likely go ″yeah, I can see how this happened″. The far open planes of shared cultural significance deliver death upon the unforeseen. We are no longer challenged to rethink what music, politics, culture can be. Alice′s and Edward′s powers of future sight and mindreading do something quite similar; they decontextualize and deterritorialize the self. Not only is their conduct hugely invasive and would be horrifying to any reader if our self-insert were not mostly immune, but it also shifts the lens through which we should understand their lack of interaction with humans. Alice and Edward also engage with the organic on the basis of prediction. As opposed to allowing people to exist on their own terms they take the framing of their thoughts and possible actions upon themselves. These interpretations by long dead entities with their own sets of ingrained categories and relations will be wildly different from how those humans would likely present themselves, lacking contextuality for one thing, but they do not allow an actual person to correct them. They deal with their contemporaries the way a predator would; not as a being but as a material. When Edward sets up two students with each other as a gesture of gratitude for being nice to Bella (and yes, we are expected to perceive this as charming) in midnight sun, he does not consult with them at all. He simply assumes that they would make a good couple based on the thought fragments he has heard and also that they would be okay with him doing this. That sort of despotic control over and disinterest in the agency of humans is only granted to beings which consider having this amount of power over others natural, forces which see themselves above people, no matter how big a show Edward makes of venerating humanity. Alice does the same thing since the future in twilight is malleable. Seeing a possible outcome allows her to take steps which prevent it. One might reasonably say that the future is a point of interest for all of us and that perhaps allowing some socially isolated vampire to make decisions about our fate is a horrible idea, but the Cullens, acting as an unaccountable cognoscenti of fate, have no such concerns. They decide which futures are good and which aren′t. People needn′t be asked. I′m sure you see the parallels to our world. We interact with simulations of ourselves and the system ensures that we are simulateable. We are not only robbed of a place in history, but also in a sense of our deixis, of a perspective. We are placed within a framework that feigns objectivity, one which assumes and decides but never asks, the mouths of statues speaking for us. I use the term deixis instead of perspective deliberately, because we don′t give the term perspective enough credit. We think of different perspectives as different coats of paint on the fundamentally same thing. Deixis on the other hand is stronger. A deixic term is something like ″here″. It means nothing apart from the perspective you bring into it. Your ″here″ is fundamentally different from mine. It′s the opposite of the coat of paint. While there are superficial similarities like that we are saying the same word, the meaning underlying it is a different beast entirely. A deixic transposition like the one in Midnight sun or when our stories are told for us is by no means a harmless act, It′s a trojan horse of ideology. The Cullens only experience the present through the eyes of the past, through their own framing of it. Whether deliberate or not they keep themselves distant from anyone who could make clear to them the injustice of their actions. People are left as playthings without agency, whose future is predetermined or in the hands of forces outside their control. Bella′s fate is certain and what could be more terrifying than a future which already exists? One which can be predicted? There may be plenty of fates worse than death, but there is no death worse than fate.

Midnight Sun and the End of Everything New

Let′s finally talk about this fucking brick of a book. When I first got it felt like an artefact from another timeline, some sort of cursed object, and I still feel like that a bit. The sensation was a big part of what inspired this video. Midnight sun doesn′t just feel wrong, it feels distinctly temporally wrong. Into the odd liminality of covid lockdown came a book that we collectively thought would never come out. Twelve years after the completion of the trilogy we repeat the events from the first novel, but their deixis has been shifted towards the perspective of Edward, that of the undead. The hauntology is palpable. Not only has time been narratively folded over itself and returned inorganic, but in the context of our world it feels like this book should have been written years ago in a history that didn′t come to pass, in the future we imagined would come in like 2010 or something, in a lost future as Fisher would have it. The kind of future one feels nostalgic for, like those of skies strewn with flying cars. A future that history left behind. And yet I′m holding it in my hands aren′t I? This thing somehow broke through some boundary and entered our universe regardless in a way that twisted temporality so much that we are having twilight discourse in 2021. Another thing that makes it feel wrong and also specifically like an artefact is how massive of a tome it is, I mean look! it′s as thick as infinite jest which is truly ridiculous... But it′s only 240.000 words. Longer than the other books in the series for sure, but you could read it in a day if you put your mind to it. Midnight sun fits in neither with the context it sprung from, nor with its presentation, nor with our perception of cultural time. It is the literary equivalent of artificial record crackle. Hell, the title itself is an anachronism, one time transposed onto another. This is perhaps the most metatextually haunted piece of literature in existence and it′s a twilight novel of all things. Welcome to reality: nothing makes sense, but it sure does rhyme. One way by which this rhyming occurs is teleoplexy, a portmanteau, presumably, of teleology and complexity, where teleology is the examination of events not by way of their cause but by way of their purpose. Asking not: ″how did this happen″ but ″why did this happen? to what end?″ implying a great deal more agency on the part of the universe. The main factor manifesting teleoplex topologies of time is retro-causality. Events in the future which cause events in the past, which make themselves unavoidable. They are the telos, the end, and time must manifest them. Clearly this twists temporality into all sorts of loops, endlessly doubling over and flowing into itself. ″As [...] culture folds back upon itself, it proliferates self-referential models of a cybernetic type, attentive to feedback-sensitive self-stimulating or auto-catalytic systems [...]. To accelerate beyond light-speed is to reverse the direction of time. Eventually, in science fiction , modernity completes its process of theological revisionism, by rediscovering eschatological culmination in the time-loop.″ Nick Land thought that cities work this way, predetermining their own future and past along these sorts of inscrutably textured topologies of time, and if cities are time machines, Vampires most certainly are. Whether you believe that retrocausality exists in real life or not, Twilight is overtly retrocausal. Futures can manifest themselves by way of Alice seeing them, which then leads to them happening, in turn mandating that Alice sees them in the past. Now Land was more interested in accelerating, positive feedback loops than the stabilizing systems we experience in Meyers′ work and Fisher′s examinations of hauntology, but this broader understanding of non-linear time should still come in useful. At this point the significance of the two books following the original trilogy, ″gender swap twilight″, which was for the most part a faithful retelling swapping the genders of the characters and doing very little else, and Midnight sun being pure iteration is probably obvious, but we can now ask what this Telos demands of the past. What had to happen for the purpose of getting temporality so utterly stuck? Well, let′s look at the end of the story proper, the end of history if you will, and find out. We find ourselves at the center of a moderately sized whoopsie. Bella has given birth to a half human-half vampire child, Renesmee, something heretofore believed impossible and the Volturi, unelected vampire government that they are, have, through a very silly misunderstanding, gotten it into their head that this is actually a normal child which the Cullens turned into a vampire (something that is super duper illegal unlike y′know murder). The clan has therefore amassed an army of sympathetic vampires with more traditional diets than their own to fight back or at the very least stand their ground long enough to plead their case so as to not be summarily executed. You might say that this sounds like quite a bit of novelty and change, like a revolt of the organic triggered by the human element Bella introduced into vampire politics, with Renesmee being literally a new type of being. Depending on how much you know about the series you might also say ″what the fuck I thought this was a romance novel″. Both are very valid points, but of course the books don′t actually follow this line of flight, radically overthrowing the old order. That′s not the kind thing that allows you to repeat the events of the first novel over and over again, there′s too much momentum there. Twilight does not have a way of handling novelty, we′ve seen that, so the only possible resolution apart from the Volturi winning is for Renesmee to not be a radical break at all. We must be wrong in having assumed her to be a refutation of the symbolic order, and so Alice, just in time, arrives with Nahuel, another Hybrid she discovered after scouring the globe, to present before the Volturi. They have a friendly chat and leave without a true confrontation. Huge anticlimax. But look what happened here: Renesmee only gained her right to existence once it is shown that someone like her has existed before. This event, the most novel, potentially radical element in the series only becomes valid when its novelty is debunked. Twilight does not allow lines of flight, it only allows loops. The potential conflict with the Volturi is dissipated. Where other stories might seek escape, overhaul or some other agency in transition, Twilight ends the way it symbolically must, with the integration of Bella and her daughter into the preexisting paradigm, with the neutralization of its radical. And the statues get to stop moving again, their ranks richer by two and their dominance unchallenged. The series ends with all escape paths falling back into their causal orbit, with the tying of a knot that ensures eternal stasis. Repetition is the only thing that can follow. The forest has been cleared and we are free to explore every crevice of a barren landscape with open skies where time flows into itself in circles. We should have known, really. Renesmee′s name is a remix. It′s a combination of the names of Bella′s and Edward′s mothers, an echo of what came before. Bella is the type of person created and recreated by our modern material conditions of hauntological culture production, and Edward is a piece of literal marble. It is unfathomable that they could create novelty. Their end-goal was from the very start integration and a restoration of stasis and so with their success they herald for this universe the end of everything new. Let me again be very clear: Twilight does not provide an analysis of our present′s hauntological tendencies. It does not provide an escape. It merely portrays the supreme hauntological subject. A fictional crystallization of our world dominated by the echo of what is not. In order to be a fascinating work to study, twilight does not need to be a piece of great philosophy. It is the work of a mind that is profoundly haunted, a work through which to see our own atemporal stasis and shudder at the ghosts in our media.