Ghost Tropics:

Spectral Tropicality, Deleuzian Post Structuralism and Post-Colonial Aesthetics

By GG Skips

Iphone Easter Island Head Emoji



How you can read this thesis:

This thesis is intentionally meant to be read in any order. It is arranged in sections or Plateaus which can be mixed up to your desire. It is advised that you read the prelude to start with to understand why this is the case, and read the conclusion at the end. Each section intersects with other sections, there is a Key of symbols to help you do this and a glossary of definitions of the terms used frequently. You can read by following the symbols- therefore weaving through sentences from different Plateaus of the thesis if desired. Footnotes are included as a second voice throughout the text, to comment on why i have written certain sentences. 





Key

Holiday⫸

Diagram/Non Linear⨌

Assemblage ⨂

Heterotopias⋈

Segmentary‖‖

Liminality▚

Utopias◑

Palm Trees⥣

Erotica♀

Colonialism ⊼

Ecology⽊

Swimming Pools 〜

Ethnography 🝊

Aesthetics 🝤

Flamingoes 𐆒

Capitalism 🝧

Ghosts/Occult ░

Music♬

Uncanny☺

Marxism☭

Otherness🝍

Media Archeology🜇

Kitch🝩


Glossary


Swimming Pool

A structure designed to hold water to enable swimming of other leisure activities.


Palm Tree 

A family of perennial plants.


Hauntology

A multidisciplinary way of thinking formed by Jaques Derrida which uses the language of ghosts and haunting to reveal a temporal disjunction or lack of presence. A modern definition notes hauntology as a ‘nostalgia for lost futures,’  or the present being haunted by visions of the past that never came into fruition. 


Post-Structuralism

An anti-philosophy that rejects ordering or structuring human thought, in favour of a non-linear approach to the world.


Rhizome

Deleuze and Guittari’s observation that thought extends like the roots of a tree into endless avenues, which are non-hierarchical and can be entered and exited at any points.


Uncanny

Something eerie, both familiar and unfamiliar, concerned with otherness.


Spectral Tropicality

In what S. Harvey calls Spectral Tropicality she refers to tropical landscapes, Oceanic folklore and  as uncanny states(Harvey, 2008). Whilst i will look into traditional notions of Tropicality, this definition will also be concerned with the modern kitch conception of tropical aesthetics and how they have a postmodern hauntological appeal. 


The Other/Otherness

A binary definition of something unlike our own Western experience; or something that sits in between our lived experience.


Heterotopia

Foucault's theory of an in between space, spaces of otherness. A world within a world. 


Ethnography

An anthropological or sociological account of a society or culture based on qualitative or quantitative research.


Media Archeology

Media archaeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media through close examination of the past, and especially through critical scrutiny of dominant progressivist narratives of popular commercial media such as film and television.

Prelude: On the form and motivation of this thesis

“Subject is secondary, their connectivity is foremost important”- Blanco in introduction to 1000 Plateaus???


i) For all the extensive postmodernist discourse written on Hauntology, specters and ghosts, it is clear that each sits in its own little niche segment. Derrida, the father of the theory, talks in terms of politics- how Marxism allowed for a revealing of ‘a predetermined historical trajectory’ (Callari, Ruccio,: 1996). Demos sees a buried amnesia of colonialist past in modern contemporary art (Demos: 2013). Fisher sees a musical richness in the underbelly of the crackle of a vinyl record (Fisher, 2013). Be it music, art, culture, gender, race- the theories of hauntology focus on how much of our cultural awareness is buried below human phenomenology. This makes hauntology an incredibly important speculation in a Capitalist world⊻, one using occultist language to provocatively expose an absence of cultural clarity. A radical political need to look below the layers of neon and light we are blinded by in modern living and dig up the ghosts that have been hidden beneath. But all these angles and directions⨌ make hauntology such a vast and all encompassing theory that to find a satisfactory lens to approach it linearly is simply uncomfortable to me. In fact, any kind of thought in any field feels entirely wrong to be approached linearly- as this is not how the world works. Hauntology follows suit in rebelling against preconceived notions it acts as a Radical antiphilosophy opposed to rigid thought exploration (Massumi, 2019), conjuring ghosts and the occult, (Blanco, 2013) treating subject as if it was an archeological relic. Hauntology is a nomadic practice, that is to say it is not rooted in one place, it isn’t a single view, and it doesn’t move straight. It extends its waves in every conceivable direction- like lightwaves, it spreads light on every element of reality and non reality. Hauntology is a post-structuralist practice, it is involved with a deconstruction of linear thought, both within its application and within the structure of writing about it⨌. 


 ‘I will argue for a hauntology of aesthetic experience, a kind of uncanny sensation of materiality exhibiting agency over us.’ - Steen Christiansen


To understand the reason why i have chosen to write this work in an non-structural way- I must first explain how I arrived at a subject for this thesis in the first place and what prompted me to reject specificity. I was stuck between subject- spending a summer researching Psychogeography developing an interest in non-space, convinced my chosen subject was going to be the heterotopia of a Swimming Pool⫸, then masculinity and swimming pools, then simply the history of Exotica. This toing and froing was largely due to a conscious need to specify an angle- and so I looked vigorously into a niche to fall into- the pool as a sexual lens, the pool as a mirror, a sexually liberating space, a womb. Whilst all these segmentary points were equally fascinating to me- it felt unnatural to me to split apart the angles, just focus on ‘The Male Gaze’ and leave out ‘The Pool As An Image Of Wealth’. This has always been a struggle for me writing any piece- I want to step out of the confines I set myself and view a theme- not simply object or subject (Deleuze, 1988.) What I realised was that my main interest was not the image of the pool itself- but the multitudes of possibilities of exoticism, paradise, gaze, that the pool could occupy- the pink flamingos, cocktails, lift muzak- an idea of a tropical paradise. But I was suspicious of this intrigue, completely unsure what I was actually interested in and why- and even if intrigue warranted writing. 


I turned then to the quote above- Christiansens is treating hauntological intrigue as concerned with aesthetics, a positivism of an uncanny experience. Or as with Heidiggers theory of ‘The Metaphysics Of Presence’- intrigue stems from an absence of visibility. With Tropical aesthetics and their relation to hauntology- there is an absence of material looking into its relevance in philosophy, i think tropicality is a perfect vessel for an exploration of post-structuralism and modern hauntology, as it is the key axiom of ‘otherness’. 

Through my research into the subject I notice that source material on the philosophical implications of postmodern tropicality is sparse. A general search only came up with kitsch fanzines or coffee table books with cocktail recipes showing ‘tiki’ culture, and on the academic side, only anthropological texts that deal with sociological tropical ethnographies. There is little attempt to crossexamine the postmodern confusion of tropicality- the pink flamingos on people's lawns, palm trees in every coffee shop; against the classical ethnographic study of tropicality. I therefore felt a need to explore this interchange, between the kitch history, and the serious colonial impact, and why these two supposedly binary oppositions, really exist within the same rhizomatic map⨌.


Utilizing the ‘Otherness’

Within the subjects i am focusing on in this essay; hauntology, tropicality, colonialism, exoticism, The key term that pops up constantly is ‘otherness’ (Clifford, Deleuze, Derrida, Demos)- but no effort is made to deconstruct the gap between the concept and its application. Why must these writers use deconstructionist terms such as ‘the inbetween’ or ‘the other’ without treating their writing with the same ideals? This is why a post-structuralist angle is an essential methodology to approach this subject, why we must see the subjects of tropicality, hauntology and poststructuralism as an assemblage⨂, as a collection of abstract functions that make up a non linear argument (Stocker, 2006). This is why this thesis is assembled rather than structured, why i treat my intrigue into the subject of tropicality; the swimming pool, the kitsch, tripadvisor reviews, colonialism, ethnography, all with the same brush. Why this thesis has three introductions and three conclusions. Why i have included footnotes as cerebral comments on what i have written. Why i have included a key with symbols to link between ideas in the text. Why this introduction starts with hauntology and ends with deconstructionalism. The post-modern world is a constant string of connectivity, moving nomadically from thought to thought, it is there to play with and assemble, to follow each line of thought down its path.

To end with a quote from Deleuze, whom which i base this thesis’ approach:


A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. - Deleuze Guitari 1000 plateaus.


This thesis will therefore have different flows, some more analytical, some more explanatory on the history of tropicality and some more philosophical.



⨌Deleuze and The Diagram

‘The minimum real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept or the signifier, but the assemblage.’ -Deleuze, Focault


Broadness, or being too broad seems like a curse for writing. Writing is often taught as being linear- summing up points and concluding them, separating out sections, removing each paragraph from the next, presuppositions based on logical formula. Delueze and Guattari’s landmark book ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ argues directly against an idea of anything being segmentary. In their chapter ‘Micropolitics and Segmentarity, they pose thought as not being linear but instead as a channel, that flows through endlessly minute moments, getting infinitely smaller, like the quark to the atom. Blanco’s analysis of Deleuze and Guitari’s nomadic thought points out that subject is secondary and the communicable force or connective ability between themes is foremost important. For me, to think of it visually evokes Jeremy Deller’s landmark mural ‘The History Of The Universe,’ which shows the links between Acid Jazz and Brass Bands in a mindmap- it focuses on the arrows between, that make up a holistic and a-territorial view of counter culture’s relation to regality and postmodern aimlessness, a visual aid to seemingly random cognitive assemblages of the brain (Seiler, 2019). To think of it scientifically, reminds me of a stroll with a friend telling me about the theory of Quantum Physics, mathematical notions of manifold (Wim, 2014) and collective consciousness. What scientists observed is that when firing light waves against a wall with two holes- the waves bounce off the wall- some light makes its way through each hole- creating two light rays- when these light rays intersect, they create a pattern of refraction. What is really crazy about this is that the light pattern behaves differently when observed or not observed. The crux of this is that there are infinite possibilities of patterns- and these possibilities exist all at once- whether we are there or not- but what causes them to be seen and exists physically, is our observation of them. So there are infinite possibilities of lines of thought, we simply discover them through our movement through them. Drawing this, I am imagining every angle of the light going through the hole as a straight line- and then imagining every possible conception of that straight line. It makes up a crosshatch covering every possible surface area till it makes a solid black surface. If we take this experiment back to the cognitive- this would mean that every possible angle of argument, focused in infinite directions, all together would make up a tapestry, a solid surface covering every conceivable field. As Deleuze puts it in more colourful language “The diagram or abstract or abstract machine is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which proceeds by primary non-localizable relations and at every moment passes through every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.” This is how to approach broadness as a scientific reality, and how to approach Hauntology, aesthetics and theme. If hauntology is thought as buried (Soar & Foreman, 2019), or absent from the surface, we can imagine it as the earths tectonics, compressed in the ground over centuries of pressure, forming a thin layer around the globe. So wherever we are- we are standing on it, we just simply need to dig up the artefacts.

Tropicality, Tropic Ethnography and Hauntology

🝩 Tropicality, Anthropology & Ethnographic Hauntology

“Orientalism and tropicality operate as discourses of power by dramatising the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and ‘here’ and ‘there’.” - (Driver, Martins, 2010)


Ghosts are uncanny “others” in that they are both spatially and socially liminal: they call into question linear time and categories such as past and present and living and dead. Anthropology also deals with “others”—as objects and subjects of study who, at times, have inadvertently been made strange within the contexts of their representations -CARRIE CLANTON, 2017


What do we congur when we talk of the tropical? What constitutes tropical aesthetics? Palm trees, hot climates, pink plastic flamingos, maybe a cocktail by the pool, kitch? Or is it post-colony and a modernisation of the natural world? Is there even a ‘tropical’? is it a definition in itself or a moving term? 

Historian David Arnold first used the term ‘Tropicality’ as referring to a separation, a world of ‘the other,’ the distant and exotic (Arnold, 2000). The ethnographic use of Tropicality has since been a way of referring to something foreign or distant. The term manifests itself as the antithesis of our western culture, an ‘us compared to them’ attitude, creating binary distinction, even if the term itself, does not define what that ‘otherness’ entails. It’ is something both knowable (we have an idea of the aesthetic qualities) and unknowable (we do not know directly the origins or if the aesthetic qualities are accurate), therefore moving it into the realm of what Freud would call ‘the uncanny’ (Leader,2015). 

Anthropologist Michelangelo Paganopoulous notes of tropicality; ‘the uncanny ‘weirdness’ is [now] no longer about the exoticism of others, but rather is associated with the oddness of attempting to describe the culture of others’ (Paganopoulous, 2019.) And this is clear in the modern observation and description of any ‘tropical’ scene which inherits these distant recycled ghosts. Perhaps we see an undisclosed exotic female wearing a ‘lei’, a colourful tropical drink, or a bowling alley? This resembles a warped and dense history of cultural signifiers, will ultimately paint a confused picture of postmodern tropicality. For instance, take the cliche of the tropical desert island;


The tropical island is a mythic faraway land, often accidentally discovered by a distant ship, or shipwreck, the protagonist floats in on a piece of wood to find golden sand, coconuts, looming palm trees and fruits a-plenty. Here the wanderer lives in solitude in this hazy, utopian lifestyle, fashioning the trunks of the palms into objects reminiscent of home. 


Our image of the tropical island is inherited in an non pedagogical way, it is obtained through loose signifiers from various cultural points. Be it Spongebob, a shopping mall palm tree, a cocktail bar menu, or a Thomas Cook travel brochure⫸, we assemble a picture of what constitutes the tropical through individual lived experience that through repetition ends up as a collective consciousness. These axioms themselves are fallible, and are formed through decades of theft and exploitation of Oceanic indiginous peoples. The fascination with ‘the other’ stems from the colonialist representation of ‘them’, through the theft of artefacts from these indigenous cultures, the eurocentric west started to paint a picture of the Oceanic world that was misconstrued as a oriental singularity (Driver, Martins, 2010.) Of course that narrative of the tropics was riddled with misrepresentations, grouping together distant cultures in a melting pot of otherness, and when the colonisation brought about new tropical diseases and violence, the Oceanic representation fell away from being seen as a wondrous utopian (fetishised) land, and became drawn as a backwards, feared and savage space (Clayton, Bowds, 2006).

One writer responsible for the binary separation of the eurocentric and the tropical is Pierre Gourou. Who pieced together both the metaphysical and the physical aspects of the Oceanic into a theory of total separation, kickstarting the romanticization of these faraway lands. There is a birth of tropical ethnography, which in hindsight, with our plastic paradise version of exotica, brings into question the morals and metafiction of anthropological studies of these regions. And there is a shift from the observation/investigation of these lands into a manufactured and cluttered narrative by the west in what James Clifford called ‘ethnographic surrealism’ (Clifford, 1981).

This is where the Hautological aspects of tropicalism come into play. It is clear that any ethnographic studies will bring in some fictional elements through either ignorance or a personal bias, or intrigue. A prime example would be Gaugin’s explorations in Tahiti, informing his erotic, Edenistic paintings. It proved to be a total sham, he was a wife-beater and grossly abused the resources of the land and exaggerated his eroticism. He leant into the narrative of tropicality as a paradise, feeding the fire with more warped truths. The warped truths build and build, feeding off each other, creating a tapestry of foggy narratives. It is only clear when we really think about the existence of, say, a cocktail umbrella or an easter island head emoji, a modern ethnographic relic of exotica. How did we get here? And what, if anything, does this have to do with Oceana? The confusion has only become more skewed since post-colonialism. Now, the discourse around the tropical is riddled with ambivuality- the actual geographic borders, completely unclear. Ambivuality built on ambivuality. 

Dennis Cosgrove outlined the split of ‘tropicality’ into tropic ontology and ethnographic geography- between an epistemological understanding of the tropes of the tropical and the specific location of where we would apply it (Cosgrove, 2010). Whilst it is argued that the tropical mainly covers the Oceanic, Pacific, Polynesian area, its reaches have become far wider covering Asia, Florida and Miami all forming their own tropical havens. I would argue that tropicality has no form, it is a spectre into itself, it is a ghost of thousands of rhizomes, stretching into every element of culture, society and location. Can we not say that Benidorm is tropical⫸? The Rainforest Cafe? Holiday Inn⫸? Tropicality for me coungours ideas of non-space, colonialism, fantasy, the uncanny, the utopic, aesthetics, kitch. The tropical exists entirely in the in-between, which makes it, in my opinion, one of the most hauntological appropriate topics to analyse. In that It’s very formation grew from the ashes of the polynesisan islanders who occupied the lands before colonialism. Their ghosts haunt the world, reconstituted into plastic silly straws, cocktail umbrellas and pink flamingos. 



⫸ This Is The Life: Holiday and Retirement

⬔ Benidorm, The Accepted Myth of Tourism and Elvis Presley

‘The Tribute acts were great! Must Recommend.’ 

The Tripadvisor page of ‘The Tropical’ in Benidorm is filled with glorious reviews for the fantastic tribute acts on show at this bar in the main strip. I cannot help myself but imagine sitting there, 78 years old, with my Tequila Sunrise, watching a faux Elvis belt his heart out infront of snaking plastic ferns around the bamboo adorned tiki bar. There is something at play here, we are sitting in an invented holiday town, in a fake tropical tiki bar, watching a man wearing the attire of a dead singer. Everything in this scenario is a mimic, it is a copy, a replicant. There is an uncanny weirdness to this scene when analysed, as with most of modern life through a postmodern lens, there is a normalisation of surreality. But perhaps the weirdest thing is why is this considered as a paradise? Why is it the end goal, where you go to retire and live your last days. And why is a coastal resort in Spain, full of sunburnt English people appropriating the aesthetics of the tropical?


Catherine Cocks argues that The appeal of the tropical lifestyle is one both formed through media archeologies from the tourism industry, painting island lifestyle as one of complete ease (Cocks, 2013). There was a framing that tourism in the Oceanic regions was a sort of assimilation to reverse the wrongs of the colonial past, A. Thompson follows that postcards and visual imagery conveyed a renewed domesticated version of tropical society. (Thompson, 2006) However the reality of cultivating the aesthetics of tropicality in selling a civilized society as something unintentionally kitsch, creates a paradox. In harvesting the kitchest (stolen and warped) signifiers of Oceana and selling it to a Western audience as a utopic fantasy land, this did quite the opposite of representing the peoples as progressive society. And whilst The marketing of Tropical tourism to the west succeeded in its goal of creating a demand for this aesthetic lifestyle, it did so by stimulating the percieved ‘otherness’ and fetishisation of these invented primitive narratives. 

George Hughes writes of a western orientalism ‘They all feel that modernization or social evolution is inevitable, but the islands reprezent a possible safe place, a kind of purity through otherness.’ (Toop, 1999). The otherness is exemplified in the images of postcards, posters and toys sold as a representation of the idyllic life of the tropics. 


This conception of the tropics as a utopian eden, is largely contained in the fantasy kept alive by colonialist ethnographers, and then capitalised upon by the post-colonial western tourism industry. The post-colonial period developed a public reversal of much of the narrative around Oceana, now picturing it as functioning magical idyllic society, with wild fruit and swaying palms, ideal for your vacation. Hill argues that much of the Western popularity of the tropical was developed in this period, that the fantasy narrative was what took the aesthetics of the tropical to a global scale. 

The acceptance of this utopian narrative was based on lies. Many of the isles such as the Carribean at the time were struggling to build economies, with very little infrastructure, and a dying population (Thompson, 2006.) This watering down of the truths of what atrocities happened on the isles mere decades before, kickstarted the postmodern confusion, where a hyperreality is formed. Tourist boards shoveled propaganda that Hill notes created ideas of white guilt to provoke an subconscious ‘imperialist nostalgia’ in western tourists when visiting ex-colonial regions, “the psychodynamic process by which one idealizes and mourns what one feels one has destroyed” (Hill, 2008). 

Sociologist, Fokkema, claims that it was the ‘inaccessibility’ of the lands that leave the image of the place largely to the imagination, creating a distance that provokes fantasy (Fokkema, 2011.) And once the destination has been seen in person, even if the landscape isn't what has been described in the media, there is a conviction to keep the dream alive. To reject it would be a rejection of the Capitalist beast, feeding us constant fantasy which is so easy to simply give in to. But of course, there would be no conception of utopia without a generation of hope and fantasy (Johnson, 2012).

Why does Benidorm then, which isnt an utopian Island, still use its aesthetics? Like ‘The Tropical’ in Benidorm, the aesthetics are used in an attempt to create a sense of otherness in an otherwise miserable location. In placing the aesthetics in a place as a way to ‘cheer up the place,’ they no longer become simple characterized, cartoon versions of Polynesia, they become utopic items. The aesthetics are used to bring you away from the ordinary world, even if this world is meant to be the escape itself. Fokkema concludes that to utopianize a location “emphasizes the negative motivation of the desire for another world.” And it is clear that Benidorm’s ‘The Tropical’ is not a utopia, it is dressed up, putting a garnish on somewhere clearly destroyed by mass tourism. The dream is kept alive by the collective participation in the myth, perhaps the idea that one day, we will get to Eden. But, for now, here’s fake Elvis further normalising this surreality with his hit single ‘King Creole.’


Palms and Ecology, Waiting Rooms, Nail Salons + Non Space

“Bland exotica […] Tropicality has started to appear as a different kind of aesthetics—far blander, plainer, and more everyday. Occurrences of new tropicality are happening within contexts where the tropical might not conventionally belong, like a reference to an oddball diorama at a provincial natural science museum, or the rediscovery of the Barbican Conservatory on dozens of blogs at the same time.” - Mika Sevela


§ Exotic Ecology in Postmodern Space


There is a coffee shop in Hastings called ‘Cake Room,’ it is filled to the brim with exotic plants, faux palms, screenprints of palms and they also sell cake. I sit there and have my Flat White and look at the pristine, bathroom-esq tiled walls and the assorted tropical plants from homebase. There is a sense of calm and professionality about this ambience, and it is purely to create an ambience. The mixture of the blank, tabula rasa, hospital room with the intended ecology creates a sense of manufactured calm. 

The use of tropicality in commercial space has had a resurgence of late, the amount of palm trees and cheese plants in an establishment creates a scale of how much the interior leans into the creation of this fantasy. The use of a ‘romanticism and primitivism’ through ecology challenges the definition of postmodern space, bringing us away from consumer tropes and more into the world of the air conditioned eden (Morton, 2020.) 

The use of palms in commercial space, shifts the space into the conceptual and spectral. If hauntological spaces are about absence, the merging of the commercial and the natural creates a space that is for no one, it becomes unnatural. 

Whilst most hauntological writing has looked as spaces that would more traditionally be coungerers of spirits, such as haunted houses, castles, heritage sights and so on, i would argue that this new brand of consumer space is equally haunted. The palm trees do not belong here, they are taken away from their native land and placed in a location where the purpose is to generate profit. This is all the more relevant due to the Polynesian belief in spiritual animism, where the plants themselves are part of the fabric of the land. If they are stripped from their home, they lose their soul, they become ghosts. This empathy with plants also isn’t reduced to spiritualism, in an essay on Ecology in modern Architecture Morton looks to a turn to moral empathy with plants, drawing upon a quote from Philosopher and Trancendentalist Henry Thoreau “Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins?” Perhaps this is an extreme angle towards a spiritualism and anti-humanism, but only from a western angle. The fear of sounding like a hippy, occultist or heathen is an acceptance of the western colonialist post-secularism that stripped these beliefs from Oceanic natives in an attempt to ‘educate’.  If Christianity is western canon, then by the same brush, a rejection of religious animism from Oceanic regions, is clearly racially motivated.

Is this animism so different from the post-modern thinking itself? The very arrangement of this thesis is rhizomatic, a theory formed from looking at how the roots of a tree extend in infinate directions, creating a whole. Felix Guattari’s theory of Ecosophy develops this view, that we should look to the natural world to find better ways to order ourselves and observe the interconnections of ecology as to better understand our actions and purpose. He claims:


Without modifications to the social and material environment, there can be no change in mentalities. Here, we are in the presence of a circle that leads me to postulate the necessity of founding an "ecosophy" that would link environmental ecology to social ecology and to mental ecology. - Guattari


And it is a pretty clear theory to follow. Why should we not learn from the structure and fabric of the natural world? The universe itself is a natural thing, it is a machine that has managed to create life, and a philosophical ignorance of its linkages seems to be quite a fatal flaw in epistimology. The only things we can know for sure, is science, why not treat philosophy in the same obvservational way?

An acceptance of the removal and re appropriation of the palm tree from its natural location as a postmodern issue, is less of a pseudophilosophy if you are to accept structures themselves as being inherited from the natural world. And since this thesis itself uses language of ghosts as a necessary language for postmodern thought, an animism or ecosophy is not too far a critical stretch.



↹ Tropical Liminal Spaces - Smooth and Stirated: Nail Salons and Lobbys

Delueze and Guitari’s definition of space splits it into categories that are juxtaposed rather than opposed (SRBIC, 2020.) The first is striated space, which is a ‘state space,’ an ordered, paternal and political space, often resembling the structure of a state. The second is smooth space which can be moved through freely,“Its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation.” (Deleuze, & Guattari 2013, p. 573). As with the palms in the coffee shop, Tropical liminal spaces deal with both smooth and stirated states. The distinctions, as with all of Deleuze and Guittari’s theories, are not singular and require a relationship between the two terms. Some may think of stirated space as being a negative and fascist space, and smooth space as a postmodern, liberal space, however smooth space on its own cannot trigger freedom of movement neither stirated provide oppression to that movement. Always politically leaning Deleuze and Guittari call for a deteritorialization, which is to say a removal of the codes that influence bodies within spaces (Fisher, 2012). 

Tropical Liminal spaces contain both stirated and smooth elements. I will note Tropical Liminal spaces as those that feature elements of tropical aesthetics, wrapped up in ideas of escapism and utopian fantasy. For example Nail Salons often feature a wall decor of a sandy beach with a palm tree, or a waiting room might be playing moogified Exotica music with travel magazines spread out on the coffee table⫸. These aesthetic choices shift the space into the liminal, or in between the striated and the smooth, with a state implemented notion that this is the utopia you desire is contrasting with the practical transience of the spaces. 


It is important to notice how the similarities between the classification of spaces of tropicality (Deleuze’s smooth and stirated space) mirrors Focaults distinction/relationship between heterotopic space and utopic space. An example Focault uses to show the crossover is the mirror, which acts as a Utopia- it is a ‘real’ fantasy space where you can see your own visibility, and a Heterotopia- it engages with (reflects) the space that exists in reality, but isnt a space unto its own (Architects of Gender, 2020.) It exists inbetween worlds- therefore making it liminal. I would claim that a Tropical Liminal space does this same action through historic colonial reflection, as all tropical aesthetics are based on an inheritance of a false colonial narrative, they reflect a location that isn't or never was present, they reflect an ‘intermediate experience’ (Johnson, 2012.) 


Tropical Liminal spaces are right at the center of these crossroads of the utopian and heterotopic, as both are ‘spaces which are linked with all the others, and yet at variance somehow with all other emplacements’ (Focault, 2000.) It is the concepts of Utopias that seem most apparent on the surface of Tropicality. The word itself stems from the greek expressions ou- not; ue- good; topos- place; ia- region, which makes its conception in Thomas Moore’s Utopia as an ambiguous and undefined term. Johnson, in his essay on Utopias and Heterotopias, claims there is an acceptance that the utopia does not exist within its very definition; it is a daydream, or a romanticization of hope (Johnson, 2012). And this is a trope of the tropical, with daydreaming scenes in film and media often taking place on a tropical island, it is a dream that suggests a desire or an ‘anticipatory illumination’, a not yet becoming of the world created in the dream. 


Tropical spaces are right at the center of these crossroads of the utopian and heterotopic, as both are ‘spaces which are linked with all the others, and yet at variance somehow with all other emplacements’ (Focault, 2000.) The utopian space is the daydream and the heterotopian space is how that daydream is physically represented. Through that shift of the utopia into an actual physical space is where the tropical gets its liminality.  An example of this interplay between utopias and heterotopias creating this tropical liminality would be the British Museum, both a heavily striated space with its state stolen and presented artifacts of colonial ‘achievement’ and a smooth space due to how these objects are direct examples of primitive ingenuity and creativity. A museum is also an excellent example of why it is important to speak in terms of descontructionalism, and why ghosts become necessary language. A museum is stately in the way it presents a carefully curated narrative around the objects that it contains. Everything down to the design of the programme is imposed, it traps artifacts, such as an incan mask and guides you through its chosen story. But the curators are dealing with ghosts, dealing with remnants of culture that they are not part of. Without the artefacts, the museum is a shell, an ode to nothing. To notice, accept and reject/or accept the structures of space, allows a choice to accept the narrative, or create our own, to move freely, nomadically through the information we have been provided. This way of thinking allows the tropical to be anything from the Nail Salon Palm Tree decor to the curated Exhibition on Oceana. It allows the utopia to be accepted or rejected as the truth, it allows an intellectual freedom of thought.

Exotica And Easy Listening

♫Hauntology: why music? Why specificity?


Hauntology has more recently placed itself within a musical discourse, the most famed example being the modern hauntological pioneer Mark Fisher’s analysis of postmodern cultural stagnation from the 90’s onwards, a key thinker in placing hauntology as a postmodern meta-reality within the field of music. In his essay ‘Metaphysics of the Crackle’ He focused on music that was buried under a crackle, or music that uses its spectrality as a means to project a message about melancholy, nostalgia and fading futures. This, along with several other essays, was narrowing hauntology towards a musical canon, even though these writers were clear that hauntology was ‘more than a matter of musical style’ (Fisher,2012.) Perhaps this is an obvious side-effect of music theorists delving into Derrida’s Marxist critique, a specific lens will always channel the expansive, post structuralism of hauntology, ironically into a structure.Hauntology clearly expresses a positivism and critique of corporeality, with Derrida’s theory clearly laying out that Hauntology ‘should replace the canonical understanding of ontology’ (Glazier, 2017.) So if Hauntology so clearly surpasses the ‘a posteriori’ knowledge of the learned physical world, to condition it into simply musical form reduces its scope, to human aural function.


That is not to say i am critiquing Fisher and Reynolds intelligence by claiming that Hauntology concerns more than just the subject of music, they make reference to this throughout their writing. And of course sonic soundscapes are a perfect way of clearly expressing the language of the spectral- as you cannot hold music in your hands, like the water of the pool, its constantly drifts away from you in a ghostly fashion.

Reynolds instead consistently refers to ‘world building’ as the pillar for spectral subject and notes that Hauntological music is not just the sonic world but rather contains the visual, physical and non physical aspects of what surrounds subject itself (Reynolds, 2019). 

A prime example of this theoretical ‘world building’ is outlined in Fishers analysis on ‘The Metaphysics of The Crackle,’ which looks at the music of The Caretaker, a thirty year project by Leonard Kirby, taking its name from the caretaker of The Overlook Hotel from Kubricks ‘The Shining.’ The project uses samples of ballroom dance records from the 20’s-40’s, drenched in reverb and crackle, slowly becoming more unrecognisable- as a conceptual manifestation of the degenerative mental disease, Alseimers. It is an airtight magnum opus of hauntology, perfectly capturing the language of haunting and the feeling of losing memory.


What makes this project so enticing is not just the music itself, with its painfully distant slow-dance tunes eating themselves in vinyl crackle, it's the aesthetic world it evokes both deliberately and subconsciously. It bases its ideology on a preconceived notion of visual cultural awareness, in this case ‘1920’s ballrooms’ (Tavin, 2005). You may have some knowledge of ballrooms of the 1920’s but it is not taught to you, it is not pedagogically inherited. Rather, the work of The Caretaker is a ghostly soundscape that uses a semiotic language that i would argue, is largely reliant on a visual world inherited through an array of cultural signifiers, that the music is merely an opening into. The actual musical language is based on its visual and corporeal context- grand ballrooms, The Shining, gramophones, military choirs, wartime design. Where have these surrealist cultural pillars been taught to the average person? Certainly not through music. Ballroom music is one of few genres that essentially bases itself on a visual picture. And this is exhibited in exotica where the music was formed through inheritance of false visual and cultural narratives.

Ultimately this shows that the visual informs the auditory in a chain of neural networks that make up the assemblage, this is then passed onto the next person. Each person will have their own assemblage of a specific cultural idea, and when this is then spread through pedagogy their idea adds to a network of thoughts, images and manifested stereotypes. The process of confirmation bias and illusory correlations forms a diagram like the rhizomatic roots of a tree⨌, creating cultural consciousness of a subject. Stereotype becomes more than a prejudicial function, and instead illuminates us to how ideas are carried, how ideas become spectral through their spreading and dilution. It shows that the spectral is not just concerned with specifying it to music, spectrality in hauntology is made through the connections between segments, not the segment itself.




♩Exotica and Easy Listening & Dream Sequences

"offered package tours in sound, selling tickets to sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboo emotions before lunch, view a pagan ceremony, go wild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home stereo comforts in the whitebread suburbs." - David Toop, Wired Magazine


“For Ritual Of The Savage, also known as Le Sacre du Sauvage, a painting depicts a shadowed, moustached Lothario in his middle years, a Burt Reynolds type. He appears to simultaneously entreat and ravish a Latin beauty, Jane Russell in essence, who tosses her head, parts her lips and averts her eyes in protest, rapture and erotic agony. One hand pushes away, the other half shrouded in darkness. These lovers, or fighters, merge in the bush, framed and dominated by a crudely sketched museum tableau of carvings and masks, an approximation of tourist pieces from Central Africa. In the distance, the silhouette of a tree or rock formation suggests the form of a tapir - an animal renowned for its symbolism as avaricious sexual seducer in South America mythology - about to crest the hill. The setting could capture a moment of passion during a ballroom dance context, Latin section, held in the Disney Museum of Fetish and Ancestral worship”

-David Toop, Exotica, 1999


Looking at the cover of Exotica pioneer Les Baxter’s album ‘Ritual Of The Savage’, music theorist David Toop identifies a clear dichotomy of thematic reason. The mixing pot of the savage, the erotic, the relaxing and the occult. Throughout Toops landmark book he explores this parallel fascination with both the clear savage violence represented by the cover art, titles and themes, and the apparent classification of all this as easy listening. The tropes of exotica, have always been at odds with each other, each piece echos a soundtrack to a film, yet they are not soundtracks, they are standalone pieces. Most composers of exotica; Baxter, Lyman, Yma Sumac, did at points compose scores, but their standalone albums remain the most fascinating. Using swiring orchestral melodies transporting you to a fantasy land of escapism, imagined lands, with linear notes explaining these make-believe backstories. They are film soundtracks with no film, taking the listener on their own personal spectral journey to whatever confused representation of a foreign land they are focusing on, be it . What differs them to traditional film scores is the use of oriental and exotic instrumentation over western instrumentation. But the lens is so clearly western that the music becomes an unavoidably linked with appropriation and the idea of a warped colonialist Fantasy. Perhaps this is why exotica is so often used in films to represent the daydream of the character as in Ratso’s fantasy of Miami in Midnight Cowboy (1969) or The Dude’s daydream of being chased with Scissors in The Big Lebowski (1998). As Toop claims ‘Technology carries them to paradise, or records it, yet erases the fantasy of utopia on impact’ (Toop, 1999.) 


The most fascinating example of this was the famed exotica singer Yma Sumac, whose wailing nonsensical faux-incan hymns over Baxters tropical score is further buried in fog due to the lack of initial information about Sumac’s origin. Painted as an incan princess, but more recently confirmed as Peruvian born, hollywood fashioned this wannabe folk singer into a jungle-goddess, inventing a occult-like myth around the singer (Miranda, 2017). Sumac’s layers of confused origin become more textured with the sincere attempts to include her peruvian upbringing- warping songs of her childhood into an amorphous blob of orientalism. These are the layers that Hollywood primed their clientele on, her vocal parabola mimicking, if not mocking, the many identities she took on (Toop, 1999).


The switch between nationalities, instrumentation and tone within exotica works itself similarly to the spectral, weaving in and out to create a confused and bubbling whole. Aggressive tribal drums and chants, evoking sacrificial ceremonies then transform into pleasant magical strings. It is clear that the view of the extoic in America around this time was as confused as the music- feared, admired, controlled, repurposed, consumed. But bizarrely where this music ended up in the landscape of releases was in the ‘easy-listening’ category. Perhaps this makes sense when considering the implementation of it as utopian signifier to suggest a visual ‘world’ of beaches and cocktails. But as discussed, the reality of the music was far from ‘easy’ or ‘light.’ The music of exotica falls into the Musak catagory, being used as Lobby music, or music to soundtrack liminality. If this was the implementation of the genre, then that suggests that the music considered the most relaxing or pleasant, is one that concerns fantasy, daydreaming, or taking you to a world far away from the blandness of an elevator or waiting room. Exotica therefore is Hauntological by its very nature, it aims to take you to an absent space, a non-existent world that it invents, that both in its implementation, creates its own narrative. To put it differently, the use of say Yma Sumac’s nonsensical faux-oriental singing in a liminal space such as a lobby, is a confirmation of it being categorized as ‘Musak,’ therefore confirming the suspect colonialist undertones as ‘easy’ and ‘pleasant.’ As Josef Lanza claims in his book on Elevator music “Musak and Moodmusic are, in many respects, aesthetically superior to all other musical forms. They emit music the way the twentieth century is equipped to receive it” (Lanza, 2004.) This speaks again of Reynolds’ ‘world building’ where the music is applied as an assemblage of the world it is creating, as a door to its full picture. As well as how the consumption of material was more important that the material itself- a very postmodern and Deleuzian outlook. The music of exotica is merely a vehicle of a confused and spectral world of ‘otherness’ sold in a neat consumerist package.



Swimming Pools

〜The Swimmer

‘You need to sure like swimming to warrent this expenditure.’ - The Swimmer


In the 1968 film ‘The Swimmer,’ Burt Lancaster appears out of the bushes, adorned in skintight speedos, like Jesus resurrecting. He proceeds to make an existential journey back to his home by swimming through all the pools of his wealthy LA friends. Remaining aloof about his homelife with his wife and kids, he proceeds to sexually assault an ex girlfriend, attempt to court a girl who used to babysit his children and gets in a fight with a gangster. But the mysterious ending of the film, in which his home turns out to be abandoned, with no wife, and no kids, throws the picture into the mystery genre. Like an episode of The Twilight Zone, We realise that Burt Lancaster is not who he seems to be, perhaps he is a ghost, and the trials he faces through his journeys between the pools are maybe tests of the afterlife. Perhaps the film is what Travis Woods calls ‘A country club retelling of the Narcissus myth’? Despite the many interpretations of the films twist ending, the more fascinating element throughout is the pools that he occupies (Woods, 2018).

The pool in ‘The Swimmer’ allows Burt to act without moral authority, to revert to a childlike state as he breaks down in a woman's arms, the pool becomes a mothering womb for him. The film expresses the pool as the middle ground between the character and his wealthy friends, with no one rejecting his request to swim in their increasingly lavish pools. Burt’s requests allow for them to exhibit their wealth, for them to even envelope Burt within their wealth’s waters. But a majority of the other characters never set foot in their own pool, it is there for show, just a reflective basin of their success, a cleansing baptism for Burt’s increasing despair.

The pool is a Liminal space, it suspends bodies in it, allowing for freedom of movement in any surface area of the water, but paradoxically traps them within it. If Delueze was looking for a space that is both stirated and smooth, one that both enables and disables deterritorialization, the pool occupies that space. Depending on where the pool resides It is a signifier of relaxation and holiday⫸, or a symbol of wealth, sport, baptism. You can both be free to relax in a pool, and drown in it. You can see your altered reflection in a pool, a reflection of your privilege, acting as a utopian vision of yourself, both present and unpresent (Foucault, 1986) . It is therefore a haunted space, a disappearing heterotopia, with its ability to reflect and suspend in a nether zone, and also to be drained into nothing at any point. 

The pool is a containment of the tropical, a chlorinated and cleansed element of the exotic. A fantasy version of the ocean, kept alive by chemicals and ‘pool boys’ to keep the bugs out. 



Plastic Palm Trees: Atomic Age + Overproduction, Capitalism and Criticisms of Hauntological Ethnographies


Exotic and Erotic Exploitation


‘Exotica and erotica are close, not just semantically, but in their promise of a life less ordinary, detached from the libitdo suppression of reality, responsibility, rationality and ‘civilisation,’ hitched instead to a hopeless belief in the free physicality of primitivism’

David Toop, 1999


The Atom age of the 60’s saw a growth in the exploitation media- Bikinis, Women in Prison, Zombies, Sexploitation, Blacksploitation, Cannibals, Rape, Bikers, Nudity. All this media saw a kitsch freedom in the paranoia of the end of the world, which capitalised on new, cheap, easy media production. Perhaps the most marginalised group in this period, and especially in exotica, was women. 

Erotica in the tropical is linked with the sexual desire of ‘otherness’, both an infatuation and taboo of the primitive. Much of the visual products of exotica used its tropes to evade sensors, to exploit the ecstatic trance of primitivism (Toop, 1999). The covers of Baxters exotica albums clearly show this, with crazed females under a ‘hoodoo voodoo’ spell that the islands curse somehow contained. Of course this all resulted in an damaging victimisation and abuse of women and especially non-white women. Be it the assertively sexual Belly Dancer with their Orientalist seduction (Shay, Sellers-Young, 2003), the rise of the Bikini flick in the 50s (Rutsky,1999), Grace Jones infamous ‘slave to the rhythm’ shoot, women are exploited the most within tropical aesthetics, reduced to a loaded primitivism, which is in itself based on racist sterotypes and exploited at a rapid rate.

Whilst there was a culture reductionism of Polynesian peoples since the post-colonial era, the post-war/cold-war period brought about an application of the racial fetishism to western women too. The rhetoric of the ‘crazed’ was seen as a desirable trait, and ‘otherness’ was in fashion, evident in the countless ‘Island Movies’ featuring whitewashing, white saviors, noble savages and just straight savages (Tanga Tika 1953, The Naked Jungle 1954, South Pacific 1958.) The exotic explosion of beach⫸ and island life was especially utalised at the time in the ‘Surf Flick’ (Bikini Beach 1964, Ghost in The Invisible Bikini, The Endless Summer 1966.) Thomas Doherty notes the switch towards a commercialisation of this exotic sexism in this genre explosion ‘ They show [female] teenagers as wistful, comic, conformist creatures, sexless and predictable, ultimately willing to carry on the traditions of consumer capitalism that they, as voracious consumers themselves, clearly benefit from. (Doherty, 1988)’ Young able-bodied people were now seen by pools or by the ocean, living a romantisized, relaxing tropicalist life, and with the economic boom at the time, the island life could become a reality with swimming holidays in Hawaii (The only US state in the South Pacific) and Miami⫸, all capitalising off the allure of exotic visual traits. By this point the horrors of colonialism that lead to the exotic aesthetics were out shouted by the overproduction of them. 


Defence of the Plastic Palm Tree

Overproduction of exotic traits is where Derrida’s hauntological stance comes into it, as through capitalism overproduction, there is an introduction of spectrality, as the original incentive is killed through the process (Koch, 2006) or, as Fisher claimed, capitalism has won, the spectrality comes from the death of culture. The loss of ‘credibility and meaning’ through the victory of capitalism, (Fisher, 2013)  births an ‘end time’ (Fukuyama, 1992) we enter a period of ‘hyperreality,’ ‘post-history’ and a pairing of postmodern thought with a certain nihilism that even Derrida himself wanted to distance from (Brantlinger, 1998.) 

Brantliger argues against the modern hauntological doomsday thoughts, due to its failings to critique capitalism enough. I would agree with him in that there is a pairing of kitchen intrigue and genuine enjoyment of hauntological manifests such as exotica, which both heavily critiques the ghosts that capitalism has created whilst also bathing within its product. 

This critique is similar to Hutnyk’s destruction of Exotica and travel writing, where he tears apart Clifford’s ‘ethnographic surrealism’ as tokenistic and not actioning the Marxist theory enough (Hutnyk, 2000). He claims that Clifford's ethnographies on tropicalims and their reduction into ‘collages’ is simply an extension of developmentalism and neocolonialism ‘cocooned in self-satisfied contemplation’ (Kar, 2002). I would argue for the products of the period of exotica (plastic palm trees, pink flamingoes) from post-war till now as objects of ethnographic relics, and they should be treated as historical artefacts as important as the incan masks in the British Museum. Their conception through chinese whispers of falsified Oceanic aesthetics, tell a very telling story about Western capitalist expansion, globalism and Media Archeology. The ethnography at play is an unconscious and automatic one, the plastic palm trees have been formed from replication by the expansion of the western world, and whether this automatic ethnography is correct or representation is insignificant to its existence. It is also irrelevant how horrific this expansion was, we can all agree colonialism was a crime against nature- but an ambivility to the products of its growth is nieve.

I strongly disagree with the notion that a hauntological ethnography and its products are reductive. Hutnyk provides an overtly structuralist reduction himself, in imposing a separation of the end product (A Clifford ethnography, or a plastic palm tree) with its assemblage. What we are left with is obviously an uncanny end product, that has gone through years of messy interpretations. Hutnyk misses the point of hauntology as a spectral doctrine, allowing for ambiguity and myth, as Paganopoulos so effectively puts it:


‘Hauntology exemplifies a true provocation, meaning a critically evocative representation that acknowledges the uncanny, by that implies an acknowledgement of the absence of discernible origins, historicism and arbitrary borders.’ (Paganopoulos, 2019)



Reflection

Frederic Jameson - ‘the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be;...we would do well not to count on its density and solidity’


Here we are, at the end of these thesis. A conclusion for this essay may seem counterintuitive as nomadic thought aims to deconstruct the notion of a conclusion, of a start, or middle or end. And as exhibited in this thesis, deconstruction will simply open more questions, more roads and routes of intrigue. What this thesis has attempted to do is what i consider the mind to do, to go off on tangents, to naturally follow lines of thought, to explore subject not directly but around the edges, through different angles and styles. 

I chose tropicality as the base of the thesis, as the walking ground, purely because i enjoy the subject of tropicality and its philosophical implications, but really i could have chosen any subject. What I am overall attempting to show, is how the postmodern world works- how it treats subject, object and argument. How postmodernism deals now with assemblages, how all subject, pedagogical knowledge and empiricism has altered key philosophical questions by a mass globalism and information superhighway. Tropicalism is a perfect route to explore this, as it is an undefinable spectre based on something that was unstable, fallible and confused from the start. Tropicalism could be said to be based on Ethnography, colonialism, Utopia’s, but as seen over the last 50 years is how all of these subjects are riddled with contradictions, falsehoods, subjective linkages forming a string of ever mysterious Chinese whispers⨌, a dense fog of information we can never know to be accurate or not. We live in an age of this ambiguity, everything a replicant, nothing solid or knowable. We live in an age where Structuralism has been seen to be false, and has to be challenged. It is a modern cultural awakening that rigidity doesn't work, as it creates assumptions from singular viewpoints rather than taking everything as a whole. 


It is of my view that if you are going to deal with a topic that relates to this post-modern ambiguity, hauntology, otherness and density, you must treat the way you write about it in the same way. To impose the binary and ordered academic approach, would be a complete hypocrite. I am aware of the criticisms to this approach, how it can allow an overly cerebral umming ahhing, it can get too philosophical and too meaningless, perhaps even over-intellectualising the obvious. But i would argue that the post-structuralist approach is more than just a mental experiment, it has real-life optimistic application. To acknowledge that everything is an assemblage, made of multiple angles, arguments, substances, is a freeing way of thought. Removing binary definitions and looking at the tapestry of variety, is a move to a humanism, to an acceptance of the marvels of humanity’s many shapes and sizes, vocations, hopes, dreams. It is an acknowledgement of creativity of the intellect, and allows a free passage through multiple angles⨌, seeing them and accepting that they are part of a bigger picture. Be this applied to arguments, types of people, animals, what pub to go to. To accept a rhizomatic approach is to reject hierarchy, to look against the order of things which has so often in the world has created division. 



This thesis also attempts to bring together the angles of thinkers from a range of different fields from 

Anthropology - Clifford, Kravanja, Fokkema, Arnold, Paganopoulo, Clayton & Bowd, Demos,

Postmodern Philosophy - Deleuze, Guitarri, Focault, Derrida, Christaens, Brantlinger, Fukuyama.

Modern Hauntology - Fisher, Reynolds, Tavin, Clanton, Christiansen, Toop, Lewis.

Cultural Studies - Doherty, Rutsky, Hutnyk.

And group these thinkers as all dealing with the same assemblage of Tropical Liminality.

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