No(n)stalgia (for (non-)Places)

0nty is a pseudonymous writer and artist focused on ‘post-net’ art and internet culture. Their audiovisual productions have been featured in the Wrong Biennale, Millennium Film Workshop, the New People’s Cinema Club (NPCC), Forum Stadtpark, SoundPedro Sound Art Festival, and WIP Gallery, among others. In 2023, they completed an artist residency at Foreign Objekt’s Posthuman Art Laboratory; and served as lead organizer for the first conference on the subject of CoreCore, ‘All Things are Nothing to Us’, held at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Their essays, reviews, and visual work have been published and discussed in print through Becoming Press, and in online journals including UltraJournal and OnMyComputer, as well as Stimulant and Ethics (forthcoming). In 2024, they served as lead editor of an anthology volume entitled Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde published by Becoming Press.

“Sounds like the soundtrack to a job that pays enough for a disposable income.” @garethrichardson7817

“[I] leave this tab open in the background while shopping Amazon.” @Iije927

Collecting these short notes was suggested to me by Palais Sinclaire, co-director of Becoming Press, after we shared a brief discussion on the trajectory of Vaporwave. What follows are a few comments on the genre and some selected quotes from the comment sections of Vaporwave youtube playlists — right now, I’m listening to Employee of the Month, a 2023 mix compiled by Sega64. It’s not bad.
For all intents and purposes Vaporwave’s “future” seems a moot point. The genre’s flight path has long since descended below any inflection point that might have promised escape velocity, its potential energy exhausted at the lower bound of some attractor in youtube-playlist cyberspace. The founding gesture of the genre – arguably, Ramona Xavier’s 2011 Floral Shoppe — represented the genre’s most mature form: there has been no further great events in Vaporwave, merely a balkanisation and degrading into various sub-sub-sub-genres which only intensify Vaporwave’s already nostalgia-for-consumer-age properties (consider for example Mallsoft, which is exactly what it says it is).
The initial critique of Vaporwave was that it represented a false start. From its inception in the early 2010’s to its peak and crash in the ‘a e s t h e t i c’ era circa 2015, Vaporwave was a backwards-facing cultural phenomenon that guaranteed it would be read as nostalgic above all else. My colleague Dylan Smith (of OnMyComputer and Codex Journal) likes to suggest that Vaporwave was doomed from the start due to these nostalgic elements. And this seems true enough, even if the original creators of Vaporwave positioned themselves with a degree of ironic/critical distance qua their more-nostalgic-than-nostalgic genre (a position almost instantly lost to Vaporwave’s audience). This nostalgia is hard to deny. The elemental building blocks of Vaporwave involved a combination of 70’s-80’s corporatised ‘smooth Jazz’ samples (the kind one hears in malls, airports, doctor’s offices, and so on...), elevator Muzak, and some R&B transposed through the prism of a decelerated chopped and screwed editing suit. Its visual presentation involved a recycling of 1980’s Cyberpunk imagery, a resuscitation of Memphis design and later Frutiger Aero, bookending the consumer aesthetics of the 1980’s-2000’s —all of which served as a hypersaturated gloss over the liminal hallways, elevators, highways, supermalls, office blocks, and other late-modern institutional-infrastructural spaces populating Vaporwave imagery. It is quite right, then, that the first interpretations of Vaporwave were concerned with what it was reflexively picturing; as Alican Koc puts it, via Jameson, what Vaporwave is “cognitively mapping” — Vaporwave was not some new territory, but rather a sort of geographical exercise cast over our late-capitalist landscape of Walmart parking lots and ruin¹.

“I'm currently without work... but I dream of a day I can listen to this mix when I'm in a high rise office building...” @gamerguy980

A tension is found here already: Vaporwave is caught up in two types of distance. On the one hand, the distance of the cartographer engaged in Jamesonian ‘mapping’ of the contemporary world and its affective landscape — Vaporwave steps outside the world to picture it. On the other hand, the distancing of the nostalgic, which exiles the contemporary world to the status of a dim reflection of a more authentic, perhaps more neon-soaked, era — Vaporwave steps outside the present to picture it. Why, for Vaporwave, does nostalgic distance produce cartographic distance, and vice versa? We might approach this knot by interrogating what exactly serves as Vaporwave’s muse. The elements of Vaporwave’s nostalgia seem to be composed from the aesthetic elements (both sonic and visual) less of a particular time than of a particular relationship to place. Its choices in setting are relegated primarily to consumers and workers — the mall, the office, the hotel room, the elevator, the airport. Airports, malls, hallways, highways, high-rises: Vaporwave is a portrait of what Marc Augé in his Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity dubbed ‘Non-Places’. Augé’s neologism of a ‘non-place’ refers to a hypothesised product of ‘supermodernity’, which is a distortion of ‘space’...
Following Michel de Certeau, Augé defines spaces as more than geometrical; spaces are necessarily inhabited, frequented, such that they form a symbolic scaffold for cultural meaning and identity; to frequent a place (broadly— situations, ensembles of elements, environments) is for de Certeau to make a space. A non-place, then, denotes a relationship to space — to movement, frequenting, dwelling — which is erratic, transient: the archetypical non-space is the traveler’s space; the simplest form of ‘non-place’ is errant space; space marked by displacement, disjunction, alienation². In opposition to the affordances of place, non-place is contractual, solitary, transient, and disjointed from dwelling and the fixities of culture. The candidates for non-places are a veritable Vaporwave catalog: airports, malls, and so on. Non-place as the object of nostalgia explains why, in Vaporwave’s fantasy-frame, these empty spaces are never populated — the yearning is not for a bustling mall, but an empty one that one can traverse in the right way. In the empty mall, the displacement of non-place — the Augéan, transient bustling— has been displaced, but it is still a displacement that’s missing — the missing historicity of non-place has become, itself, an aestheticised monument in some greater airport. It is in this sense that, as Jameson puts it in his Nostalgia for the Present, the present is ‘stylised’ to convey the past. Each empty mall is now a signifier. And Augé understands very well the particular role of monuments for non-place: a property of non-place is its being severed from history — while space contains a retroactive element in its very structure, non-places delegate historicity to specific, often monumental sites — so what Vaporwave finds is maybe some kind of extimate safety, a lost extimacy, a better lack, the coziness of a past without a past. Vaporwave’s gambit is that we have lost our liminality — remember when we had it so liminally good?

“POV: you walk into an office building and try to wave good morning to the security guard with a cup of coffee in one hand and a leather briefcase in the other. The security guard smiles, waves and presses the button to open the door and you manage to get to the elevator just before it closes. Sales report for the quarter came in this morning and your name is at the top of the list. Your boss' assistant helps you calculate what your bonus looks like. 'Congratulations' she says.” @ericadB412

Vaporwave is not what we would call ‘ambient music’, but a comparison between the two is fruitful. Among the the first ambient works in the dawn of the 20th century, Satie’s Musique d'ameublement, there was already contained the notion that music could be a sort of affective frame for space— a medium or scaffold for what Merleau-Ponty would call “Anthropological Space”, i.e. the mise-en-scene of a structure of relations with other agents and the world at hand, the state of being situated in a milieu. The inception of ambient music was its relationship to place in making it a space: it was not meant to inhabit place as an object of attention but rather aid in the constitution of the space as such. The very coining of ‘ambient’ music enters history with Brian Eno’s late 70’s Music for Airports works, precisely music designed to scaffold the ‘non-places’ that are the focus of Augé’s writing³.

“There are stores and hallways, but I can’t buy anything. Everything is on display, but just for looking at. My hands fumble when I try to use them, but the lighting is nice. The water in the fountain feels slightly warm; I expected it to feel refreshing. A small grating in the wall emanates a soft, constant buzz and a strong chlorine smell, but it’s just that – a deeper part of the mall. There’s a waist-height tower with a CRT screen inset, and it’s showing Disney trailers. It tells us to buy and come visit. I feel like an American, even though I live W4,000 miles away. I feel happy, and I don’t care why.” @Nick-ph9mb

Vaporwave, much like ambient work, exists in relation to these non-places... but it does not constitute them in the sense that Musique d'ameublement constitutes a living room or Eno’s works constitute an airport, rather, it indicates them. Ambient music is a non-referential affair, all territory, no map: it aided in the constituting of the very non-places which Vaporwave now maps from an external vantage point. Vaporwave, because of its representational distance to non-place (i.e. its nostalgia), places non-places in a particular era — as per Vaporwave, airports, malls, and elevators are artefacts from the 1980’s⁴. Vaporwave’s nostalgic distance re-inserts place into non-place by, as it were, geo-locating it. This is what radically separates, for instance, the immortal, striking ambient works of Vangelis deployed in a film such as 1982’s Blade Runner, and the Vaporwave of the 2010’s, despite both recruiting many of the same sonic building blocks (‘slow jazz’ elements, synthesisers, etc.) — something like Vangelis’ Memories of Green or Blade Runner Blues construct the aesthetic language of Blade Runner’s fictional-2019 Los Angeles megalopolis (which is, it is worth noting, a veritably infinite patchwork of non-places produced by, in a perfect Augéan twist, a population of slave-clones devoid of real memories); only later invoked, indirectly, by Vaporwave’s post-Matrix Cyberpunk aesthetics in a film such as 2011’s Drive:

(he is so me, the reflexive statement as such; as opposed to the non-reflexive, hysterical ending to Blade Runner: I am not me).

So Vaporwave is thus distinct in this sense: it is music about non-places, not of Non-Places ; it is a nostalgia for non-place. This is, I think, how Vaporwave unwinds the knot of both mapping the present and being nostalgic for the past: the external vantage point on the present which Vaporwave assumes in order to ‘map’ the present is the same distance it assumes qua its object of nostalgia, Non-Place. And without jumping ahead, this is perhaps because the present is in fact composed, as Marx knew very well, of a contradiction between space and non-place, a present-absent non-place…

“I find an odd level of comfort being inside superstores. The wide open spaces and the abundance of sights just put me in a good mood. I never dread grocery shopping - I instead somehow look forward to it.” @arathyn8294

But what is nostalgia for a non-place (...“nonstalgia”...)? — In the most cynical reading, Vaporwave nostalgia (Nonstalgia) is a longing for re-inclusion into the spoils of what Lenin theorised as ‘Labour Aristocracy’: the first-world segment of the global proletariat reliant on the extraction of value from the third-world proletariat; i.e. the feeling that you wish:

“It [was] 1997. Your mom decides to take a break at the food court after shopping around all day. While you’re waiting for your parents to come back to the table with your food, you decide to walk over to Gamestop nearby. They have the latest N64 and you just jumped on goombas and koopa troopas in Mario 64 with your brother in the background cheerfully backseat gaming. You go back to your table as it greets you with pepperoni pizza slices along with Teriyaki chicken and pork fried rice. Your mom is talking about clothes you need to get for the upcoming weekend church event. You sip on Mt. Dew while thinking about the new Zelda 64 that’s coming out next year. Life is good.” @mknlb50

In this view Vaporwave is purely reactionary, since non-places are only objects of nostalgia insofar as their labour-aristocratic role in a system of global alienation allowed for a brief window of pleasant first-world fetishism somewhere between the 80s and 2000s (did that actually happen; or is it just a retrospective projection of a time in which we really could -after Levy-Bruhl- mystically participate in commodity fetishism?). During this fantasy period, the affective load-out of alienation was sufficiently unglued from the misery of the global abject so as to become the romantic purple glow cast from the 100-foot virtual girlfriend in Blade Runner 2049 (he’s so me) and so on. And this works out neatly in Marxist-Hegelian language: of course the map of the present is also ‘exiled from the present’, when the present is itself composed of a contradiction between capital and labor; to paraphrase Žižek, nonstalgia is the hidden ‘fourth’ subjective moment of the dialectical failure of modernity’s self-identity... etc. etc. etc.

But we can’t stop there, I think, especially since the operative concept at play here —non-place— is first and foremost Anthropological.

As Alican Koc puts it astutely in his 2017 article on Vaporwave (the article, it’s worth noting, which first posited the idea of Vaporwave as Jamesonian ‘cognitive mapping’):

“...while the melancholy affects brought to life in the virtual lifeworld of vaporwave speak to the decidedly privileged class positions of late capitalist consumers and artists rather than subaltern subjects, they bring to life an allegory of late capitalist suffering from a place under the skin. This is not “class consciousness” in a traditional Marxian sense, but rather an opening into the virtual realm of late capitalism, the identification of a throbbing affect lodged deep in the collective sentiment of a social body...”

Vaporwave was also a sort of re-grasping of space already-colonised by non-place that expressed a genuine yearning for place, even if of the ‘non’ variety— i.e. its nostalgia, while properly reactionary, was motivated by the desire for a dwelling. There is a reason the true kernel of desire at the heart of Vaporwave is something like a nucleus of coziness in a field of home-sickness — Vaporwave’s real affective export is coziness — and it is because what Vaporwave ‘wants’ (i.e. the desire structuring its fantasy-image) is actually something like a home one can live in, resembling, to invoke Jameson again, a ‘laying siege to the present’. The figure of the home is invoked by Marx nine times in his 1844 Manuscripts, and three are devoted to his definition of Alienation: the concepts are inextricable from the outset. The exclusion of the worker from the means of production is described first by Marx as a forceful disentangling of the home and work which displaces the worker from home at a level which persists even within the walls of her house — the neolithic cave (as Marx puts it later on, in a characteristically 19th century anthropological analogy) is a home, but the living room of the Musique d'ameublement is not — it has been reduced to a “hostile dwelling”.
If one takes the notion of Alienation seriously enough — as radicalised, totalised — then there is perhaps no place under capitalism, only non-place. And Vaporwave is indeed an ideology of an unhostile dwelling under capitalism (this is what nonstalgia is, technically), but it is also a genuine yearning for dwelling per se, and an apt ‘symptomology’ of alienation — and this is maybe why it has always felt safe, innocent, benign. The genre is less cynical than it thinks it is: nonstalgia is a neurotic nostalgia to remystify a fetish, motivated by a prematurely morose lament that one has escaped fetishism⁵: but this is only possible due to the fact that one has not escaped fetishism — because one believes the hostile dwelling can still be a home, after all, even after it is definitely, really dead this time. This logic is fractal — nostalgia for Vaporwave is Vaporwave, because this secondary nostalgia is to Vaporwave what Vaporwave is to the mall. But this redoubling — the mall-ification of Vaporwave; the placement of Vaporwave — is the cost of observing the loop. As @lowpolysunrise puts it...

“This music is my escape. It numbs my mind for just a little while before I have to wake up and continue to fight with reality. Within the time of my escape, I close my eyes and see the world through a lens of an old video camera. The figmented mall is buzzing with people. I never hear individual conversations as I walk past them, but it creates a discernable background noise. It all echoes throughout the shops as neon signs and checkered tiled floors are lit up by sky lights from the enormous ceiling. Taking the escalator to the next floor, I continue to walk around this imagined mall until reality calls me back to battle its iron chains. Thank you for making this mix and helping me escape the fiery grip of life that has left ashen scars upon my mind. Thank you for letting me escape to a place of a long forgotten paradise and of a time long missed. It’s all a nostalgic time I never got to know. [sic]”

ENDNOTES

¹This critique of Vaporwave stung particularly due to its implicit reprisal of internet culture as such: the dismissal of internet culture tends to involve a nasty subtraction of culture’s generative element — i.e. it amounts to the relegation of the internet to nothing more than an in silico referential repository of those more genuine, in vivo cultural products — leading often, as Tom Boellstorff notes, to the naive lending of ‘virtual space’ a kind of diminished ontological status relative to its non-virtual counterpart. At its worst, Vaporwave thus represented the ultimate failure of a natively digital subculture — it grounded itself in the orbit of a lost object from, of all things, a pre-digital era excitedly peering at the digital from the outside. It is not all so settled, however — now that Vaporwave is dead, we are perhaps in a better position to discuss its stillbirth; we are now (people are saying this) nostalgic for Vaporwave, finally far enough away to take a close look.

²We don’t really have space here, but it is worth asking to what extent ‘non-place’ is distinct from ‘alienation’ in the Marxist sense per se; since Marx frames alienation precisely in terms of dwelling in its introduction via the 1844 Manuscripts; framing the whole issue in terms of production, as opposed to movement, which might be more promising.

³We might then call Ambient Music “Non-Music” — it aided in the creation of non-place from space; but not Vaporwave, which is rather “Music for Non-Places” — ambient work is a matter of “non-placement”, Vaporwave is a matter of “placing non-placement”; Vaporwave is reflexive.

⁴As an ‘internet genre’, the greatest crime of Vaporwave was thus perhaps one of omission: they missed that the internet was itself largely a Non-place. But this is being a bit unfair. Vaporwave is of the internet, but not really about the internet (and why should the internet be about the internet?). What is the ambient music of the online non-place?
⁵We can almost joke here that the real nostalgic resuscitation that Vaporwave offers is the late 80s-early-90’s theory of a “post-ideological” world...

Reference List:

Augé, Marc. Non-places: An introduction to supermodernity. Verso Books, 2020.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism.” Postmodernism. Routledge, 2016. 62-92.
Koc, Alican. “Do You Want Vaporwave, or Do You Want the Truth?.” Cognitive Mapping of Late Capitalist Affect in the Virtual Lifeworld of Vaporwave. Capacious: Journal of Emerging Affect Inquiry 1.1 (2017): 57-76.
Boellstorff, Tom. “For whom the ontology turns: Theorizing the digital real.” Current Anthropology 57.4 (2016): 387-407.
Zizek, Slavoj. The most sublime hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. John Wiley & Sons, 2014.