David Bowie and Recursive Time
On January 10, 2016, the final version of David Bowie passed away. Something happened on the day he died. The days fell on their knees and the sound of tomorrow was an explosion that falls upon deaf ears.
Time was out of joint; a new version of Bowie had only just emerged with Blackstar (★) and a new Bowie-era seemed to open up, only to abruptly close, not only by the shock of his death but by the announcement that he had privately suffered from cancer for years.
This event was foreshadowed two decades earlier with the Hours... album. On the cover, Bowie lays to rest Earthling-era Bowie. Since then, Bowie never used any of his many earlier versions. To see his last two music videos from Blackstar repeat this laying to rest is a crushing, haunting experience. Both videos reference Bowie’s death which had not yet happened when they were released. It could be said that the videos both precede Bowie’s death and also follow it, as they fold the event of his death into themselves. This is a recursive temporal motif — the return of something that has not yet happened.
“Blackstar” opens on an astronaut lying still with a hole in his helmet. When the helmet is opened, we see a skull encrusted with gold and gems. This same skull appears in “Lazarus” released a month later, as does the character Button Eyes — Bowie wearing a mask with buttons for eyes. The two videos, directed by Johan Renck, tie together to deliver what must be considered a statement on Bowie’s death. They remake an event that they are anterior to. The cause — Bowie’s death — comes after the videos, even as both of them clearly call attention to the impending event. The videos thus enact a hauntology — a crack in the past where the future leaks out.
Hauntology originated as a term in 1993 when Jacques Derrida released Specters of Marx. For Derrida, hauntology is a homonym pun on ontology (a pun that mostly works in French). Hauntology dislocates origins by reference to the specter as something that is always-already yet to come back. A ghost has no origin because it never fully belongs to the past, the present, or the future — a ghost is part of all of these aspects of time. It is in the nature of being to be riven by contradictions, to never have an originary moment, because there is always something anterior to it that is part of it, and something that comes after.
Hauntology marks the presence of an absence. Blackstar marks the presence of an absence, too. The cover of the album is the first Bowie album to not feature his likeness. Passed over on the album’s release January 8, upon his death on January 10, critics were agog that they had not noticed this telling absence. The specter of death is present—the presence of Bowie’s absence. Much the same can be said for the two videos that mark Bowie’s final artistic statement. At the center of it all is the specter of death present in the videos—or, to put it another way, the presence of Bowie’s absence.
This specter forces us to turn and face the strange temporality of the videos. A case in point is “Lazarus.” Button Eyes here is confined to a hospital bed, slowly floating up toward a retreating camera. The lyrics are overdetermined — “look up here, I’m in heaven,” “I’ve got nothing left to lose,” “you know I’ll be free” — enough to make your brain whirl. Little wonder that fans speculated about the messages in his songs, videos, album covers. Tony Visconti, Bowie’s producer on Blackstar, reinforced the speculation by first stating that Blackstar was Bowie’s “parting gift” to his fans, only to mention later that Bowie was working on music for a new album after Blackstar.
My point here is not the question of Visconti’s accuracy (his Facebook post can be read in several different ways), nor whether Bowie definitively tried to impart a particular message in the videos (Johan Renck rejects all such speculation). Rather, I’m interested in the uncanny experience of the music videos and their strange temporal loop. That loop is recursive in that it is a temporal structure that rewrites past events due to subsequent experiences. The music videos, then, are contingent on an event that had not yet happened and so they have no firm point of origin. That point of origin is deferred into a future that was yet to come.
Bowie’s last videos are untimely. They are made not just with the knowledge that Bowie would die imminently but also place that knowledge prominently in the videos themselves. Seeing an emaciated Bowie lying in a hospital bed with a shock of grey hair is unsettling. Seeing him in the spandex suit scrawling away with a skull on the desk, only to slowly crumble and fall underneath it is hard to understand as anything other than a reference to dying. Walking backwards into the closet as the video ends, as a surrogate coffin, his last bow, a final statement. The video is untimely in how it drags the future into an anterior event. And without that death-yet-to-come, the videos make little sense. One must accept them as instances of the future dragged into the present – touching tomorrow but from the other side, the side in which it has already happened. The day never arrives because it has always-already been there. Causality collapses into recursion, time has always-already passed and still remains yet-to-come. Time is out of joint: that which is to come is, unsettlingly, to come back.
Hauntology’s temporality is precisely such paradoxical loops; no beginning, no ending. Being never has an origin but always folds more future events into itself. Bowie walks backwards into the closet, “always a closet heterosexual.” Major Tom is in “Blackstar.” Not a return but a wishful beginning that already happened. Time itself is recursive because it makes no sense to ask what was before time and what will be after time; time is what is. What is, is time. There can be no outside to it. Yet we are not in time; we are of time. But that time is not linear. It is not straightforwardly causal. “Lazarus” insists that any given now is a confluence of past and future potentialities, things that have not-yet-happened determining and changing at the same time that very moment of now. Now is indeterminate, floating, recursive.
Bowie walking backwards into the closet marks a recursive point of the future touching the past, experienced in a shifting now. Viewed the first time, the scene suggests the end of the video. Seen after Bowie’s death, it suggests him dying. Yet the temporal past, of making the video, was situated in a time that anticipated him dying, therefore the first time (if we watched the video before Bowie’s death) is a time that is later overwritten as time folds back over itself and rewrites this first time as something else.
The video for “Blackstar” opens up the question of repetition. Crucially, not just repetition and a first but also repetition and a last. This is the first time we see Major Tom. But we never actually see him because there’s just a jeweled skull in the spacesuit. Major Tom has been such an iconic part of Bowie's entire career that it could be said there is really no first or last time. Major Tom is unstuck in time.Major Tom is unstuck in time, floating in a most peculiar way, in and out of time. Repetition, then, much like recursion, dislodges any clear sense of origin, and any sense of conclusion. A ghost is that which always comes back and so never concludes. There will always be one more time; nothing ever goes away. There can never be a last time, even for the late David Bowie.
But if repetition removes a last time, it also removes a first time. When something returns it is always the first time, but it has happened before, and it will happen again. The first time something happens it is not a repetition. It is only a repetition when it happens again. But to repeat, it must also happen again, which means it’s never the last time. A repetition has no first time, no last time, yet it is never the same either. A repetition is a ghost of what came before and presages what will come after. Major Tom in “Blackstar” is a ghost of what came before and what will come after. It’s too late to be late again. Bowie has died but he will die again every time I watch the video, every time I listen to “Blackstar.” And he will die again when I will listen to Blackstar again. Nothing ever goes away.
This is not the first time that Bowie has cut a zero in the fabric of time itself. His album Outside (sometimes written as 1. Outside because it was meant to be first in a trilogy) is obsessed with time, the end time, the apocalypse. The album exists in two versions, the original and a version that includes a Pet Shop Boys remix of the main single, “Space Boy.” What was the song that was removed to make place for this remix? None other than “Wishful Beginnings.” Similarly, the last song on the album, “Strangers When We Meet,” is a reiteration of a song on the soundtrack album Buddha of Suburbia that Bowie felt never got enough attention. Yet if the song has been released before, are we truly strangers when we meet — again? Repetition and first time, repetition and last time. Recursion. Mise-en-abyme.
Bowie was nothing if not a trickster. He had spoken to Brian Eno, collaborator on Outside, about returning to that material and maybe completing this unfinished cycle of albums. Fittingly, this cycle about the nature of time will be indefinitely deferred. The width of a circle that never closes, if time had not stood still. Loops, tears, wrinkles, and cuts were always part of Bowie’s repertoire, experimenting with cut-ups à la William Burroughs and looping time on the drum tracks on Low. Time never stood still for Bowie but always anticipated the next, always folded in the future to the present.
Hauntology is a recursion; it is a recursion of time that dislodges conventional causality. We cannot conventionally perceive time as other than linear and chronological, but that is a limit of our perception, not a statement on time. For quantum entanglement theorists, time does not flow in one direction. For those of us less in tune with quantum mechanics, art becomes the way we can experience the fluidity of time, the recursive nature of temporality. Bowie was always of the future, part of “the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” That will continue, though he has died. Fortunately, as a ghost, Bowie will always be yet to come back.
