Hauntology

How pasts haunt the present; takes a “deconstructive” approach to questions of being, presence, absence. Figure of the ghost.

A spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism.

Where there is history, there is haunting. Being haunted is a condition of living in the world, and ghosts are everywhere, whether we attend to them or not. — Kassandra Spooner-Lockyer & Katie Kilroy-Marac, “Ten Things about Ghosts and Haunting” (2021)

By placing the present in conjunction with the recent past, hauntology highlights the shortcomings of the former, identifying the political failings of the present by returning to those moments when a different path might have been taken, turning points whose promise remains unfulfilled and which continue to offer us hope for the future. — Merlin Coverly, Hauntology (2020)

Being haunted as an affective state?

Ghosts trouble, inhabit, and mediate the borderlands between life and death, past and present. As transient beings, they signal to the living that the boundaries we draw—and which we then naturalize—are unsettled as well. To accommodate ghosts, we must make ourselves accountable to the pasts they bring into the present, even when those pasts are painful, and even when they threaten to unsettle our present and futures. — Kassandra Spooner-Lockyer & Katie Kilroy-Marac, “Ten Things about Ghosts and Haunting” (2021)

The arrival of the ghost (which is also always a return) disrupts linear time, bringing past, present, and future together in unexpected ways. As the past bursts into the present through and alongside the ghost, it makes demands on the future and forces us to contend with time differently. Ghosts disrupt linear time and trouble progressive historical narratives because they reveal multiple, coexisting temporalities and the complex layering of different pasts onto fractal presents and futures. — Kassandra Spooner-Lockyer & Katie Kilroy-Marac, “Ten Things about Ghosts and Haunting” (2021)

Temporal disjunction. Disruption of linear temporalities, where past, present, and future become entangled, and time is out of joint. Uncanny repetitions. Abandoned or decaying spaces.

Cultural memory? Nostalgia and melacholy.

“Digital ruins”? Retrofuturism?

Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds, and others applied it to music in the 2000s. Ghost Box, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, Boards of Canada.

• [!] Look into how hauntology might relate to concepts in software development, such as legacy systems or backwards compatibility.
• [!] Explore the connection between hauntology and Derrida’s concept of “différance”, as a way of understanding where hauntology fits within the larger framework of deconstruction.
• [?] Is hauntology specifically tied to the British cultural experience? Can the concept be meaningfully extended to other geographic and spatial contexts?
• [!] Consider how different cultures understanding ghosts and haunting; this could provide a comparative framework for understanding hauntology across contexts.
• [?] Are hauntological aesthetics and “nostalgia for lost futures” a response to political and cultural impasses of the present?
• [?] Can hauntology be deployed for emancipatory or utopian ends, or does it ultimately reflect a pessimistic, melancholic orientation to culture and history?
• [?] Is hauntology still relevant in the 2020s, or has it been superseded (and, if so, by what)?
• [📚] Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx; Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life; William Gibson’s short story “The Gernsback Continuum”
• [&] See also: counterfactual reasoning, psychogeography, skeuomorphism?

Tags: time

Backlinks

: Colportage : Conjunctural analysis : Latency