Future Less Vivid

In recent months, I’ve made it a bit of a sideline project to explain certain important concepts alongside my normal commentary – I’ve gone over Jouissance and the Accursed Share; I’ve talked a bit about Naomi Klein’s usage of “shock” and consensus decision-making, and I even found time to discuss the Big Other. Now, I want to turn my attention on something a bit more directly: Hauntology.

I sat down to write this piece principally because it’s been a running joke in one of the facebook groups that I’m in to post an image or meme and caption it with the question “is this hauntology?” It never actually is. What is Hauntological, almost depressingly so, is the recent melt-down over images of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the met gala wearing a dress with a social democratic slogan on the back – from roughly mid-back to mid-thigh – and their arguments about what Mark Fisher would have said about it. Aside from the fact that this doesn’t matter, as far as I can tell both sides have trotted out quotes from him to support their argument.

Hauntology is neither good nor bad: but invoking the name of one who has passed and arguing that they would have supported your side of an argument is a particularly unhelpful iteration of it.

This is an idea originally coined by Jacques Derrida, picked up and further elaborated on by Mark Fisher, and used in a different sense by China Miéville. Fisher’s definition seems to be the one with the most currency, because it’s the one that articulates a needed concept. Notably, also, it’s one commonly used to explain the feeling of one of our touchstone pieces of media, the computer game Disco Elysium.

Now, Derrida coined Hauntology in a passage where he wrote:

Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost. What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or the presence of a specter, that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual. insubstantial as a simulacrum? Is there there, between the thing itself and its simulacrum, an opposition that holds up? Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the Singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology. This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being (of the "to be," assuming that it is a matter of Being in the "to be or not to be," but nothing is less certain). It would harbor within itself, hut like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves. It would comprehend them, but incomprehensibly. How to comprehend in fact the discourse of the end or the discourse about the end? Can the extremity of the extreme ever he comprehended? And the opposition between "to be" and "not to he"? Hamlet already began with the expected return of the dead King. After the end of history, the spirit comes by coming back [revenant]. it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again. (Specters of Marx, pg. 9, bolding added)

This is book is incomprehensible, like most Derrida. It’s sort of an autopsy of really-existing communism, as evinced by the Soviet Union. As such, it works as a kind of exorcism: putting to rest the monster of the 20th century as Yeltsin stole Russia from underneath Gorbachev.

If I understand it correctly – and I’m the opposite of a Derrida scholar – it seems to suggest that hauntology is a meditation upon something that exists only in the form of simulacrum: an object that exists only as a copy of an absent, merely theorized, original.

Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher picked it up and refashioned it into what the term is now used to mean: a kind of nostalgia for a lost future. A future-less-vivid – if we should do X, then Y would be the case, but we didn’t.

In Ghosts of My Life, Fisher spends a long time converting the Derridian original into a usable concept. He begins a section entitled “Why Hauntology” on page 17, and eventually does his best to explain the original concept with the following:

Hauntology was this concept, or puncept. The pun was on the philosophical concept of ontology, the philosophical study of what can be said to exist. Hauntology was the successor to previous concepts of Derrida’s such as the trace and différance; like those earlier terms, it referred to the way in which nothing enjoys a purely positive existence. Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede and surround it, allowing it to possess such consistency and intelligibility that it does. In the famous example, any particular linguistic term gains its meaning not from its own positive qualities but from its difference from other terms. Hence Derrida’s ingenious deconstructions of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and ‘phonocentrism’, which expose the way in which particular dominant forms of thought had (incoherently) privileged the voice over writing.

However, he then immediately begins to pound on this idea, fashioning it into the shape it would thereafter take, passing through the subgenre of music that had been labeled “hauntological” due to the affinity that certain critics saw between it and Derrida’s writing. In the following section, entitled “Not Giving Up the Ghost”, Fisher states that:

What’s at stake in 21st century hauntology is not the disappearance of a particular object. What has vanished is a tendency, a virtual trajectory. One name for this tendency is popular modernism. The cultural ecology that I referred to above – the music press and the more challenging parts of public service broadcasting – were part of a UK popular modernism, as were postpunk, brutalist architecture, Penguin paperbacks and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In popular modernism, the elitist project of modernism was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist. Particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the present moment was taken up and renewed. Which is to say that, although of course I didn’t realise it at the time, the culture which shaped most of my early expectations was essentially popular modernist, and the writing that has been collected in Ghosts Of My Life is about coming to terms with the disappearance of the conditions which allowed it to exist.

However, he quickly moves on to state, in the next section “Nostalgia compared to what?” that this isn’t simply a longing for a period of social democracy. It’s not about the missing period of history, or about what was but about what could have been. The thinking that there was a time when things could have been different, and what that different future – with its attendant alternate present – might have been like.

From an American context, one can look at the sketches of Gerard K. O’Neill, and his visions of humanity living upon a “high frontier”, dwelling in orbit and beginning to spread beyond the Earth (this was, of course, turned from a utopian vision to a dystopian warzone within three years – O’Neill’s book The High Frontier came in 1976 – by 1979, Mobile Suit Gundam, a seminal anime that depicted war in just such a future as O’Neill envisioned, began broadcasting in Japan.) We can also look at the history of unbuilt buildings the world over – such as deranged plans to construct mile-high skyscrapers or the conceived-of bronze elephant that was going to be where the Arc de Triomphe is now.

Likewise, the loss of the predicted “hot vax summer” that was popularized in the mainstream – where we would all be safe from the virus and ready and willing to engage in risky behavior. The prediction was the product of everyone having a brush with mortality and wanting to celebrate the fact that we are still alive. The disappointment felt by the average person that this did not happen is the affect of hauntology.

However, the most clear-eyed description of it in an American milieu probably comes from Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in the famous “wave speech” section, which concludes:

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

It is not the content of this speech, but the moves behind it which are notable here. There was a time when things might have been different, but now they will only be the same. An attempt was made, and you can see the wreckage if you know where to look.

In short, something is Hauntological when it references the dreams of the past, a nostalgia for a future that never came to be.

Contrasting to the Fisherian definition, Miéville uses Hauntology in a more aesthetic sense, closer to what Fisher called “the eerie” in his media criticism. In the fantastic essay “M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire” (which, admittedly, is largely concerned with defining “the weird” for his purposes, and which I used in conjunction with Fisher in a prior piece), published by the Weird Fiction Review in 2011, he defined the Hauntological as

Hauntology, a category positing, presuming, implying a ‘time out of joint’, a present stained with traces of the ghostly, the dead-but-unquiet, estranges reality in an almost precisely opposite fashion to the Weird: with a radicalised uncanny – ‘something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it’ – rather than a hallucinatory/nihilist novum. The Great Old Ones (Outer Monstrosities, in Hodgson’s formulation) neither haunt nor linger. The Weird is not the return of any repressed: though always described as ancient, and half-recalled by characters from spurious texts, this recruitment to invented cultural memory does not avail Weird monsters of Gothic’s strategy of revenance, but back-projects their radical unremembered alterity into history, to en-Weird ontology itself.

Still, there is a trace of something useful beyond the aesthetic here – Miéville quotes Hamlet by way of Derrida (a famous quote, we used it here), specifically referencing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, referring to it as a “radicalised uncanny”. The familiar within the unfamiliar, the repressed truth within the monster. So here we have a negative conception of Hauntology: the hauntological envisioned as the avenging ghost, the furies at Orestes’s back.

So which of these definitions is best? What is Hauntology?

There are contexts where all are valid, but I’m just going to go out on a limb and guess that – when I hear the term – what is meant is the middle definition. It’s the one most likely to come up, given how much we talk about the future around here, and how much better the future used to be.

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