Art that permits a hauntological reading would facilitate this process of haunting.Ī hauntological effect in artTake a look at this picture:Īww – a young lad lounges on vividly green grass in total sunlight in apparently blissful, Arcadian communion with a cute woodland animal. Hauntological spectres come to bother us and our images from any zone of deficit lying between things as they were / are / will be and things as they are thought or hoped to have been / be / be in the future, thus history haunts (Marxist) ideology, and (Marxist) ideology haunts history theory haunts practice and practice haunts theory, Utopia haunts reality and reality haunts Utopia, and so on. Here the haunting metaphor can be extended: traditionally, a spectre invades the present to redress a balance there, to warn the present concerning the future. ![]() Or they can be linked to the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan and Žižek – the spectres Derrida discusses conceivably residing in an area beyond the abilities of the Imaginary and the Symbolic to reflect and describe the Real. It can easily be linked to the general methodology of deconstruction Derrida pioneered – as metaphors, spectres, being neither one thing or the other, challenge basic binary oppositions like ‘alive / dead’, ‘present / absent’ and ‘past / present’ and so are ‘deconstructive’ in nature. Hauntology describes the haunting of a historicised present by spectres that cannot be ‘ontologised’ away.Īs is often the case in Derrida’s writing however, ‘hauntology’ is a concept that’s arguably better suited to interpretation than strict definition. The word ‘hauntology’ is a pun on the word ‘ ontology’ (both words sound almost identical in Derrida’s native French) and describes the problematic, intangible and paradoxical ontology that such spectres, in their incessant haunting, pose for discourse on history. ![]() Derrida challenged the opinion held by some commentators that Marx’s theories had been effectively defeated and liberal democracy had triumphed (which was Francis Fukuyama’s argument in The End of History and The Last Man), and proposed that Marx would continue to haunt history, just as ‘the spectre of communism’ was described as haunting Europe at the opening of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. What is hauntology?The word was first coined by philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, which began life as his contribution to a conference that asked the pertinent question ‘whither Marxism?’ following the dissolution of communism in Eastern Europe. I hope that’s constructive, but in the end it’s just that I’m very interested in the parameters and problems of hauntology as a way of looking at art, I’m keen to pass on some observations and I’m really into writing about it. My main aim here is to discuss the famously hauntological in more detail and expand the hauntology aesthetic to cover more music and particularly art, and secondly to provide an introduction for anyone interested in one. Though I’ve needed to start from a personal interpretation of the subject of ‘hauntology’ (as the aesthetic consequences of Derrida’s term and not just a specific musical style) it shouldn’t be taken as a (re)definition, and though I’ve been relatively thorough, what I present is clearly far from comprehensive or encyclopaedic and doesn’t constitute (god forbid) a ‘hauntological canon’. What follows isn’t intended, even by implication, as a response or challenge to any of the theory and debate on hauntology that’s developed since January 06, but rather as a contribution in parallel to it. I was going to do this divided up into standalone instalments, but since it made sense to include it in a four-part series with other pipeline essays, I’m posting this all in one go (needless to say, it’s ‘make a cup of tea long’, but it’s still in bitesize chunks). Actually it was when a friend pointed out that the aesthetic connection between Boards of Canada and Ariel Pink I’d been pondering was being discussed online and there was a whole record label devoted to something similar (Ghost Box) that I first started following Dissensus and the network of blogs surrounding it. ![]() ![]() I’m all too aware that it’s no longer 2006, the year to blog about hauntology, but I’ve been planning to write a piece like this since the summer of that year, initially for a student magazine that found the idea a bit niche and long-winded (me? ridiculous), and in the end that plan fell through. Download this as a high-quality mp3 and listen elsewhere by clicking the arrow on the right of the player. Here you can listen to this blogpost as spoken word and together with the musical examples (this doesn't include the areas about visual art). Rouge's Foam - Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.
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