I like drinking coffee. More than that, I like gazing over the half finished coffee sitting in my cup getting colder as I leave it on my desk for the rest of the day. Getting in and out of my library, I stare at my cup with dried stains on its surface. It is a remembrance, a gift sent to me from my peaceful morning. The inexplicable desire I had for a hot beverage just a couple of hours ago now hangs on to my cup. Now the day starts to get hot itself, and my energy drains parallel with me stepping into my responsibilities. The cup stands as a statue, since statues often remind us of our past. Our individual belongings and nation-wide effigies, remembrances and memories, all those phenomenons are visitors from the dimension of phantoms.

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You would imagine that the scientific era would consist less of phantoms and ghosts, and that we would not be haunted anymore by our past. But according to Jacques Derrida, modern technology only increased the power of ghosts on us: “instead of diminishing the age of phantoms as a certain prenatal age, modern technology of images enhances the power of ghosts.” Ghosts can be anything that belongs to the past (or the future) but still affects our present. Ontology is the study of being; yet there are things that are very real, but not actual or materialized. Thus accordingly, Derrida coined the term “hauntology”. (1)

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What is hauntology?

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Hauntology “refers to the persistence of elements from the past, in the manner of ghosts.” It is a pun which combines haunting with ontology. The best way to understand it is the concept of ideas. Some ideas just appear in our world, and even if they don’t gain dominance or power in political or artistic spheres, they still hang on. Communism can be an example of this. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state that the spectre of communism is haunting Europe. It means that communism at that time is there as an idea, which affects the actions of people, but is not the dominant form. On a related note, Francis Fukuyama later claims that future is dead. Now that neoliberal capitalism is everywhere and Soviet Union is dissolved, we cannot imagine an alternative. Because of that, the present does not pass and the future cannot form. We also see this in the slogans of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that tell us “there is no alternative.” (2)

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The concept of hauntology is derived from Derrida’s deconstruction method, “in which any attempt to locate the origin of identity or history must inevitably find itself dependent on an always already existing set of linguistic conditions.” (1) What we conceive of as future or past is very much influenced by our understanding of them in the present. This is why the image of stains helps me understand hauntology. Stains are made by an act that took place in the past, but they themselves persist on to the present. If we think of our present as the layers of an onion, we can see that there is no pure origin of the events but rather the echoes of past as waves, similar to the depiction of time by Virginia Woolf.

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In Specters of Marx, Derrida writes that “Haunting is historical but it is not dated.”

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Sense of time is not completed, it is broken. Derrida quotes Hamlet and says that “time is out of joint.” Ghosts cannot be fully present, but instead they return. It can be the return of primal impulses as in Freud. When he says that the death instinct pushes us to move forward, it can be interpreted as these instincts return, and allow us to cultivate the knowledge in the future. If we think of it, neither the death instinct nor development is present. Instead they elude the present time, but they still affect it. As ghosts, these phenomenons are in a paradoxical state. “What is not can have very real effects, a presence though virtual and insubstantial.”says Derrida. It is indeed related to virtuality; both in the way we understand the word and in its philosophical use. 

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Future belongs to ghosts

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Mark Fisher, in his paper “What is Hauntology” (2012) points to the two possible directions hauntology can take: one foot being in the present while the other is in the future or the past. Things may pass but be still effective “as a virtuality, like the traumatic compulsion to repeat.” Or things do not yet come but respectively are still effective in the virtual as “an attractor, an anticipator shaping current behavior, an idea.” (3) This is more prevalent today as we can multiply the platforms of virtuality with new media. And according to Friedrich Kittler, the media always gives way to ghost phenomena since the events presented do not succeed one another in a traditional fashion. (4) We distribute ourselves and can be in all places at all times via recording devices. We can pivot certain events and shape how we remember our past, thus shaping our individual history and identity alongside. We also make contributions to cultural memory by leaving our traces at the places we visit, in the forms of photos and comments, from which future visitors create an idea about those locations. While highlighting some parts of our lives, some get missed by. For example, we cannot imagine how it was to sustain a relationship before and after the marriage by looking at someone’s wedding photos in their Facebook timeline. These things still elude such representation.

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Ghosts use electronics to spread out. According to Fisher, “To be haunted by a ghost is to remember something you have never lived. For memory is the past that has never taken the form of the present.” If we think about it, what is the act of watching a movie anyway, if it isn’t taking hostage someone else’s fake memories? We are the agent of the act of watching; but according to the virtual world we are watching, we are only an observer. The film was made with the consideration of such observers but it was not specifically us that the film was intended to. We only exist as an idea, the idea of an observer and thus are stuck between the being and non-being.

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There was a time in which writing was a new experience. Plato argued in those times that writing destroys memory because humans don’t contain the experiences or ideas within the limits of their brain, but transfer them to a piece of paper. Yet Derrida argues that memory has always been writing; and through that written and technical memory, we constitute the living memory.  Teche means the thing that makes life, it is what makes things appear. It is also what made possible the invention of man. Thought “becomes possible with the assemblage of hand, tool, language, speech.” This is why our individual memory follows that of the technical. Through creation we also invent who we are. (5)

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Memory is associated with the transmission of knowledge through time, escaping its historical boundedness. Bernard Stiegler theorizes that “digital, social and spatial media as techniques that externalize knowledge such that it can be transmitted across time and space. Writing a letter, drawing, tweeting or sharing a photo through Instagram are all techniques that connect our knowledge and action in the present moment to knowledge and possible action in a future moment and open the possibility of collective uptake of individual memory.” (6)

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History is made up of contingencies and ruptures, a pool of possibilities from which individuals or groups choose. A story usually takes these singular events and composes them into a linearity. Those who don’t get to be picked are lost in time and space. Or are they? There were lots of depictions of the future, diverging from one another in the 20th century. Even though most of them failed in accurately predicting the future, they did not just die out. Instead they are nowadays consumed as fiction in novels and movies; or are taken as forms and structures which lead to a whole different aesthetics and music production. They were brought back into the circulation of content. (Fisher,2012)

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We can see the best examples within the internet. Most of the content and artistic structures that were found and became popular in the late twentieth century are still present today. Some critics even argue that culture cannot keep up with the acceleration of technology nowadays. It is said that in the past, technology allowed new cultural forms. But according to Frederick Jameson, 80’s revivalism is in high demand now. Thus, retrofuturism and pastiche find a place for themselves in today's cultural atmosphere.
 

Music and Cinema

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What would it be like to not have most of the genres we have today in the music industry? What would it feel like to be surprised by a combination of notes, or some melody that you have never heard before, because of the fact that it did not exist? According to Mark Fisher, that was the situation of the West in the 60s and onwards. Especially the 60s and 70s were “the age of popular modernism” and “made it feel as if newness was infinitely available.”

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Mark Fisher states that “by 2005 or so, it was becoming clear that electronic music could no longer deliver sounds that were futuristic.”(Fisher, pg16) We can talk about vaporwave in that regard which is a type of music that is heavily reliant on the music that has already been created. Vaporwave takes individual pre-existing pieces of music and slows them down or mixes them up with other compositions and presents itself as a new piece. Burial for example, searches youtube and collects covers of pop songs, and some inserts of other music; and then forms his own music on this basis. Vaporwave not only uses the music from these preceding periods (mostly 80s and 90s), but also the cultural artifacts these periods came up with. Palm trees followed by a sunset, Roman architecture and especially statues, outrun games and glitches, fonts and certain colors are all part of the creation process. We can arguably say that this music is kneaded with melancholy and “preoccupied with the way in which technology materialised memory.” Mark Fisher continues his argument by saying that while the 20th century made us feel like newness was infinite, when it came to the 21st century we were basically exhausted. The sense of finitude dominated within capitalist realism which meant that we couldn’t imagine any other way of life except the one we were in. Even the escapes were commodified. So new things are produced now only through imitation and pastiche of old forms. (7) (8)

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