Hauntologies

The following is a brief presentation of the research project I’m embarking on. It falls into two halfs; the first is a theoretical overview, where I trace the origin of hauntology, its connection to other critical movements and terminologies. It focuses primarily on the spectral and is certainly only a very sketchy overview, as there are several areas that still need to be investigated closely, specifically media boundaries, the concept of presence and hauntology’s broader relationship to modernity.

Hauntology is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida in his work Specters of Marx. In it, he invokes not just the ghost of Marx and the opening of The Communist Manifesto but also the ghost of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Two passages from Shakespeare’s play are particularly significant for Derrida: “Time is out of joint” and “To be or not to be”.

“Time is out of joint” is for Derrida the cue to point out the tenuous connection between past, present and future. The past always haunts the present, of course, but equally important so does the future. Some refer to hauntology as “nostalgia for the future” (Ballardian) in an attempt to point out that the introduction of a ghost – in this case, the ghost of Hamlet’s father – creates a tear and a fold in history.
Derrida takes this point further with the quotation “To be or not to be,” which he expresses perhaps most clearly towards the end of his book, stating that

To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration. (161)

Derrida’s point is thus that the very concept of Being is always haunted – not in the sense of the past returning as a kind of return of the repressed, but rather in a more fundamental sense. The origin of anything – ontology itself – is always spectral, is always repetition’s first and last time. Being always carries the ghost within itself, in the sense of a “structural openness” as Colin Davis points out, and he continues to state that the “ghost pushes at the boundaries of language and thought.” (Davis 379)

Hauntology is thus Derrida’s differánce and trace, it is that which cannot be articulated but remains a part of everything in our culture. The presence of Derrida’s specter is a way to make “established certainties vacillate” (Davis 376) and so it is evidently a deconstructive term but it remains significant that he chooses the figure of the ghost and the term hauntology to describe this process which is particularly related to a challenge to linear history and a sense of nostalgia. As Wendy Haslem argues, “Haunting is the effect of modernity. Spectrality emerges from the reproduction and repetition of images…” (Haslem) which suggests that there is a distinctive resonance in the figure of specters, ghosts and haunts.
Indeed, several scholars have pointed out the rise of specters, ghosts, phantasms, haunts and similar forms of the ephemeral and have in different ways pointed to the significance of these figures and metaphors. One important point comes from Fred Botting when he states that “[s]pectrality instead describes ordinary operations of new technologies and their hallucinatory, virtual effects.” (Botting 200) This connects to Botting’s larger argument about the Gothic and the inherently Gothic nature of new technologies, but at the same time we surely also see a Baudrillardian specter of the simulacral effects of technology.

Surely of equal significance, is Jeffrey Sconce’s concept of “haunted media.” In his book Haunted Media, Sconce analyses what he refers to as “media metaphysics” and is particularly interested in the cultural history of electronic presence, a presence which is not an essential property, but a variable social construct which has changed across media history. (Sconce 7) For Sconce, as for Derrida, “haunt” becomes the key figure to question the stability of presence and to point out how technologies and media are caught up in the way we perceive and understand the world – in other words, how we relate to Being and Time. The ontology of media history, for Sconce, is thus clearly a hauntology of media history.

Marina Warner takes up Sconce’s argument and gives a survey of how ghosts, spirits and other ephemeral phenomena – phantasmagorias, to Warner – all crop up as metaphors when new technologies emerge. Her argument follows two concepts: Henri Focillion’s argument that aesthetic forms generate autonomous meanings in the interplay of historical, social, economic and personal circumstances, and Mallarmé’s “logic of the imaginary.” (Warner 11-12) In other words, technology and media generate new ways for the cultural imagination to refashion representations of specters, just as specters, ghosts, etc reconfigure emerging media in specific ways. Warner’s point is that we cannot ignore either side of the equation and that we need to examine the hauntings of media as closely as we examine media themselves.

Much of the same argument, but this time in relation to social life, can be found in Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, where she argues that “Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it.” (Gordon 7) Without specifically invoking Derrida, Gordon’s primary argument is that “that which appears absent can indeed be a seething presence” (Gordon 17) and that the ghost is the sign – the empirical evidence – that a haunting is taking place. For Gordon – and Derrida and me as a hauntologist – the ghost is not simply a dead person but a social figure; a social figure of a dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.

In other words, ghosts are significant because they produce material effects, and it is through the material effects that we may locate the presence of ghosts and analyze the effects of their hauntings. Gordon’s argument for the significance of ghosts is also tied to technology and media for as she states “in a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are led to believe not only that everything can be seen, but also that everything is available and accessible for our consumption.” For Gordon, hypervisibility is “a kind of obscenity of accuracy that abolishes the distinctions between ‘permission and prohibition, presence and absence.’ No shadows, no ghosts.” (Gordon 16)

I shall take it to be the task of the hauntologist to locate the ghosts that lurk in our culture of hypervisibility, to not just locate their absent presence or analyze their material effects – though these are all complementary tasks – but point out how the ghost as a social figure helps us understand the convergence of cultural forms, history and social life. We will do this by opening up the cultural forms we analyze, rather than attempt to catch the ghost. Paraphrasing Gordon, I will argue that cultural texts haunt that which assembles and binds. Hauntological analysis will be a method to interrupt the “presentness of the present” (Weinstock 5) and undermine the fixedness of binary oppositions and the linearity of history.

As is evident from the above, the figure of the ghost has been influential in many different areas, all of which can be considered hauntological efforts. Furthermore, Derrida’s concept has gained critical recognition in various places; most especially in the area of music studies where blogger K-Punk is particularly prominent. For K-Punk, hauntology has been a very suitable term for a distinctive brand of electronic music which relies heavily on sampling.

Indeed, we may now find references scattered across the web to specific albums and bands as ‘hauntological’ and in this way it may be considered almost a genre of music. The term hauntology was first applied to music in 1995 by Ian Penman in an issue of The Wire. The musical genre is a version of ambient and trip-hop, where there is an emphasis on dubbing, and the genre emerged by using samples particularly from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and library music. As a consequence, the sound becomes distinctive and a further relation to haunting is the interest in how the future was imagined in the past. One example of this type of music is Burial – Ghost Hardware

K-Punk refers, in connection to blues and Robert Johnson but I believe it holds true across all media, to the “layers of fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise” which is the spectral part of Robert Johnson’s music. (‘Phonograph blues’) I argue that hauntological analysis will always focus on these layers of fizz, crackle, hiss and white noise that haunts every text – the places where hegemony attempts to assemble and join, for as K-punk goes on these “specters are textural,” we can sense them in the texture of the text. Hauntological analysis is thus sensitivity to these layers of textures.

So, this sensitivity to layers of textures can be said to be the method of hauntology as an analytical tool, which points out that we need to be sensitive to all manners of different layers, not just textual, but also medial, historical, economic and so forth. It is tied to our historical moment, which Jo Collins and John Jervis refers to as “the uncanny grounding of modern selfhood and the social.” (Collins & Jervis 4)
As Jervis points out later, “the spectral can figure a state of ontological undecidability or tension, where there is an insistence, a presence of whatever resists us, recalcitrant to our understanding.” (Jervis 10) Although Jervis talks about the uncanny, it is evident that many of his points apply to hauntology as well, such as history being a stream of disappearing traces (11), the frission of the uncanny (31), the phantasm as the uncanny double of the image (39), but most significantly is his argument that the uncanny is an “unformed feeling” suggesting that our foundation of experience is grasped and figured in aesthetic terms. (Jervis 45) This returns us to both Warner and Gordon, who argue for the vacillation between the aesthetic and the social.

Hauntology is a portmanteau concept indicating that most texts are already portmanteaus themselves, and the task of the hauntologist is to reveal the layers and open up the text for various new meanings that were not clear before. So, let us turn to a number of cases in order to see how that might work in practice. In order to do that, I will present some cases that are papers from conferences I have attended or will attend in the near future.

David Bowie, 1. Outside (Uncanny Media, Utrecht, August 2008)

Despite being one of Bowie’s least-known albums, Outside has consistently had a strong underground following due to its unusual nature: it was made as a collaboration between Bowie and Brian Eno (the first since Bowie’s Berlin-trilogy) and consists of regular rock songs, interspersed with small, spoken-word pieces where Bowie’s voice is altered through the use of plug-ins. Conceived as a trilogy, this first album starts off an unusual murder story: the young girl Baby Grace has been killed in a horrible graphic way, but also in a way which the story’s detective refers to as “art-murder.”

The investigation is what takes up most of the album’s narrative, which is presented both in the form of the songs and the segues (the brief spoken-word interludes), as well as the booklet which accompanies the CD. We meet a variety of characters which Nathan Adler, the detective, interrogates and investigates. We even hear Baby Grace speak to us, despite the fact that she has been killed. This occurs in the segue “Baby Grace: A Horrid Cassette,” indicating how already here we encounter the voice of a ghost. All these characters are portrayed by David Bowie himself, both verbally – altered by the plug-ins readily available in ProTools – and visually in the booklet, where the alteration has taken place with digital imaging techniques.

Bowie haunts the entire album in a variety of forms: what we might call uncanny doubles, since we as Bowie fans can certainly recognize both his voice and his appearance in the various characters. That is not the only Gothic figure of the album as the story itself is narrated out of linear sequence. Not only do we hear Baby Grace after she has been killed but the song “Wishful Beginnings” is the 13th track rather than the first (and the same song is the one which has been left out of the 2nd version of Outside to make room for a Pet Shop Boys remix of the song “Space Boy.”) This winding, labyrinthine narrative suggests the figure of the arabesque which was prominent in Gothic architecture, but also useful as an aesthetic figure.

We are never provided with enough information to solve the puzzle, and the identity of the killer is never revealed. Partly, this is because the trilogy was never completed, but what is more significant is that the way the album is conceived, no matter who the killer actually is it will be David Bowie in one of the performances. Indeed, Bowie is both victim, investigator and perpetrator all at the same time. This conflation of identity is hardly coincidental but rather part of the album’s uncanny nature. It is also the album’s uncanniness which suggests a hauntological analysis.

Certainly, time is out of joint on this album. Not only does it take place on around New Year’s Eve 1999, on the threshold of the year 2000, but the narrative is also out of joint in its non-linear sequence. Furthermore, the opening segue tells us that Leon cuts a zero in time, “a zero in the fabric of time itself.” The figure ‘0’ both signifies nothingness (because it is zero, naught, nil) and thus the extermination of time, but it also suggests infinity because it is an unbroken circle with no beginning or end. In this way, it becomes fitting that the murder is never solved, since this means that the narrative folds in upon itself and we as listeners are left to wander around the arabesque labyrinth that the album creates.

Donnie Darko and The Butterfly Effect (ICFA, Orlando, March 2009)

Time is also the central concern of my next investigation, although here we are dealing with two films – time travel films, in fact. While there are differences between these two films – Donnie Darko and The Butterfly Effect – there are several significant similarities. They both emphasize traumatic experiences as the locus of the time travel episodes. Earlier periods are re-visited and altered in order to work through the traumatic episodes. In both films, the protagonists suffer from psychological traumas, which cause their perception of and relation to reality to be different. Thus, rather than presenting time in spatial terms, as is typical of time travel narratives, these two film insist as much on a psychological view of time; a space of mentality which needs to be confronted before time can be properly re-adjusted.

In Donnie Darko, Donnie’s sleepwalking results in him surviving a jet engine crashing int his room simply because Donnie is not there. His survival causes a number of problems for the people close to him, and Donnie needs to change time in order to save those he loves. Similarly in The Butterfly Effect, Evan is traumatized as a child as are his childhood friends, and only be traveling back in time to change these traumatic experiences, can time be set right.

Both films thus articulate the paradox between free will and determinism which time travel narratives so often oscillate between. I suggest that only be reading these two films as trauma texts can we properly understand read their wounds of time out of joint. The repeated scenes of earlier events take on uncanny intensification in the way they are changed into new and better events. As both films end with the death of the time traveling protagonist (although, only in the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect does this literally happen), we see how man can conquer time, but not in a technological sense of inventing time machines. Instead, the time traveling is traumatic and can only be stopped by the sacrifice of the time traveler. No longer is history a process of becoming, but a process of unbecoming, of ceasing to be.

So, in the way that the past haunts the present life of the protagonist, forcing the protagonist to go back in time in order to fix the mistakes evidently made, so in the same way can the protagonist be said to be a specter of history; the traumatic event should have properly killed the protagonist but failed to do so. Consequently, the protagonist lives on and time is out of joint.

These two time travel films thus explicate that while trauma is typically seen as a destructive repetition, to use Cathy Caruth’s phrase, there is also the potential for positive transformation. The device of time travel is used in these films to break free of “the formation of history as the endless repetition of previous violence.” (Caruth, 63) The repetition of previous violence can thus be broken by re-visiting the episode of original trauma, so in this way the time travel can be seen as a way of recovering from history.

The narrative sequence of the both films are thus broken down and re-arranged; history is challenged and revised in ways that are considered as healing. Symbolically, the time travel becomes a way to set things right again, to recover from the trauma that haunts not just the protagonist, but all the characters involved, even though they never realize it.

Don DeLillo, Falling Man (CEA, Pittsburgh, March 2009)

Continuing on the topic of hauntology and trauma, I turn to Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, where although war does not explicitly feature in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, it haunts the entire narrative as the specter which sets actions in motion. 9/11 is the traumatic event which slowly falls apart as access to it becomes impossible.  The lives of the novel’s characters fall apart, and the event haunts them as they fail to to reintegrate the memory of 9/11. As Cathy Caruth argues, drawing on the works of Paul de Man, the loss of connection to traumatic experience results in a referential loss, free of the weight of reference. The figure of the falling man literally revisits them in the performance artist who falls from buildings as a ghost from the past. His literal falling is meant to be a lifting of the trauma experienced by the onlookers, a way for them to grasp their own survival, to read the wound, as it were, of the unknowability of survival.

A synthesis of trauma theory and hauntology will allow us to explain the destructive repetition of the history of violence set in motion by traumatic events. We can thus begin to explain how the traumatic event is in itself already shot through with this destructive repetition – that trauma is a haunt/ing: an origin and a recurrence. DeLillo’s novel explicates the experience of trauma in the way the fall of the towers and the people falling from them spread into the lives of the survivors and become the guiding metaphor for the way they live on. The conflict of event and memory of the event which stands central for DeLillo’s novel reveals how the metaphors of war permeate and haunt the traumatic origin, how these metaphors inevitably fail our search for an external referent to make sense of the traumatic origin. In the end, direct reference is lost but reintroduced in the figure of falling: the falling man, the falling lives of the characters and the fall of meaning into entropy, DeLillo’s guiding metaphor.

DeLillo’s entropy creeps in through the uncanny presence of Falling Man; the meaning of the event is slowly emptied as it is repeated over and over again. Yet this is also specifically the haunting which Falling Man reveals. So, the event is ripped from its “proper” context and we see how the trauma becomes constitutive of the lives of the surviving characters. Hauntology reveals this constitutive fact of the trauma and how repetition works for the characters, emptying meaning from their lives.

Tom Waits, Bone Machine (IGA, Lancaster July 2009)

Tom Waits’ album Bone Machine sounds like an apocalyptic vision, the clattering of percussion sounds like a dance of skeletons, while Waits’ gravely voice sounds like a necromancer conjuring ghosts of both past and future in a dance macabre of images that haunt America. The album is itself a bone machine, a thing stitched together with all the scars showing and so the monstrosity of Wait’s album articulates the specters that surround an imminent apocalypse. Bone Machine starts with the Earth dying, then moves across a Gothic landscape of barns, empty highways to the allure of the west coast and ends with a plea to never grow up in this terrible world.

I see this album as a hauntological and spectral album where Gothic media images are conjured up to provide a spectral America, and to show how much haunts, specters and ghosts have always been part of American national imagination, as Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock argues in the collection Spectral America. As a media monster, the album disrupts the its own present time of being (as it is being heard) with scrambling, clanking sounds that do not seem to fit, yet is part of the album’s spectral sound. As a narrative monstrosity, it shambles along an apocalyptic path tearing at the foundations of America to reveal traces that are often covered up, the parts of America so rarely mentioned but which has been part of Tom Waits’ career.

By figuring the American mythology as a specter, Waits reveals that “there’s a world going on – underground” (Waits, “Underground”) and Waits himself can be said to be in the position of the mediator or perhaps phrased better as the shaman – Waits’ increasing popularity is indicative of the fact that he brings certain things to light in mainstream culture. From one perspective, it is precisely the spectral nature of the “rain dogs” that wander urban streets at night, but it is also a challenge to mainstream musical production.

Waits’ love for the “fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise” of sound production is well-known and his voice bears the same texture as a well-scratched record, worn with use. These haunting sounds of the production are emphasized rather than smoothed over. The assembling and joining is thus revealed, in the same way that Waits points to the flip side of American mythology.

Conclusions

As is evident from the above, hauntology is mostly useful for texts that are reflexively aware of their own ontological instability. This is hardly surprising, seeing as how hauntological research is interested in the places where texts are assembled and joined. In other words, hauntology is best suited in the case of texts that are at least partially transgressive and subversive. We should not assume that this only applies to ideological texts, even though Derrida connects hauntology to hegemony, but instead keep in mind that it applies to all forms of transgression and subversion, including those that challenge textual and media boundaries. Hauntology allows us to open up and transform the texts in order to better understand them and our relation to them.

Also, while the texts I have chosen are recent texts, I hope that it is also evident that hauntology applies to a broad range of types of texts; it is not an approach limited to one specific cultural form but it is one which – at least as I have used it – is mostly useful for some kind of media/text analysis.

Works Cited

• Ballardian, “‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection”, from <http://www.ballardian.com/simon-reynolds-on-the-ballard-connection>, accessed February 16, 2009.
• Botting, Fred,  “Gothic Culture”, The Routledge Companion to Gothic, Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.), London: Routledge, 2007.
• Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
• Collins, Jo & Jervis, John, Uncanny Modernity, Houndmills & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• Davis, Colin, “État Presént, Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms” in French Studies 59(3), 373-379, 2005.
• Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international, London: Routledge, 1994.
• Gordon, Avery F., Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis & London: Minnesota UP, 1997.
• Haslem, Wendy, “Traces of Gothic Spectrality in New Media Art” in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 5, December 2008 <http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/gothicspec.html>, accessed February 16, 2009.
• Jervis, John, “Uncanny Presences” in Uncanny Modernity, Jo Collins and John Jervis (eds).
• K-punk, “Phonograph blues”, <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.html>
• Sconce, Jeffrey, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham & London, Duke UP, 2000.
• Warner, Marina, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
• Weinstock, Andrew (ed), Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, Madison: Wisconsin UP, 2004.