Introduction
MONSEIUR, LA TRAVESTI, C’EST OBLIGATOIRE!
Riverrun, runoff, overrun, riverran, we all ran, ran to where and ran for why and ran from where and ra-ra-ra-ran-ran-ran. Ran in running rivulets of recaldescent radioactivity, because the radio is always active, recurringly rerunning reflected refractions of infractions from contraptions, because radiosets were once radialcepts and transcepts (not trancepts), and televisors were advisors, man and superman, het and superhetero and superheterodyne, because dynamic is always panic and things that were built for aetheric conjuration and were not aetheric conjuration, because nouns used to be separate and separtist from pronouns and because things used to be built and not conjoured, and conjoured and not bought. Nouns are sounds and kings are things and hosts for ghosts are hostesses in evening dresses (remember those?) on sonezaki j/e run, t/u run w/e run Not Now Not Any More but we did oh yes we did we ran and I ran and you ran, oh how you ran, oh you ran, oyuran.
SOME INDEFINITE DEFINITIONS.
I became aware of the Area of Study which is now generally known as Hauntology in approximately 2014, by which time it was, of course, almost all over bar the bleating. The thinker most identifiable with the discipline had already completed two of the three definitive texts on the subject (‘Capitalist Realism’ and ‘Ghosts of my Life’), and three years later would have completed their third and died by his own hand. In the single bitterest and most ironic contradiction in a field of study characterised by bitter and ironic contradictions, Fisher’s own spectre would be the one that would loom the largest over the discipline.
In fact, I had almost certainly read the expression some eighteen years before that, when I was loaned a review copy of ‘Spectres of Marx’ by my Political Theory tutor in my final University year. I have had a problematic relationship with the thought and theory of Derrida before, during and after reading this particular work, and nothing will ever completely convince me that Deconstruction is not a narcissistic philosophy, amounting to kicking over sandcastles, or stomping on someone else’s painstakingly-constructed cardboard cities; a methodology that self-identifies in the mode of Nietzsche’s Philosophising with a Hammer, or as being in some way Character-Building (even as it lurches around decrying the very notion of Character or characters) but ends up destroying things in mindlessly brutish acts of unproductive annihilation. Because hectoring and overbearing always go along with passive-aggression, deconstruction is loathsomely self-pitying too, in its scolding piety that nothing that actually be truly understood. A very great deal of my distaste for this kind of thing comes from the prescient-with-deconstruction and no-less tiresome and ill-thought co-option of some poorly understood aspects of Quantum Mechanics into popular culture. Since it will be repeated often here, the real unknowns of Quantum Mechanics derive from people just not being good enough at some very difficult mathematics, and not from faeries-and-crystals mysticism. Since I am one of those people whose mathematical ability reached its terminal crisis approximately halfway through Eisburg and Resnick, I know of what I speak, and I suppose my frustration with Deconstruction may well be my inability to understand that, either. However, there is a parallel here. Hauntology – a post-deconstructionist methodology if ever there was one – self-identifies its Rezeptionsästhetik as in part post-punk, and this reproduced the pattern that post-punk (or New Wave, if you will) is in turn characterised as an ethic/aesthetic of reconstruction and rebuilding, after the brutish destructive tendencies of punk rock. A single piece of fall-out what from seems to be a fairly marginal footnote to Derrida’s lifelong work seems to offer more possibilities than the larger monolith.
Furthermore, I was already very, very familiar with many of the cultural touchstones of Hauntology, partly because of my rather sloppily eclectic education which seemed favour both Political Science and Classical Physics as different-equals, and partly because of my own ghostly past as an unapologetic admirer of a particular strand of UK TV drama and independently-produced music. I was not entirely happy with some of the understandings applied to these things, not because I thought that they were wrong per se, but incomplete, or at least not underwritten.
In short, by the time I came to consider a writing, curation and thinking project of my own, Hauntology was, if not played out (not by a long way, it turns out) but sufficiently….not colonised precisely, nor assimilated, but Sufficiently Well Understood that there was little that could be added to the core discipline without running serious risks of lacuna, psuedocentricism or misunderstanding. This was when it became apparent that a divergent, branching or parallel mode of work was needed, and this is also fitting since (as will be seen) an overarching theme of this work will be parallelism and not opposition.
Potentially more troublesome for this project was the fact that, aside from its function as – in simplistic briefness – a Marxist model for understanding the circumstances under which Social Dynamism seemed to halt and cease to progress, and a prescription for the resumption of those processes, Hauntology became an aesthetic or rather a litany of sources. Instead of being a means of understanding historical process, it became, a little too rapidly, another one of those lists of Clever References which are an unfortunate side-effect of Postmodernism in general and Situationism in particular. In seeking to undo ossification, it threatened to represent another form of ossification. Some of the artefacts that were produced under the name of Hauntology, or categorised under it, were delightful indeed, and do not represent any kind of ossification in their own right, but when anything begins to aquire the signifiers of an aesthetic and not a process, it may be a sign that another approach is needed.
What is suggested, then, is a project of an essentially practical nature; one which does not not attempt to deny the debts which it owes to its parent project, nor, for that matter, turn away from it or against it, but to carry out its mission in localised manner, free from the expectations of being an academic discipline. To repeat, it is in no way a rejection of any part of Hauntology or any of its exponents, scholars or advocates, and especially not against the thought which has been categorised as Hauntological, since these have been amongst the most exciting and expository areas of philosophy of the last ten years.
TOWARDS A METAPATHETICS OF TRAGICAL HEGEMONISM.
For reasons which will become clear really quite soon, it seemed appropriate to derive a name for this project from the work of M.R. James. And without any great searching or questing on my part, this one popped into my line-of-sight….
“I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full Term is over, Professor,said a person not in the story to the Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St James’s College.”
The homonynical pun around ontology / hauntology is probably well-enough understood for it to stand not being repeated here, and since this project is neither Hauntology itself, nor ontological in aim, the idea of giving the name of another made-up academic subject which be subjected to the same linguistic refraction, and ends up yielding a piece of nomenclature which is not merely meaningful in the abstract, but very accurately describes the aims and objectives of this project at large proved nigh-on irresistable.
Here is what the hosts of the M.R. James podcast have to say on the subject:
Mike Taylor : Parkins in a Professor of Ontography, it seems. An interesting choice for James because there’s, um, no such things as Ontography, or at least there certainly wasn’t at the time. It wasn’t a subject that wcould be studied. I think, in general, it’s James having at the expense of people who do, kind of, modern subjects. James was very much the traditionalist, y’know, he did his archaeology and his Classics and History. I think Ontography is the old-fashioned equivalent of, y’know, Media Studies or something like that.
Will Ross : I’m ploughing through Micheal Cox’ biography of M.R.James at the moment…
Mike Taylor : That’s hard to find!
Will Ross : It Is hard to find. But the Wandsworth Library Service came up trumps….
Mike Taylor : Shh!! Don’t Tell Everybody!
Will Ross : It came out of the stacks, and it last came out on 27th January 2006, you know who you are. And, yes, I get this impression from james, that his academic pleasure was in amassing knowledge and facts. And when I see a subject like ‘ontography’, it suggests to me an academic subject that is full of theory, a very modern kind of approach to something. Penelope Fitzgerald sums it up as “the study of things as they really are”.
(http://www.mrjamespodcast.com/2012/01/episode-7a-oh-whistle-and-ill-come-to-you-my-lad/)
So here at least the is the origin of the expression. In the spirit of continuance and parallelism, as Hauntology is to Ontology (simultaneously, a meta-subject, a linguistic pun and a piece of deconstruction in its own right), so Hauntography is to Ontography. Or, put another way, I liked the idea of a half-baked branch-subject that was predetermined to be not taken any more seriously than it deserved to be.
The actual imaginative possibilities of whatever Hauntography might be – and it is decided here to characterise it as Craft/Engineering compared to the strict Art/Science of the (naturally) mythological subject of Ontography. In fact, Hauntography may be construed (declined?)(conjugated?) as not merely the practical/vulgar/volkisch mode of Ontography, but as a subject of actual pre-eminence in the Parallel Universe / Thought Experiment already defined or hinted at by the inferences of Hauntology itself. The kind of subject which might have been on the curriculum at the Belbury Poly, or studied at the same institution where Adam Brake did his doctrate work. By definition, therefore, Hautography is a whimsical or capricious process which seeks to make craft objects and not neciserily artefacts of fine art or hard science.
The segment of ‘Ghosts of my Life’ which I spent longest on understanding and unpacking is the main body of Chapter 2, title ‘The Slow Cancellation Of The Future’. Even that title packs a semiotic weight which I could easily write a short essay on in its own right, but the centrality of the text consists of the following arguments: Firstly, That the concept of ‘future’ and therefore ‘futurism’ has been lost amidst the uncertainties of whether there will actually _be_ a future; under the wave after wave of nostalgia in which the Past is exhumed and repackaged, and under an unhelpful byproduct of postmodernism which insists that nothing new can ever serve as anything but commentary, or a list of function-pointers, to already-instantiated objects (I am using the language of computer science here, for reasons of my own, of which more later). Secondly, that we must guard against succumbing to two out of three forms of Left Melancholy: one kind, the Postcolonial kind which longs for an imagined golden age, and which looks outward to some imagined hostile force as the conscious agent of its demise; and another, the Depressive kind which resigns itself to having had the Best that society is ever going to get, and resigning itself to failure. (the third kind, considered redemptive, is the kind which engenders an effort to understand what went wrong, when and how, and the means by which the situation can be repaired or restored. The original text uses the expression ‘shaming’ here, which is an expression that has taken on problematic side-effects since 2012 and which I shan’t be using here.) The Final argument is that, things which are presented Now as completed projects, long-dead, tidily wound-up totalities (very specifically, the soft-Socialist public-service benevolent-state model of provision and economy and education, which may be viewed in parallel to the Soviet Union) were nothing of the sort, and that far from failing and needing to be cleaned up after, were vital and thriving and improving, if very, very imperfect entities until they were curtailed. Note please that this does not fall foul of accusations of postcolonial melancholy because it never assumes that the age in question was Golden; nor that it was ended by an abstract, occulted Hostile Outsider.
In conclusion, the reason all of this is said to be Hauntological is that it represents either a failure to mourn and thus come to terms with a bereavement; or else it considers the Declared-yet-Unfalsifiable Halting of the processes to be ghostly (the Halting is a Hainting, give or take a little-n and a bad typewriter), not least because haltings are demonstrably unfalsifiable, and looping right back around to Derrida again: that if Communism was indeed a Spectre Rising Up Over Europe, and if Communism Is Dead, what exactly is invoked when a spectre dies?
It is worth taking a moment to consolidate exactly what we mean by ‘ghosts’ and ‘spectres’ and ‘hauntings’ here, since they’re expressions that will be coming up a lot. It is understood that these expressions are being used here to refer to a situation where natural causation appears to fail or follow its strict laws inconstantly: when there are effects without cause, or causes without effect. Ghosts, hauntings, the Uncanny, the Wierd and the Unnatural are real and material, but they are not spirits of the dead and do not require special abilities beyond an enquiring mind to fully understand. In fact, it is a self-stated goal of this project to identify Pseudoscience and Mysticism as deliberate counter-revolutionary artefacts implemented with the express purpose of foreclosing understanding of the real, historical processes by which hauting takes place, from the very social groups it most directly affects.
Pseudoscience cannot, in fact, be rehabilitated to the realm of any real form of human enquiry. The aim of Hauntography is by no means to lend, load or otherwise make available credence to Nonmythological artefacts of Confidence Tricksterism such as literally-claimed spiritualism, clairvoyance, mediumship or any invocation of The Paranormal outside the realm of self-identified Fiction. In fact, a very large part of this project is to use every weapon available to science and critical theory to heap scorn and derision on the very material reality of Pseudoscience, and expose it for what it is: a means of engendering anxiety and dependence for the exclusive purpose of obtaining capital. Thinking that you can commune with the Dead, contact aliens, see Bigfoot or derive spiritual strength from crystals is at best self-delusion and more likely an actually harmful and pernicious lie almost inevitably concerned with either obtaining money by false pretenses, or deliberately occulting easily-understandable processes.
SO WHAT IS A HAUNTOGRAPH?
A working Syndrome of a Hauntograph would be something approximate to the following:
A Cultural or Physical Craft Object which has some historical origin in The Haunting brought about by the unresolved mourning for the announced but falsifiable termination of the future.
A Cultural or Physical Craft Object which attempts to resume whatever process.
If a Physical Craft Object, one whose productive processes are clearly described and reproducible, and whose means of acquisition are not Occulted in any way.
If a Cultural Craft Object, one which draws from a source which is not Occulted, which is to say, unavailable, or a rarity, or insulated from commentary.
A Cultural or Physical Craft Object which derives enjoyment from the joissance and frisson of the Occult, the Supernatural, the Wierd and the Uncanny whilst understanding that these things are historical, political and economic forces and not to be materially understood in any other way.
AND FINALLY
The Hauntography project is, above all else, supposed to fun, diverting, playful and interesting. Let’s try not to lose sight of that.