Hauntology : an introduction to Ghosts of my Life.

Liverpool.

 When I arrived in Liverpool, the YouTube algorithm decided to introduce me to the concept of Hauntology. Hauntology comes from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book The Specters of Marx from 1993. A quick definition being : "Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost." Wikipedia This is to say that the failed ideas and concepts of the past still haunt us today, like how the collapse of the USSR didn't lead to the end of communism. Instead, the ghost of communism haunts capitalism with the notion that there is an alternative to the system that we are currently in. The motivational fear of the Cold War and communists has been internalized (at least in the US and perhaps the UK) to any leftist political movements, with the fear that it is the ghost of Marx that will be resurrected.

 This initial video that I watched led me to tracking down a copy of the book that the author references so much. In reading Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher, he argues that the 21st century is trapped in the 20th century. “While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century[.]” (pg8) Fisher's method of examination in Ghosts of My Life is primarily to look through the lens of pop and underground music culture. The speed of which music is created and applied to the ebbs and flows of culture makes sense that it could be the canary in the coalmine of society. Music and fashion are things that can change with the seasons, while things like architecture take a long time to build and define a time.

 I think that we should not to look at this as a linear progression of time, but instead a web of lines, similar to a thread unraveling and re-raveling. I think that the best representation that I have seen of this is in a two-part episode of Star Trek Voyager (perhaps one of my own ghosts of my life) called Year of Hell. In the story, there is a ship that exists outside of time and has the ability to erase things from time. The overarching issue with this technology is that since time is a thread, if you pull out one of the strings, the whole thing begins to unravel. We see the cause and effect that only those who are on the ship, that exists out of time, carry the weight of all the lost futures of civilizations that never existed. The feeling of this story feels similar to reading hopeful literature from the 19thcentury about the building workers movements, or looking at how the political cartoons from this time are really not dissimilar to the worker struggles of today.

Krenim timeline graphic from Voyager.

 In the novel Germinal by Émile Zola, a failed coal miners strike ends with the hopeful notions that the next generation will learn from this failed attempt to bring about the changes to improve the lives of the workers. The hauntology of this is that when it was written in 1885 that we have now progressed generations and the utopia of a system that supports the workers has still never happened. If anything, the unions that came about in the following couple of generations have been systematically dismantled in the later 20th century. The worker's utopia of our great-great-grandparents was deferred while wealth inequality continues to skyrocket into levels beyond what they could have imagined. As Fisher put it, “[C]ultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.” (pg9) The factory workers of the past have morphed into warehouse distribution workers, while tech has reinvented the repeated consumption of planned obsolescence as subscription services.

Reading Zola with a pot of tea.

 Probably the biggest derailments of progress for workers were the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. The phrase, "lions led by donkeys", from WWI of the working class lions led to their deaths by the donkeys of military leaders feels adept in explaining what happened to the momentum building from Zola's Germinal. This occurred again with WWII and then the following Red Scare, McCarthyism, and dismantling of industries for overseas sweatshops. The sheer level of urban destruction from these two wars also issued forth a unique opportunity to reconstruct major sections of cities that wasn't usually possible except after great fires. (It has been joked that the United States was jealous of all this destruction of European cities, so they destroyed their own cities in Urban Renewal schemes. Of course, the reality and complexity of this is a lot larger, with noting responses to the Great Migration and racist policies to separate the classes and races in US cities. For example, the location of most Interstate construction through cities usually corresponds to an historic low-income, immigrant, or Black neighborhoods.)

When living in Portland, Maine I noticed they suffered from an excess of blank lots in the city center due to Urban Renewal policies of the second-half of the 20th century.

A ghost of Liverpool at the base of the Anglican Cathedral.

 Living in Liverpool has provided me with noticing those scars of war firsthand. Liverpool was the most heavily bombed city in the UK outside London. It housed the seaport for where goods would enter the island, so it was a strategic bombing to prevent the island from receiving support. Time feels jumbled as blank spots in the city center are left as rough gravel lots or small sections architecturally transverse quickly over large time periods. At one point I made a friend at a pub who, while talking about this feeling, suggested a trip to a beach just north. As a means of slowing the erosion of the beach, the city of Liverpool had dumped the remains of ruined buildings and then covered it with soil and grass. As the erosion continues, elements of Liverpool's history are slowly unburied and beaten by the waves. It is a beach of bricks rounded smooth, telling a forgotten history. Rummaging through the rubble, one can find old stone carvings for what could be assumed was once part of a grand building. The hours of labour put into creating such elements are now out of their context and slowly being erased by salt water. My friend who told me about the beach said that in one of their visits that they came across an old graveyard headstone lost amongst the rubble. These ghosts of Liverpool have form, but have lost their context.

Chunks of Liverpool's past beaten by the daily waves of time.

 Time marches forever forward, but the ideas of our past and our lost futures haunt us. Fisher argues that should be seen not as a depressing negative take on reality but be allowed to fuel our desires for a better world. “This refusal [to give up on a desire for the future] gives the melancholia a political dimension, because it amounts to a failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism.” (pg21) The realities of living within capitalism might have deferred our dreams of a worker's utopia, but they haven't eliminated our ability to dream of such a thing. In the 2022 introduction to Ghosts of My Life, Matt Colquhoun wrote, “[Fisher] seemed fascinated by a younger generation with no memory of the Cold War or its immediate aftermath. But young progressives are similarly less aware of the other failed leftist projects that defined our previous century and the potentials that still lie in wait amongst them. The ‘harsh Leninist superego’ of establishment centrists, declaring everything has already been tried, only fuels the young’s defiance. Capitalism makes these failed projects more accessible than ever, after all. They float incongruously through popular culture and the churning maw of internet culture. But it is up to us to seize them, and place them once again in tension with one another, denaturalizing our persistent retromania.” (pgsXXIII-XXIV)