fractured lens
Many years ago I discovered the concept known as hauntology while browsing through various ambient tunes on the internet. One video titled Spooky Numbers Station caught my attention. Curious, I listened, and was grabbed by it immediately. Naturally this led to various other hauntology videos, including music from the likes of The Advisory Circle, Belbury Poly, and The Moon Wiring Club among others, and I've been hooked on the stuff ever since. Quite why is still a mystery to me, much like the concept, but what I can say for certain, is that something about it taps into part of my brain, my subconscious, like nothing else.
So what is hauntolgy? Well the blog rouguesfoam.blogspot.com says this:
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. 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. 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. Hauntology describes the haunting of a historicised present by spectres that cannot be ‘ontologised’ away.
Which is a pretty good summing up of the concept and hopefully goes some way to explaining the bulk of the material found here.
In addition you will find original images, sounds, poems, prose and other texts – all influenced by hauntology, if not defining it.
