Hauntology

for of all the ways in which the spectral manifests itself in Derrida’s schema, from the economic and the technological to the political, religious and cultural, it is only as a function of time that the concept of hauntology can be fully understood.

Specters of Marx, in which the term hauntology is mentioned only three times,

r the term hantise, translated here as ‘haunting’, also contains ‘the common sense of an obsession, a constant fear, a fixed idea, or a nagging memory’,

t it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.7

“The end of history? The beginning of nonsense!” Margaret Thatcher (1989)2

Mark Pilkington writes: ‘In the mystic haze of late ’60s Britain, T.C. Lethbridge’s ideas would converge with the ley line theories of Alfred Watkins, giving birth to the ‘Earth Mysteries’ movement, and feeding the minds of New Wave psychogeographers Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd (Hawksmoor), Alan Moore (From Hell), and others whose ideas subsequently flowed into the hauntological timestream

One reason why the Apollo moon-landings failed to touch our imaginations is that science fiction got there first, just as it has anticipated so much of our lives, effectively taking all the fun and surprise out of existence.133

Does the future still have a future?

In the thirties and forties people had an intense interest in the future. They saw the future as a morally superior world to the one in which they lived. [...] Yet some time around the end of the fifties, the future somehow lost its hold. I think it died. [...] People certainly lost interest in the future. They began to fear the future.

Ballard’s sense that time has become divorced from culture clearly foreshadowing the emergence of hauntology.