Hauntology 101; Wyrd Dreams from a Thwarted Past

I feel a little apprehensive in approaching the subject of Hauntology as it's a philosophy that for quite a while I struggled to understand, and even now I see it as one whose emphasis changes depending on whose definition you are reading. To some it's a carefully thought out proposition, to others it seems to reflect no more than a taste for 60s and 70s folk horror. And yet it is a philosophy which, in its essentials, aligns so closely with my own outlook on our culture and its recent history that I feel an almost evangelical need to describe my understanding of the idea and how it inspires and informs my own worldview. My own description will inevitably be less articulate than those who have written at length about Hauntology, and while that is a source of some regret, I feel a genuine comfort knowing that the ideas are out there and in such a well-articulated format.

Hauntology is fundamentally about the persistence of historical ideas and forms to 'haunt' the present day. The term derives from a 1993 work by the French Marxist philosopher Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, in which he discusses the persistence of Marxist ideas in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama's declared 'End of History'. The idea of 'haunting' is a nod to the opening sentence of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto of 1848 - "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism". It is also a pun - hauntology in Derrida's native French is a virtual homophone of ontologie, the study of being.

A term used to describe the supposed survival of Marxist ideas may not strike us as particularly relevant. It was, however, picked up by a different writer to use in a wider cultural context.

Mark Fisher was a Marxist writer, commentator and philosopher based at Goldsmiths in the University of London. Beginning his writing career as a blogger going under the handle k-punk, in 2009 he published his first major work, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, a work whose premise was highly reminiscent of Fukuyama's End of History. With a title based on a quote by Britain's first neoliberal Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the book argued that the end of the Soviet Union had resulted in a triumph of capitalism so overwhelming that it has led to "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it". This has resulted, in short, to a major contraction of the range of options that was once thought available to human civilisation. Whereas at one time capitalism might have been regarded as just one of the multiple potential ways of organising societies and economies, it is now the only one, and all political and economic discussion is regarded as having to take place within that limited space - to the extent that even anti-capitalist movements have been compelled to shift away from promoting alternative systems and toward instead mitigating capitalism's worst effects. Like Fukuyama, Fisher saw our age as one in which there were no longer any competing ideologies. What he calls Capitalist Realism has so captured public thought that there is no longer any forum in which anti-capitalist ideas act as the antithesis to capitalism that they once did; and the younger generation, in contrast to earlier times such as the late 1960's or the late 1970's, appear to have stopped even considering alternatives to a society moulded around hypercapitalism.

To Fisher we saw this in action quite spectacularly during the financial crisis of 2008. Because Capitalism was the only game in town, and because of the big banks' central role within capitalism, to let them fail was simply inconceivable. It was necessary therefore for states to bail out the banks on a massive scale, a phenomenon they called "quantitative easing", without regard for the consequences for everybody else; the system and its neoliberal base survived (possibly stronger than ever given the emphatic government action and what it told us about governments' determination to not let the system falter), but for Fisher the end result has not benefitted everyone: "The only powerful agents influencing politicians and managers in education are business interests. It's become far too easy to ignore workers and, partly because of this, workers feel increasingly helpless and impotent. The concerted attack on unions by neoliberal interest groups, together with...the move towards casualisation, just-in-time production, globalization... has eroded the power base of unions". A systemic global pandemic of mental illness is, to Fisher, just one of the prices we have had to pay for capitalist realism and the idea that there is no alternative.

The wider cultural impact of Fisher's Capitalist Realism is explored more closely - and more accessibly - in his 2014 work Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. There was a trajectory to the development of society and culture (or, at least, Western society and culture) before the triumph of capitalist realism - a seeming journey towards a modernist, progressive, perhaps even a utopian future driven by the postwar optimism that gave us, in the UK, the welfare state and the flowering of the garishly polychromatic counterculture of the 1960s. This journey was brought to an end by the complete dominance of neoliberal capitalism, which instead shunted us all down a sideline into a dystopian polycrisis of massive inequalities, runaway climate change and environmental collapse. The thwarted expectations of those postwar decades are the "Lost Futures" of the book's title and Fisher refers to the result as "the slow cancellation of the future". The material realities of the new 'post-Fordist' economies and the cultural fallout from the 'deflation of expectations' has led to an environment in which genuine innovation has been replaced by the tendency of popular culture to rehash its past. Buried under 'a superficial frenzy of newness', the 'jumbling up of time, the montaging of earlier eras' ia now 'so prevalent that it is no longer even noticed'.

Fisher presents this regurgitation of older work largely in the context of music. He posits a thought experiment which had struck me too on numerous occasions:

"Imagine any record released in the last couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It's hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music have really changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s...Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of 'nostalgia'. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia..."

He compares the current situation with that at the end of the last season of the old (1979-82) UK TV show Sapphire & Steel. For those who have never watched the show (where on Earth have you been?), it was a wonderfully eerie and perplexing horror/sci-fi programme about a pair of interdimensional operatives named Sapphire and Steel (played to perfection by Joanna Lumley and David McCallum) who work for a mysterious authority whose role is to investigate circumstances in which the normal flow of time is broken by previous periods bleeding into the present. All the operatives are named after elements, and yes, Sapphire and Steel are not elements but we really didn't care. The series ended rather disconcertingly with the main characters trapped in an old cafe from the 1940s that seemed to be trapped in space and where nothing would ever happen or change. As there were no further episodes filmed we can only assume that they are there still and forever, and Fisher regarded this endlessly unchanging limbo as an analogy for his 'slow cancellation of the future'.

The association of Hauntology with musical trends was shared by the music critic Simon Reynolds and was the theme of his 2011 book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. It also helped to give rise to a whole genre of 'Hauntological Music' whose artists attempt to evoke the past by utilising the "spectral sounds of old music technology" - library music, film and television soundtracks, educational music, snippets from electronic and folk music sources - and capture a kind of aural folk memory.

It is here that the concept of Hauntology ceases to be merely theoretical and becomes of interest to the cultural commentator and the explorer of the lost worlds of the past. Fisher opens his book with the image of Sapphire and Steel trapped in their old cafe lost between the dimensions, and he moves on to identify other cultural touchstones that illustrate his views on cultural 'hauntings' - the music of Joy Division and the spy novels of John Le Carre are further examples. And this is one of the appeals of Hauntology - once you recognise the 'folk memory' you feel can be helpfully evoked in a hauntological context, you are pretty much free to identify for yourself the cultural touchstones that have stood along the way.

For most writers who identify as hauntologists these touchstones are in a category that we would normally associate with folk horror. In Stephen Prince's very entertaining work A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields: Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology, based on his hauntology AYitC blog, frequent references are made to such works as

• Penda's Fen, a 1974 Play for Today about an adolescent boy called Stephen whose hallucinatory encounters with the Anglo-Saxon king Penda and other figures of local Malvern folklore form part of an exploration of England's mystical and pagan past.

• Children of the Stones, a UK childrens' TV series from 1977 in which a time rift opens in a village set in the middle of a megalithic stone circle.

• The Changes, another UK childrens' series from 1975 in which the population of Britain are driven by a sudden unbearable noise to destroy all machinery and technology and return the country to a pre-industrial state where anyone even suspected of continued use of technology is regarded with suspicion.

• The Wicker Man. Robin Hardy's classic 1973 folk horror film in which Edward Woodward, as Sergeant Howie, travels to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle in search of a missing girl only to find the locals worship pagan gods who demand sacrifices.

• Any of a number of British Public Information films of the 1970s which often featured dark and sinister themes, including the famous "Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water" film of 1973 to which Donald Pleasance provided the voiceover.

We are here I feel not so much in the territory of cultural hauntings but personal ones, aspects of 1970s popular culture whose now eerie and unsettling 'otherness' mark them as belonging to a different age and 'another' Albion. Prince writes that an early description for his AYitC website was as follows:

"A set of year-long journeys through and searching for an expression of an underlying unsettledness to the bucolic countryside dream; an exploration of the otherly pastoralism, the patterns beneath the plough, pylons and among the edglands: a wandering about and through the trails of things that have influenced, inspired and intrigued me along the way, which will possibly take in the further flung reaches of work with its roots in folkloric concerns and what has been labelled hauntological culture"

It's a vague definition and yet, to one who is of a similar age and familiar with his references, to one who has sat and watched, with hands over the eyes when necessary, programmes like The Stone Tape or Witchfinder General or the semi-regular BBC adaptations of the old M R James horror stories, no explanation is necessary. We are wandering so far from Derrida and Marx now that perhaps we should not be using the same term to describe this much more personal phenomenon, and yet it is one that feels right.

I feel that I have identified with so much of what I have tried to describe here for most of my life. Above all perhaps that sense of history thwarted. As a keen student of history in the 70s and 80s I grew up with what became known informally as the Whig View of History - that it was all a progression towards an end, the Whig version of which was the perfection of the British constitutional monarchy. This was the history lampooned by Sellar and Yeatman who could claim that their work, 1066 And All That, contained "103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates." More immediately though there was a feeling that things were getting better, each generation was better off and more free and less subject to arbitrary misfortune than their parents', and the postwar consensus seemed the apogee of all that - we had come through the collective trauma of a total war and were, rightly, reaping the benefits. No matter how materially deprived my family was, I felt the world was essentially a benign place.

And then around about the end of the 1970s that sense of a historical progression towards the sunlit uplands all came to an end and we were forced to confront the reality that there is no teleological progression in history and just because things had seemed to be improving doesn't mean that they would continue to do so. I do feel a sense of lost future and I do look with fondness on those weird old products of that last doomed decade or so when as a civilisation we could look to the future with curiosity and hope. I feel Fisher's cultural haunting of an age where nothing feels really new, and I feel very much Prince's more personal haunting of the weird old England where there were fiends in the furrows right on the edge of our vision. I also feel that for someone who has innately felt this, no definition of Hauntology is necessary, and conversely, for someone who hasn't, none will make very much sense.

It is unsurprising, given the underlying pessimism of Fisher's outlook, that he was plagued with depression for much of his life, a depression which, I feel for good reason, he regarded as systemic as much as personal. He is reported as commenting to Simon Reynolds "the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals." It is impossible to be unaffected by wider social and economic trends and late stage capitalism can be, one feels, a uniquely alienating system in which to live. Nor is it surprising that in 2017 he took his own life as a result, a great loss to those who value his work and wish that there might have been rather more of it. I find I can't listen to very much 'hauntological' music but I did listen to the work that The Caretaker released as a tribute to him, the aptly named Take Care. It's a Desert Out There... and I would agree with Roger Luckhurst's comment in his obituary that "it is a catastrophe that we no longer have Mark Fisher". I feel grateful that in Hauntology someone has given me, not for the first time, an explanation and a label for some of the thoughts that I have had for so long.