redistributing wealth (searchable pdf of horror in architecture by joshua comaroff & ong ker-shing) to the masses (tumblr users obsessed with haunted houses)

enjoy! <3 xoxo

edit 01/06/2022: the google drive link stopped working for some reason but here's a working link to it on archive.org!

A Hauntology for Everyday Life

Meaning, Language, and Subjectivity

Ghosts, Metaphors, and Structures of Feeling

The Haunted Objects of Desire

Hauntology sans Exorcism, from Justice to Networked Subjectivities

Epilogue by Michael M.J. Fischer: Hauntology’s Genesis, Catacoustics, and Future Shadows

Correction to: The Hauntology of Everyday Life

The Pale is a haze that bends and warps reality and memory. It is a grayness into nothingness, impossible to describe or measure, a location without a defined location, into which one’s memories scramble with other’s and no one’s. It is filled with information from the past, but none that is clear, instead degraded like that of the damaged tapes found in the game. Traveling through it is dangerous. Reality is suspended, and one’s brain becomes garbled as one ceases to be able to remember what is the present and what is the past; what are one’s memories and what are not. It encases the game with a sense of oncoming apocalypse, as the majority of the planet is covered with it, and worse, it is expanding. A parallel to both our own climate change, and our cultural stuckness, it represents the end. The end of the world, a slow and ongoing process; and the end (or more accurately, the edge) of possibility. Disco Elysium’s reality is bounded by a sea of nothingness, in the same way our own is, with no escape from the confines of capitalist reality imaginable.

What hope is there for such a dying world? A world exhausted of the new, ravaged by neoliberal austerity, and overflowing with suffering. In this capacity, Disco Elysium is no fantasy, but our own sad, warped reality. In his book Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher describes the concept of hauntology. Originally a term coined by Jacques Derrida, hauntology is an idea that can be understood as how everything that exists is defined not only by what is present, but equally so by what is absent (the word itself reflects this: ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies existence and being. In Derrida’s native French, the h in hauntology is silent, thus (h)auntology is pronounced the same as ontology). He argues that hauntological music, in how it engages with memory and loss, has “an implicit acknowledgment that the hopes created by postwar electronica or by the euphoric dance music of the 1990s have evaporated — not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible.” For Fisher, the latter half of the twentieth century represented a bursting forth of possibilities, with different cultural forms, in what he terms “popular modernism,” were allowed to experiment and expand, in large part due to post-war social welfare policies. With the closing of that period, and the dawning of the so-called “end of history,” such possibilities were drained away. Where once there was a hope for the future (whether in art or in politics), now we have only repetition and despair. In other words, to use his only terminology, these futures are lost. Yet, unlike the bubble gum optimism that neoliberals push, Fisher argues that this kind of sadness can be understood to be productive. In holding onto the desire for the future, rather than it being seen as some kind of conservatism or hopelessness, Fisher argues that “this refusal gives the melancholia a political dimension because it amounts to a failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism.” Sadness and holding into past desires for such lost futures, is political, and imperative, as it sustains the hope for something else, an alternative to that closed off reality that we live in under capitalism.

Disco Elysium exemplifies the kind of melancholia that Fisher talks about. The failure of the revolution is a lost future that weighs down the whole district. Despite the absence of the reality of communism in Martinaise, it exerts a strong presence like nothing else. Fifty years on from its defeat, it’s as if time has failed to really move on. In other words, the failure of the revolution haunts the area, the literal specter of communism can be found everywhere. Many of the other failures of the future can equally be ascribed to politics and the economy. Would any of the misery that surrounds Martinaise’s citizens be present if not for neoliberalism? It’s hard to say, but that ambiguity is what makes hauntology so powerful. It engenders feelings of what if and other potentialities; possibilities that the official reality attempts to close off. The character of Cuno, for example, is a twelve year old drug addict. His father is dying of alcoholism and is left mostly to his own ends, which leads him to all sorts of mischief and crime. It’s noted in the game that Cuno has potential, given the correct choices, it’s even possible for Cuno to take the place of your partner. Yet, for the most part, it only remains that: a potentiality. Cuno is just another poor soul, crushed in the grinder of neoliberalism.

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

Ada Limon

James Baldwin

Autumn, Ali Smith

Hamlet, Shakespeare

Residual Hauntings, Psychic Library

Autumn, Ali Smith

The Five Stages of Grief, Linda Pastan

Hauntology: How the Ghosts of our Past haunt our Future, Vincent Freeland

BBC Archive - What is Hauntology

Hauntology

Ken McMullen

- Ghost Dance

1983

private show

#placidhousee

© Nick Scott

Hauntology in Teen Wolf

Haunted Images, Deadness, and Impossible Mourning by Matt Foley / The Hauntology/Narratology of the Neo-Victorian Ghost Story by Brenda Ayres / “Penelope Was Not a Phantom”: Everyday Hauntology in Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood by Joakim Wrethed / “What She Had Seen Was Final”: Everyday Hauntology, the Threat of Male Violence and the Power of Fiction in Alice Munro’s “Free Radicals”, “Runaway” and “Passion” by Joakim Wrethed

One Day I Will Return To Your Side: Disco Elysium and Hauntology

i didn’t really understand the sudden uproar about “cozy horror” until i saw that tweet that was like “i like horror it’s silly and fun and cute but if you like saw or terrifier you’re sick in the head” and now i’m like ohhh okay i guess we do need to gatekeep

The Belbury Circle – Outward Journeys (2017)

Hauntology and nostalgia are not the same thing. Nostalgia is an uncritical glorification of the past. Hauntology attempts to see the past as it was in its complexities, while finding and perhaps even reclaiming the future that was being built towards. To say the artifacts of the USSR are hauntological is not to glorify the USSR in its contradictions and ugliness—its gulags and food shortages—but to perceive the Communist society that its people thought they were building.

Disco Elysium plays like an existential novel, an effect vividly enhanced by the game’s obsession with the hauntological. Even the title’s reference to disco is a hauntological artifact in and of itself. A cultural revolution of the 1970s whose effects can still be felt today, disco offered a subculture of hedonism and optimism that created a space for both queer people and black people, drawing from a variety of fringe and niche subcultures only barely tolerated by the mainstream, if at all. When the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” was organised by two radio DJs in 1979, tellingly at a baseball game, they were cementing a straight and white reaction against disco that likely killed the genre before its time. To encounter disco’s modern remnants—in club culture, in electronic music, in group dancing—this, too, is hauntology.

What haunts is not that which is gone, it is that which was expected to come but whose condition of arrival has been foreclosed, and the ghost is an advocate of the promised future that was unrightfully canceled when the past was destroyed.

Sadeq Rahimi, The Hauntology of Everyday Life

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