The Science of Ghosts

 

Hantologie...

Two weeks ago I was in Taipei for a terrifically stimulating conference titled A Future Slowly Cancelled, mounted by the Taiwanese arts organisation C-LAB. Most of the papers touched upon Mark Fisher's work and notions like lost futures, hauntology, acid communism, etc (including my own keynote speech).

The night before the conference proper kicked off, there was a showing of a 1983 film that amazingly (I ought to have my Hauntological Association membership revoked!) I had never heard of: Ken McMullen's Ghost Dance.  And knock me down with a feather, who should pop up on screen, in a sort of acting role (playing himself), but ol' Jacques Derrida. It's 1983 but he's already talking the kind of ghost talk that would lead to Spectres of Marx, published a full decade later. 

Quick as a flash, I start taking phone pix of Derrida talking about ghosts -  the bright idea occurs to me that I can drop a few of these into the Google slide-show of my lecture just at the points where concepts like mal d'archive and hauntology feature. So it'll be the re-apparition of Derrida on the very same screen he'd appeared on the night before, mediated by the sort of tele-mediamatic technology of the digital era that JD alludes to  in Archive Fever (albeit glancingly so). Levels of image degradation  multiplied: faded made-for-TV video, shakily snapped on a mobile phone from a hasty distance, uploaded to Google, then reprojected in the lecture hall via my Chromebook. A ghost of a ghost of a ghost (of an actual ghost - a man no longer living). As academic wisecracks go, this ought to bring the house down.  (Well, in the event, not quite... )

Here's another scene with Derrida and the "heroine" in it (she's his student, but she... ) 

Jacques looks very debonair and dashing with his plume of fair hair. 

Now what is even more bizarre is that - although they don't share the screen at any moment - another major role in Ghost Dance is played by the young Robbie Coltrane.  Who could have dreamed it - Monsieur Archive Fever and the future-Hagrid, in the same Channel 4-funded art movie.

There's an odd sequence at the end where there's a kind of ghosting of images - the faces of Derrida and other characters appear on a seaside ridge of rock (ever so slightly redolent of the ending - or one of the endings, there are different versions, I'm talking about the TV version - of Videodrome).

Pascale Ogier - tragically soon to be a ghost (she died in 1984 aged only 26, of a heart attack)

 

Here's the whole film for the watching - a poignant flashback to the days when Channel 4 did adventurous and experimental programming. Lost futures, eh? 

There's some wanky overwrought bits, but many striking sequences and it's well worth a view, I'd say. Part of the slim corpus of hauntological cinema. 

retro politics and time warfare

Looking at bits of the RNC last week, I sometimes felt like I was watching a costume drama, with the participants -- particularly the women - dressed in period clothes, wearing period hair.  (Not sure which period exactly, just that there was a strong sense of not-now-ness,  non-contemporaraneity, about the proceedings).


Similar impressions have cropped up in much of the commentary on the convention:

"Paul Ryan gave a great attack speech. But it felt like a throwback to an earlier time. Everyone in the hall loved the iPod line last night from Paul Ryan. He listens to Led Zeppelin, and Mitt Romney doesn't. Modern. Current. Today. Led Zeppelin broke up 32 years ago. By that standard, Chris Christie is more contemporary with his love of Bruce Springsteen.. but that wasn't the only way in which the Ryan speech seemed of a previous generation."  [John Dickerson, Slate]

"The GOP is now running on the fumes of its own nostalgia" [Leslie Savan, The Nation]

Although it doesn't explicitly reference the idea of anachronism and turning back time, I think you can read into the following analysis of the Clint Eastwood Performance a sense of competing realities, the desire to over-ride the present with a largely fictional past, to impose yesterday over today.


"Add Eastwood's little make-believe sketch to the mounting evidence... that the Republican Party has completely checked out of the "reality-based community," and intends never to look back..  No longer does the Republican Party feel even a perfunctory obligation to even appear to be tethered to the same reality that the rest of the country experiences... The rub in their dastardly plan to transport the electorate away from actual reality is, of course, the Fourth Estate. Recognizing this, candidates from Sarah Palin to Sharron Angle all the way up to Gov. Romney have scrupulously sequestered themselves away from being asked to reconcile their version of reality with the reality that others experience." [Scott Wooledge, DailyKos]

The Eastwood Show, or the Tea Party, as the ghost dance of a tribe on the edge of extinction, a defeated demographic left behind by History. And finding succour in what Svetlanya Boym calls "restorative nostalgia"

("Restore" is a key word in Tea Party/Glenn Beck discourse) 

(Hence the garbled attempt at retroptimism in Restore Our Future, the name/slogan of a pro-Romney super PAC, where the bright tomorrow is the return of the good old days)

The notion of this election, and the Red State versus Blue State divide, as not so much as a cultural war as a time war, has now emerged as a major leitmotif of the Obama Campaign

In his post-RNC speeches, the President has been mocking the Romney convention as "a re-run", something that should have been shown on Nick At Nite. Describing the Republican platform as "better suited for the last century", Obama told a crowd in Urbandale, Iowa, "we'd seen it all before, you might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV."

And then there's this Democratic campaign commercial, which pegs RyanRomney's vision as a relic of a "Bygone Era"  and is done in the style of a black-and-white movie era newsreel, complete with "retro spinning graphics and the action seemingly shot with a hand-cracked camera" and filtering on the narrator voice-over to give it that old-timey crackly quality. 

A hauntological ad imploring us not to join R&R in their Ghostworld

retro politics and time warfare

Looking at bits of the RNC last week, I sometimes felt like I was watching a costume drama, with the participants -- particularly the women - dressed in period clothes, wearing period hair.  (Not sure which period exactly, just that there was a strong sense of not-now-ness,  non-contemporaraneity, about the proceedings).


Similar impressions have cropped up in much of the commentary on the convention:

"Paul Ryan gave a great attack speech. But it felt like a throwback to an earlier time. Everyone in the hall loved the iPod line last night from Paul Ryan. He listens to Led Zeppelin, and Mitt Romney doesn't. Modern. Current. Today. Led Zeppelin broke up 32 years ago. By that standard, Chris Christie is more contemporary with his love of Bruce Springsteen.. .but that wasn't the only way in which the Ryan speech seemed of a previous generation."  [John Dickerson, Slate]

"The GOP is now running on the fumes of its own nostalgia" [Leslie Savan, The Nation]

Although it doesn't explicitly reference the idea of anachronism and turning back time, I think you can read into the following analysis of the Clint Eastwood Performance a sense of competing realities, the desire to over-ride the present with a largely fictional past, to impose yesterday over today.


"Add Eastwood's little make-believe sketch to the mounting evidence... that the Republican Party has completely checked out of the "reality-based community," and intends never to look back..  No longer does the Republican Party feel even a perfunctory obligation to even appear to be tethered to the same reality that the rest of the country experiences... The rub in their dastardly plan to transport the electorate away from actual reality is, of course, the Fourth Estate. Recognizing this, candidates from Sarah Palin to Sharron Angle all the way up to Gov. Romney have scrupulously sequestered themselves away from being asked to reconcile their version of reality with the reality that others experience." [Scott Wooledge, DailyKos]

The Eastwood Show, or the Tea Party, as the ghost dance of a tribe on the edge of extinction, a defeated demographic left behind by History. And finding succour in what Svetlanya Boym calls "restorative nostalgia"

("Restore" is a key word in Tea Party/Glenn Beck discourse) 

(Hence the garbled attempt at retroptimism in Restore Our Future, the name/slogan of a pro-Romney super PAC, where the bright tomorrow is the return of the good old days)

The notion of this election, and the Red State versus Blue State divide, as not so much as a cultural war as a time war, has now emerged as a major leitmotif of the Obama Campaign

In his post-RNC speeches, the President has been mocking the Romney convention as "a re-run", something that should have been shown on Nick At Nite. Describing the Republican platform as "better suited for the last century", Obama told a crowd in Urbandale, Iowa, "we'd seen it all before, you might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV."

And then there's this Democratic campaign commercial, which pegs RyanRomney's vision as a relic of a "Bygone Era"  and is done in the style of a black-and-white movie era newsreel, complete with "retro spinning graphics and the action seemingly shot with a hand-cracked camera" and filtering on the narrator voice-over to give it that old-timey crackly quality. 

A hauntological ad imploring us not to join R&R in their Ghostworld