• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Hauntology

Naughty_Felid

kneesy earsy nosey
Joined
Mar 11, 2008
Messages
8,919
The mentions of "British Racing Green" and "Folk Horror" made me think of times when I was very little, (before 5 in the 1970's), and we where driving through Thetford Forest. I remember seeing a power substation or something that must have been quite new and modern but to me looked antiquated and sort of not relevant.


I also felt this often when travelling around big cities to visit family at the same age. That what people were wearing, doing, talking, buildings, cars, etc all seemed and felt old and and out of place even when it was "new" and "now". Tired and weighed down, but lovely.

Anyone else haunted by hauntology?

It faded once i got to about 7.
 
I thought hauntology was old supernatural TV shows like The Owl Service, Children of the Stones, Sapphire and Steel, that thing with the audience of dummies springing to life, etc? Although if I'm reading your context right, you should be able to get the same feeling back from watching old TV shows and films set in that period too.
 
I thought hauntology was old supernatural TV shows like The Owl Service, Children of the Stones, Sapphire and Steel, that thing with the audience of dummies springing to life, etc? Although if I'm reading your context right, you should be able to get the same feeling back from watching old TV shows and films set in that period too.

Can be anything. Music particularly. My take of it is old outdated things having an influence on the present.
 
Can be anything. Music particularly. My take of it is old outdated things having an influence on the present.

Music, yeah, that's a good one. I'll tell you something that is extremely evocative of the past and my very early childhood, and I'll understand if you don't want to go there because they're definitely not for everyone, but 1970s British sex comedy films bring back the Britain of yesteryear incredibly vividly if you don't mind the nudity and terrible sex jokes. If you like them, all the better. They have a documentary realism that beats many actual documentaries.
 
The Northern-most part of Cambridgeshire.

Tony Martin country...

1408468924661_wps_3_Farmer_Tony_Martin_s_dere.jpg
 
[Duelling banjos in the distance]
 
I've forgotten about that story. It adds even more spookiness and gloominess (Sorry for the spelling if it is wrong) to the photograph. Maybe the ghost of the burglar is still in the house.
 
I'm always up for a little Derrida. That said, I find hauntology a particularly tough concept. If you are meaning nostalgia in general, then yes, I have loads of that. :p If you mean it in a more philosophical, abstract sense, then that's more difficult.

Music is a little easier to pin down. The obvious example is Daft Punk, who have an amazing way of bringing waves of nostalgia despite sounding futuristic. Then again, they are very clever about using samples, so it may simply be an invocation of memory there.

Better example may be this song, which makes me intensely nostalgic for something I honestly can't remember. Yet it seems to exist emotionally for me in a very specific way.
Very strange sensation, that. Phoenix are another French band, so maybe the French have a special way with this. :)

The funny thing is now the song brings back memories of 2010 when it actually came out, as well as the vague and long distant past.
 
I'm always up for a little Derrida. That said, I find hauntology a particularly tough concept. If you are meaning nostalgia in general, then yes, I have loads of that. :p If you mean it in a more philosophical, abstract sense, then that's more difficult.

Music is a little easier to pin down. The obvious example is Daft Punk, who have an amazing way of bringing waves of nostalgia despite sounding futuristic. Then again, they are very clever about using samples, so it may simply be an invocation of memory there.

Better example may be this song, which makes me intensely nostalgic for something I honestly can't remember. Yet it seems to exist emotionally for me in a very specific way.
Very strange sensation, that. Phoenix are another French band, so maybe the French have a special way with this. :)

The funny thing is now the song brings back memories of 2010 when it actually came out, as well as the vague and long distant past.
The Brits do hauntology the best. The Ghost Box label with the Advisory Circle or Broadcast
 
it cant really nostalgia i was feeling as a kid as i was experiencing it first hand. I was feeling it for the present
 
Last edited:
it cant really nostalgia i was feeling as a kid as i was experiencing it first hand. I was feeling it for the presenr

Can you describe exactly what it was you were feeling? Like a (for lack of a better word) nostalgia for the present, as if it were the past? A sense of things being out of place in time? How did this affect you?

Going by the videos you posted, this brings to mind the sense of alienation I had as a small child - I don't mean this in a negative sense at all, only that I felt an outsider looking in. This was not necessarily an uncomfortable feeling, just a curious one.

Sometimes it would seem I'd known or seen things in another life. Other times, it was as if I was taking in vast amounts of cultural information at once, without being able to fully understand the meaning of it. The feeling was certainly haunting, but whether this has anything to do with hauntology, I don't know.

I've read that theta frequency brain waves, are more prominent in children until age 5 or 6, so perhaps this has something to do with how we intake information at that age. Maybe this accounts for the haunting quality.
 
I've read that theta frequency brain waves, are more prominent in children until age 5 or 6, so perhaps this has something to do with how we intake information at that age.

Kids have fewer filters.
 
Can you describe exactly what it was you were feeling? Like a (for lack of a better word) nostalgia for the present, as if it were the past? A sense of things being out of place in time? How did this affect you?

Going by the videos you posted, this brings to mind the sense of alienation I had as a small child - I don't mean this in a negative sense at all, only that I felt an outsider looking in. This was not necessarily an uncomfortable feeling, just a curious one.

Sometimes it would seem I'd known or seen things in another life. Other times, it was as if I was taking in vast amounts of cultural information at once, without being able to fully understand the meaning of it. The feeling was certainly haunting, but whether this has anything to do with hauntology, I don't know.

I've read that theta frequency brain waves, are more prominent in children until age 5 or 6, so perhaps this has something to do with how we intake information at that age. Maybe this accounts for the haunting quality.

Really difficult to explain when you look at the old public service films of the 70s now. Thats how it felt then. Everything felt dated, but it was only certain places, buildings, etc. Most of the cars and buildings were within 10 years old so not actually that old.

Those 70s films show a past that will never be repeated completely bygone, but evocative.
 
Excellent compilation of 70s and early 80s UK TV hauntology in "factual" programmes from the TV Cream gentlemen:

Featuring a couple of familiar faces. Doctor Who? Terrible sense of humour, these poltergeists.
 
Just found this hauntology themed film this evening, Ghost Dance (1983) - Ken McMullen.

Through the experiences of two women in Paris and London, Ghost Dance offers an analysis of the complexity of our conceptions of ghosts, memory and the past. It is an adventure film strongly influenced by the work of Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard but with a unique intellectual and artistic discourse of its own and it is this that tempts the ghosts to appear, for Ghost Dance is permeated with all kinds of phantasmal presence. The film focuses on philosopher Jacques Derrida who considers ghosts to be the memory of something which has never been present. This theory is explored in the film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dance_(film)

 
I still do a lot of driving for work - a depressing amount of it on motorways. But I do sometimes go the back ways, either because I'm going home and would prefer a pleasanter drive, or because the motorways are gridlocked again. In one or two places I've had an odd feeling somewhere between Deja Vu and the feeling you get when confronted with something really old like a stone circle. I guess that's not much help. One place is in Shropshire - its a deeply wooded stretch of road with some old huts in among the trees. Another was a largish village in Oxfordshire which, when I drove through it, had no traffic and no pedestrians at about 5:30 when everywhere round about was really busy.

SatNav can lead you through some pretty obscure locations when you use it as a support system rather than following it slavishly - if you are in a long jam on a motorway I can strongly recommend (if its a sunny day) taking the next exit and steering by the sun, and wait for the satnav to reroute you once its stopped trying to make you do a U-turn.
 
I sometimes have a flash of feeling like nostalgia for the present moment. It's hard to describe: the sudden awareness that everything around will be old and half-remembered in the future. It's a sad feeling. Does this fit?
 
I sometimes have a flash of feeling like nostalgia for the present moment. It's hard to describe: the sudden awareness that everything around will be old and half-remembered in the future. It's a sad feeling. Does this fit?

Yes.

And in that future time, your moment of 'near-nostalgia for the present' will no longer exist in any solid form, because the past will not really exist any longer, but it will nonetheless be haunting your future counterpart as a ghostly presence that properly belongs neither to that time (as it is a ghostly shade of a past-moment), nor to the past time (as it wasn't the ghostly shade that existed back then, it was a respectably concrete experience). Hence the ontology/hauntology pun in French--though it just sounds like Rene Artois with my awful accent.

Or, more enigmatically, as I am fond of reminding myself: you can't go back.

Because the 'back' you wish to be at no longer exists, and even if it did it would not be the same 'you' returning.
 
Not the A41 Whitchurch to Market Drayton road by any chance?

I don't think so. North of Whitchurch though. Next time I go that way I'll try and pay more attention :)
 
These pics from 1965. Once My generation, born from the mid 60's to early 70's shuffle off no one will remember quite what it was like to live in a post WW2 country. No one will remember what that world looked like. I put these pictures here as these sorts of scenes have vanished and the people who lived - even in their youth are dying out.


These are great - look at how hard these cats are! (From Shirley Baker - what a photographer).

_113141701_1_shirley-baker-manchester-1965--1.jpg


_113141707_7_shirley-baker-manchester-1965--3.jpg


_113141912_10_shirley-baker-manchester-1965.jpg



https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-53218479
 
Last edited:
Back
Top