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Hauntology

Yes, I am old enough to remember South Wales like it always was.

Today it is much cleaner, and probably more economically productive...yet something is missing
 
The Changes, a BBC show from 1975 is another one of those strange, apocalyptic children’s series. It starts with everyone in Britain going mad and destroying all their machinery and electrical equipment and returning to a more primitive existence, complete with accusations of witchcraft. At the end, it’s all about balance and not being able to return to old times and leaving the past very much where it is.
For me, this is what hauntology is about. The feeling of a past one can never go back to and was never really as it appeared in the first place. A yearning to relive the simple joys of my youth now reveals a massive dislocation with the past and I’ll never be able to think of it the same way. The little mining town I grew up in changed so quickly as I was growing up. The collieries closed, the architecture changed and the community became more isolated and divided among themselves. The filter I now have to deal with is viewing it through the lens of progress and what’s happened since. Instant communication, next day deliveries and the distractions of the internet, The creation of a new lexicon of belief and gender in which I struggle to relate.
Of course this concept is as old as time itself and I guess I’ll just have to live with the fact that things moved too fast and those feelings can never be fully experienced again.
As I said, I spoke to my children about this - they were born between 1989-1996, so grew up with technology, in the village
where I currently live, which hasn't changed much since they were small. So maybe now is the time to talk to the generation above
ours, while they are still around, about THEIR experience of Hauntology. It doesn't only exist in the 1960-1980 generation, it's there
just in different forms, in other generations. My dad grew up in a house with no electricity and no running water (born 1928 in
rural Devon). No TV, no films and the only media being his dad's newspaper - he had 'night terrors' as a child and the content
of these were what influenced his ideas. I wish he were still around to ask his view of Hauntology!
 
The theme of going back to childhood haunts is a major theme of George Orwell's 'Coming up for Air' , where a 45 year old chap, married with two children, living in suburbia, embarks on such a quest . The growing tension on the eve of World War 2 spurs him on . It doesn't end well. But how could it possibly have met with the lead character's expectations?
 
I was thinking about hauntology when listening to Joan Baez's track 'The Magic Wood' from her 1968 album 'Baptism'. It is her interpretation of the Henry Treece poem of the same name. Henry Treece became better known as a writer of historical fiction for older children.

 
I keep having dreams where someone is in my house, behaving as though they have every right to be there. It gives rise to a similar feeling in me as memories of some youthful strangenesses, which makes me wonder if Hauntology doesn't have some kind of similar trigger. A kind of invasion of a safe space by something that only you can see as strange? As children don't always have enough knowledge to sift the genuinely odd from the 'things that are normal but that I haven't experienced yet so don't fully understand', maybe it's this state of mind that gives rise to the whole sensation?
 
Ohh. This is a fun concept. I had to go look it up. I wonder if vaporwave is hauntological in nature, then, since it derives from 80s/90s themes (and commentary on societal mores and change).

And I suppose it would exclude works which induce the instant feeling of painful, but unsourced, nostalgia that some manage to induce? Like a song that you're hearing for the first time but which hits you like a gut punch.
 
Just seen on Spotify that there is a Hauntology playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX9TOdl0GpvQm

Last nearly seven hours, and features 100 tracks. Certainly looking forward to playing this.
I'm giving it a listen. It's very much in the style of many haunting old tunes, but I supposed I'd hoped to hear something familiar. To me, part of hauntology is that it's stuff that's haunted your memory. Some of it's good though. Not party music.
 
I'm giving it a listen. It's very much in the style of many haunting old tunes, but I supposed I'd hoped to hear something familiar. To me, part of hauntology is that it's stuff that's haunted your memory. Some of it's good though. Not party music.
Like the feeling you get when you hear the theme tune to a TV programme that you'd almost forgotten existed and thought you must have dreamed?
 
When I was younger I felt a curious 'pull' towards Bury St Edmonds. Never been there, never even been close, but I had the vision of driving there in a Mini with a German Shepherd dog in the back.

The feeling faded once I got into my late twenties. I've still never been.
If you have any memories of landmarks etc in Bury SE from your vision, Mr Carl Grove (damn fine chap from there who's on here) would like to hear you story.
Ps. Window?
 
If you have any memories of landmarks etc in Bury SE from your vision, Mr Carl Grove (damn fine chap from there who's on here) would like to hear you story.
Ps. Window?
My vision was just of low lying roads surrounded by fields of an unspecified crop. No hedges.

Window still open.
 
FFHF7t6XIAAO_-8.jpeg

Within going into detail, there are a few warning signs that this might be a bit of an exercise in... hollow postmodern obscurantism; nevertheless, I'm sold on the subject matter being worthy.

Preview (which gives a taste of the potentially good and bad):

Screenshot 2021-11-27 at 10.01.04 PM.png

Much longer preview here:
https://assets.ctfassets.net/4wrp2u...dec057267148a401611/9789048543823_Preview.pdf

Publisher's blurb:
Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology. Shipwreck Hauntography asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern theological imperialism, most evident through the savior-scholar model that resurrects—physically or virtually—ships from wrecks. Instead of construing shipwrecks as dead, awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, this book presents them as vibrant if not recalcitrant objects, having shaken off anthropogenesis through varying stages of ruination. Sara Rich illustrates this anarchic condition with 'hauntographs' of five Age of 'Discovery' shipwrecks, each of which elucidates the wonder of failure and finitude, alongside an intimate brush with the eerie, horrific, and uncanny.

Source:
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463727709/shipwreck-hauntography


 
View attachment 48561

Within going into detail, there are a few warning signs that this might be a bit of an exercise in... hollow postmodern obscurantism; nevertheless, I'm sold on the subject matter being worthy.

Preview (which gives a taste of the potentially good and bad):

View attachment 48562

Much longer preview here:
https://assets.ctfassets.net/4wrp2u...dec057267148a401611/9789048543823_Preview.pdf

Publisher's blurb:
Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology. Shipwreck Hauntography asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern theological imperialism, most evident through the savior-scholar model that resurrects—physically or virtually—ships from wrecks. Instead of construing shipwrecks as dead, awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, this book presents them as vibrant if not recalcitrant objects, having shaken off anthropogenesis through varying stages of ruination. Sara Rich illustrates this anarchic condition with 'hauntographs' of five Age of 'Discovery' shipwrecks, each of which elucidates the wonder of failure and finitude, alongside an intimate brush with the eerie, horrific, and uncanny.

Source:
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463727709/shipwreck-hauntography


That's an awful lot of words to say 'shipwrecks be spooky'...
 
'Speculative Realism' sets off one alarm bell; the fact that the author mentions the book having been penned 'on occupied Waccamaw territory' rings another, but, again, the topic seems promising.
 
I smell the disappointing droppings of a postmodernist scholar chimera...

(Which isnt to say its bad but it seems to come from that way...)
 
I was viewing a webinar on hauntology topics and one speaker, before she began, recognized and gave thanks to the people on whose land she was sitting (she was in the US). Even though the intent was positive, I thought that was very awkward, an out-of-place virtue signal. The rest of what she said could be classified, as was noted, as "hollow postmodern obscurantism" totally disconnected from anything useful.
 
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