[12/1] Process, Design and Aesthetics - Future Spectralities: Hauntology and Aesthetics

To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it
Avery F. Gordon


Hauntology is a coming to terms with the permanence of our (dis)possession,
the inevitability of dyschronia
k-punk

This seminar welcomes papers that considers the role of ghosts and other spectral beings in theory, philosophy, aesthetics, architecture and design, in film, photography, music and literature. Possible questions to be considered could be:

- Can art and aesthetics be instrumental in putting the ghost to rest, or should art rather invoke the ghost?
- Should process design be a kind of exorcism aiming at cleansing processes of all “unfit” content; or rather a “ghost busting” process recognizing what haunts us and thereby improve our ability to live with ghosts?
- How are we to interpret the increasing role of ghosts and other spectral beings in contemporary culture – ranging from ghost movies to ghost economy?

Please send proposals for papers to Kristine Samson (kristine@ready-made.dk) or Claus Krogholm (clauskrogholm@mail.dk). Deadline: December 1. Preliminary program: Dec. 15th.

Ghosts has come to play an increasing role in art, philosophy, social
theory and culture studies. One important reason for this has been
Jacques Derrida and his book Specters of Marx (1993), where he coined
the neologism hauntology – an English word that pronounced in French is
a homophone to ontology. Whereas ontology is about Being, hauntology is
about non-being as well. Derrida deals with the ghost of Hamlet's father
and the specter that, according to The Communist Manifesto, has come to
haunt Europe. It is Derrida's point that we are not just haunted by the
past and past events. The “time is out of joint”, and we are haunted by
the future as well. “Hauntology isn't about the return of the past, but
about the fact that the origin was already spectral. We live in a time
when the past is present, and the present is saturated with the past.
Hauntology emerges as a crucial - cultural and political - alternative
both to linear history and to postmodernism's permanent revival.” (Mark
Fischer a.k.a. k-punk
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.html).

Hauntology has spread to numerous fields: philosophy, aesthetics,
architecture, film, music etc. Especially in an Anglo-American context
hauntology has disseminated, not just as a theoretical concept but as a
terminology for describing concrete aesthetic expressions (see the link
above and http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007252.html). With
this seminar we would like to introduce hauntology as a broader concept
in the Nordic countries as well.

In “On the Concept of History” Walter Benjamin notes how we are awaited
by those who lived before us. History is not empty, homogenous time (as
historiography regards it) but bears the traces of past events. The
unfulfilled dreams and utopian wishes of those who lived before us are
waiting to be realized. Like ghosts they have not been put to rest but
will still haunt us until they are recognized by us and finally allowed
to find their proper home; i.e. be fulfilled.

In urban planning we have examples like London's White City or The Urban
Plan in Copenhagen. These were project that should provide cheap, modern
apartments and facilities to the common people. They were vital parts of
the social democratic welfare project that should move workers out of
the inner city slum and into modern, well planned and designed
neighborhoods complete with all the comforts of modern infrastructure.
Today these projects are considered concrete ghettoes, an unpleasant and
ugly reminder of a failed utopia: a welfare state for the masses that
forgot the individual. They have become concrete ghosts, houses haunted
by the specter of political visions long considered gone and forgotten.
Today these projects (with their roots in Le Corbusier's utopian
architecture) are regarded of no architectural, cultural or historical
value – and quite often demolished. But to some they represent an
architecture, that might be ugly but should not be forgotten. They are
representations of a “ghost modernism” (k-punk), concretizations – and
possibly distorted representations – of dreams that should not be
forgotten. What is haunting these buildings are not the ugliness of the
architecture, but the unfulfilled utopian desires. Simply demolishing
them is to discard the dream; a kind of exorcism of unfit and outdated
political ideas rather than putting the ghost to rest. Until the specter
is recognized it will continue to haunt us. The repressed will return in
distorted, uncannyarchitecture) of the past; it is the unfulfilled promises of a better
future inherent in these images (or buildings).

Literature
Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air – The Experience of
Modernity. London 1985.
Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Hauntings – Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent
American Literature. University of Virginia Press, 1999.
Buse, Peter & Andrew Stott (eds.). Ghosts – Deconstruction,
Psychoanalysis, History. Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx - the State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, & the New International. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters – Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Sprinkler, Michael (ed.). Ghostly Demarcations – A Symposium on Jacques
Derrida's Specters of Marx. London: Verso, 1999.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy
Worth Fighting For?, Verso, 2001.

http://www.abe1x.org/movetype/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=7&search=hauntology
http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/search?q=hauntology