hauntology

Hauntology encompasses the idea of “nostalgia for lost futures,” that is, a longing for a future that never happened, a promise or dream never fulfilled. A quarter century into this new millennium is as good of time as ever to stir over these ideas. The idea of lost futures can be found now more than perhaps ever in the modern era.

How did we get here?

What follows is most definitely an Anglo-Euro-centric view. I am ignorant of so much, so many other worlds and ways of knowing and experiences. My very thoughts are tinged, stained by an embeddedness from within the core states of faltering planetary Empire, but I must proceed nonetheless somehow.

What were the imagined futures for those inhabiting the slow crawl of the pre-modern period? Did they exist within a long forever, a stasis of world order, where the future was an unchanged present, divinely appointed dynastic rule stretching to world’s end? World’s end, that was the imagined distant future, though the religious/superstitious lens, whether a personal end into a paradise or hell, or a cataclysmic end of all, and a return to the unformed state of pre-creation, or exaltation to the next kingdom in heaven. The early modern supplanted these mytho-religious futures through the mechanics of logic, reason, an age of enlightenment.

Thus began the new myths of never-ending progress of the modern era. Scientific and technological innovations birthed a future imaginary of advancement in knowledge and reason. But within these new utopian futures was the seed of their antithesis, the dystopic, the betrayal of technoscientific advancement, not to progress society but to revert back into, or to change course, towards something resembling the autocracy of kings of the past, the barbarism of the dark forest, the uncultivated hills, the backwaters and backwoods fringes of civilization spilling forth and engulfing, reversing what was the imagined inevitable progress of modern future thinking. Here, the ancestral ideas of today’s “lost futures” and hauntology may have originated, as a reaction and anxiety to an age of enlightenment, an age of industrialization, all that was promised and all that could be lost.

The last century saw these ideas of progress accelerate. Technological advances promised a future of salvation from labor, suffering, and wants. It promised an abundance of abundance. Social progress promised a future where the enlightenment ideals of justice and fairness, equality and a recognition of a shared universal humanity, were finally realized. That modern myth of the inevitability of progress promised a global order of peace and prosperity not unlike an otherworldly kingdom of heaven on Earth. Future imaginaries saw an exploration and expansion into the heavens from Earth, a journey into a new vast unknown, where having conquered the so-called primitive aspects of our worst natures, we would be freed to continue the inevitable march of progress to colonize new worlds. Technology would carry us bodily to paradise, circumventing the spiritual journey.

The last century also saw the rise of mechanized war, modern management science advancing eugenics and enacting genocide, technological progress that threatened to unleash a nuclear Armageddon, an application of technology to further shackle the working class, rising spectacle supplanted what social progress was promised, and a slow apocalypse of environmental destruction. Thus, it seems all those futures promised by the modern era were lost. Even in the last days of the last century, kernels of technological salvation still clung on to the collective consciousness, of promises not yet broken, or better futures to come.

A quarter century into this new millennium, where are those futures now?

But do not despair! Take it from someone who’s been along this path before, and you’ll find that it’s a closed loop, or ascending spiral, hardened through repetition. Past the nihilism of lost futures there is more, something akin to acceptance, or a recognition that in the absence of futures, in that void just beyond our reach, out of sight, over the horizon, is the material from which your future as you will it can be formed. Don’t call it optimism, it’s not the passivity of the haunted individual, but it’s a recognition of the unknowability of tomorrow, that whatever might have been promised can just as well be empty, or broken. You’ll find a container into which you can pour yourself and your own visions of futures to be realized.

Cast aside false nostalgia of romanticized pasts and idealized futures, and through will and action find a true future. It’s been done before, it happens every day. You live inside that future of your past, within an eternal present.

What futures will you find? 

What futures will you form?