Descending Light
150x90cm oil on canvas
Chapter 3: Hauntology
An understanding of Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction
is necessary in order to comprehend his development of deconstruction as
hauntology.
Hauntology is a natural progression
from deconstruction in the sense that Derrida connected the ‘close reading’
approach to an analysis of history. Hauntology describes the way the past is
always in the present – the present is literally ‘haunted’ by the past. What is
useful for our current study is that the term can be applied to both historical
concepts and supernatural myths. It was in his work Spectres of Marx (Derrida
1994) that Derrida first discusses and examines hauntology. This book is
derived from his reading of The Manifesto
of the Communist Party written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Concerning
the way the present is haunted by the past, Derrida writes:
“What manifests itself in
the first place is a spectre, this first paternal character, as powerful as it
is unreal, a hallucination or simulacrum that is virtually more actual than
what is so blithely called a living presence.” (Derrida 1994, p.32)
Derrida picks up on the way the
Communist manifesto begins with the famous phrase “A spectre is Haunting Europe
–the spectre of Communism”. But when Marx and Engels made this statement it
implied that the spectre was a power the democratic countries needed to be
aware of. When Derrida wrote Spectres of
Marx nearly 150 years later, he was conscious of the communist regimes
having come and gone, so that the remnants of this ‘communist spectre’ had
itself become ghostly. The traces of this past, however, were present in the
material day-to-day lives of the Eastern bloc people. Explaining this process Marc
Leverette writes that:
“With Spectres, [Derrida] argues that the past can never be fully
exorcised from the present. Today we live in a world haunted by multiple
spectres of Marx, for example, in terms of political and philosophical
landscapes. From the spectres of communism and totalitarism to the articulation
of class distinction and the consciousness, from the millennial tensions of
evangelism to those standing against the rising tide of neoliberalism, these
ghosts haunt continuously…” (Leverette
2007, pp.336+)
The term hauntology therefore described the
in-between state of the spectre. Adding to the complexity of the term, however,
it is important to know that the word is a play on the philosophical discipline
of ontology. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with what can be
said to exist, but in Derrida’s native French hauntology and ontology sound
almost identical. The relevance of this should be obvious: a spectre, by its
very nature, is a paradoxical being:
there is no documented proof of existence, and it ‘is’ both present and
absent.
Hauntology does not, therefore, confirm or
deny that the supernatural (as depicted in popular culture) exists. Instead
hauntology is a point for discussion which allows for the acknowledgement that
our historical past influences our potential future.
Hauntology, as a critical term, also lends
itself to the history of aesthetics and contemporary arts. For my purposes I
would want to argue that we can apply the term as an interpretive tool instead
of a definition: “Hauntology is not a genre of art or music….it arises from the
real context that surrounds the work” (Rogue
2009, online)
For example, a hauntological interpretation
can be applied to this postcard, [figure 1], from the late 1970s. We could
suggest that the denotation of this postcard is of an idyllic scene: a young
boy in clothing from the period lies in the grass on a brilliantly sunny day
watching a hedgehog; it could almost be described as kitsch. But when we know
that the postcard is from East
Germany, the communist state prior to reunification
in 1990, we become aware of different aspects of the image, and therefore the
connotation or interpretation of the image changes. It now has a second
underlying message. The postcard is no longer just a pretty picture; it is now
government propaganda to hide the reality of life in communist East Germany.
Considering the blending of
historical fact with fiction and the retelling of the ‘stories’ classified as
history leads us back to Derrida’s idea of deconstruction: what is missing in
the text? The majority of modern history has been written from a male white
European voice, so are the events depicted truthful (Guardiola-Rivera 1983)? What (or
who) is missing? It is only as recent as the 1970s and 1980s that the
traditional view of history has been challenged (or deconstructed) and we, as a
society, have started to consider the stories of other voices. As Ethan
Kleinberg states:
“Deconstruction may reveal
history’s darkest secret by bringing to light and in doing so provoking fear
and anxiety of the uncanny that is typically met with repression” (Kleinberg 2008, p.118)
The stories of other voices, that of
a country’s hidden cultural past, is not just recorded in written texts,
though, it is also held within their objects and artefacts. Material and visual
culture becomes, then, another site in which to use Derrida’s hauntological
approach: the ghost or trace of the past is evident in the objects the society
of the period has left behind. Discussing this issue, Ethan Kleinberg goes on
to suggest that:
“..much like the spectre,
history is a revenant brought back to the present by the historian. It visits
us but does not belong to our time or place. This is to say it has no
ontological properties of its own but exists through the mediation of the historian”
(Kleinberg 2008, p.125)
Derrida’s notion of the
hauntological and the spectral allows us to consider and explore the idea of
the supernatural or magical. The realms of illusion or the supernatural can be
explained as something that is outside the normal realms of logic, something
that is neither alive nor dead.
Two recent exhibitions brought
together work by many artists with the intention of focussing on the role of
the supernatural unseen: Dark Monarch –
Magic and Modernity in modern art (shown at the Tate St Ives October
2009–January 2010) and Magic Show (a Hayward touring exhibition recently shown at the Grundy, Blackpool, February – April 2010).
The link, here, between art and the
unseen is made clear if we consider the artist is like a magician. The magician
has the mastery of illusion: in front of her audience she performs tricks which
confuse and amaze the audience, leading them to believe she has transformed one
thing into another. It follows, then, that the artist (who is also an illusionist)
transforms an idea or concept into another form through her chosen medium. The
artist does this in order to convey her ideas to the audience in order that
they may gain insight into her personal interpretation of the concept she is
illustrating.
Historically,
artists and writers used the supernatural as a common theme, but in the
Victorian age science (in its many guises) started to provide factual answers
that appeared to refute or deny the role of the supernatural. It was also at this
time, however, that the emerging ‘science’ of psychoanalysis attempted to
analyse the continued role of the ‘illogical’ supernatural as a sign of mental
instability.
The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud
attempted to define the supernatural (or, as he classified it, the uncanny) in
his paper of the same name. Freud’s paper of 1919 ‘The Uncanny’ took the view
that the uncanny is a class of phenomena that takes us back to what is
forgotten and unfamiliar but in such a way that the uncanny thing (dream,
object or person) has been manipulated so that it arouses dread and
horror. Freud also makes the connection:
“that an uncanny effect is
often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality
is effaced, as when something that we hitherto regarded as imaginary appears
before us in reality”. (Rohan 2010. online p.13)
This uncanny effect, when considered
in psychiatric terms, clearly borders on what medical science might define as
madness. For Freud, however, the uncanny was the key to a different form of problem:
the traumatic and the hidden.
In 1922, a few years after Freud
wrote his paper on the uncanny, the first vampire horror film was released in Germany Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des
Grauens (directed by F. W. Murnau). Nosferatu was an
Expressionist horror film
(and the forerunner of the cinematic Dracula) which reinforced the idea of the
unnatural in the mind of the viewing public. This was at a time prior to the
television or the internet, when information was gained via the radio (for a
limited number of people) or through the local news.
The conjunction between the
cinematic and the uncanny was not fortuitous: what Freud tried to define as the
uncanny – the traumatic and hidden which would lead to madness – was mirrored
in the filmed evocation of the supernatural. The cinematic journey into the
supernatural had begun with Nosferatu,
but would continue to register with audiences up to the present day (as we will
see in later chapters). The uncanny, like the hauntological, names the gap
between the present and the absent, a gap which contains everything history
cannot think, but which art (and cinema) wants to show.
In this chapter, then, we have started to
examine how Derrida developed the idea of deconstruction and, specifically,
hauntology in relation to some specific political issues (for example, the
history of Communism). The issues and ideas hauntology describes are not,
however, unique to Derrida. As we have seen, the supernatural and the ghostly
also link to Freud’s notion of the uncanny. In both cases, however, we become
aware of how there is always a ghost of the past within the present, and
(perhaps) by acknowledging the ghosts or spectres from our past society can
move forward into the future.
In order to discover how the hauntological
might introduce the new, or allow for something different to be created, we
will, in the following chapter, look at examples of art works where the artist
has incorporated the concept of the historical and supernatural ghost. In this
way we might start to discover how the artist is an agent for the unseen.
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