CFP: Future Spectralities: Hauntology and Aesthetics

Call for papers for study circle 4 winter symposium Future Spectralities: Hauntology and Aesthetics in Reykjavik, March 27th – 29th 2009.

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

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 projects 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, uncanny images. But what is haunting is not the images (or architecture) of the past; it is the unfulfilled promises of a better future inherent in these images (or buildings).

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?

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

Please send proposals for papers to Kristine Samson (kristine@ready-made.dk) and Claus Krogholm (clauskrogholm@mail.dk).

Dead-line: December 1st, 2008.

Tags: ghost, hauntology, Jacques Derrida