1).
In a recent BBC radio documentary, Jonathan
Freedland described the experience of the decade immediately after the fall of
the Berlin Wall as like a “holiday from history”. That is, of course, for us in
the West. The 90s undoubtedly have a far darker significance for the peoples of
the former Yugoslavia and Ruanda, where two separate instances of genocide
during the decade confirms with Hegel - contra the West’s sabbatical from
temporality - that post-Soviet history was to remain a slaughter bench. It was
particularly interesting to recall how much of the news media which dominated
the period displayed a marked shift from stories about external threats to
those of a parochial, even frivolous nature. Clinton’s affairs, the sagas of
princess Diana, the OJ Simpson trial; all became emblematic for a time when
fears of impending catastrophe seemed to have faded from public consciousness.
It was also the era of Brit-pop, which cultural critic Mark Fisher
characterised (quite rightly I think) as the last hurrah for a form of white
male braggadocio harking back to the most asinine rock of the 1970s. As we
know, the spell was violently broken by the jets crashing into the World Trade
Center on September 11th 2001.
The End of History has itself long
since come to an end. What I’m going to call the ‘hauntological thesis’ –
itself originally germinated in the aftermath of the fall of Soviet Communism –
came to prominence as a way of looking at popular culture just at the moment
when its core assumptions were beginning to collapse; after 9/11 but before the
financial crash of the late 2000s. Two recent additions to the hauntological
cannon have got me thinking again about this subject and in particular a recent
branch of the field which takes the British countryside and our relationship to
the land as its point of departure.
Hauntology - to recap - is generally understood to involve the present
being “haunted” by the ghosts of the past; more specifically the unrealised or
erased potential of certain cultural and political movements. The idea of “lost
futures” is frequently cited in this context and has had special resonance in
the era of neoliberalism, when until recently the idea of an alternative to
global capitalist hegemony seemed unthinkable. And it’s on account of this
political aspect that hauntology has found an audience among the Left,
especially so as it was Jacques Derrida’s mid 90s text Spectres of Marx (1993) which coined the term. It is not without
significance, I think, that the original source of this idea was birthed in an
atmosphere of defeat for the Left and against the backdrop of all that End of
History rhetoric that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's perhaps
worth bearing in mind Nietzsche's remarks on ressentiment, especially considering the standard formulation of
hauntology as to do with lost "progressive" futures. Every lost
future is, after all, an Eden from the perspective of the vanquished.
 |
| Mark Fisher |
The late Mark Fisher did more than
most to popularise the idea of hauntology as a way of interrogating late
capitalist culture. In Ghosts of My Life
(2014) he offers up a general working definition which construes hauntology as
“the agency of the virtual, with the spectre
understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without
(physically) existing". I find this a particularly useful starting point
since it makes no claim as to the political character of the spectres we are
meant to be haunted by. After all, why must the lost futures haunting the present
necessarily be progressive? Was not the Europe of the 1920s and 30s haunted
more by the spectre of fascism than any other political possibility? And could
one not argue that today, as the global political consensus continues to
collapse, that it is spectres from both the Right and Left which are stalking
us?
Paul Wright’s recent “archival remix”
Arcadia (2018) uses old film footage
and contemporary music to weave a complex narrative about the history of the
British countryside and the communities that have worked and made their lives on
the land. It's a quintessentially hauntological work in the way it dramatises
time itself as shot through with a strange kind of folk enchantment and
spectral possibility. Mixing clips from Cecil Hepworth's 1903 short film adaptation
of Alice in Wonderland with footage of unexplained and often bizarre local British
festivities amplifies this sense of time being “out of joint” (to appropriate
the famous line from Hamlet which Derrida dwelt upon so assiduously in Spectres of Marx). The prologue, which shows
a dark static silhouette of a person passing across a field, functions as the
opening and interpretive key. A voice tells us "the truth is in the
soil". Similarly, Stephen Prince’s A Year in the Country: Wandering Through
Spectral Fields (2018) - which brings together several dozen articles from
the blog of that name – deals in what the author calls “otherly pastoralism”
and like Arcadia, draws on the
tradition of folk horror to bring to light the more arcane and weird side of
the British countryside and its traditions. Continuing Mark Fisher's cultural
explorations, the book also functions as a fine resource on a host of
out-there, underground and avant-garde music, TV and films.
2).
Both these projects take the land as
an originary and near primordial source for their encounters with British
culture. Characteristically, for hauntological works, they instantiate a
feeling of melancholia towards elements of the past; a sense of what Fisher
describes as a "failed mourning", an inability to rid oneself of the
lost objects of Britain's history. For Stephen Prince this takes the form of an
antiquarian and mildly scientific exploration of the fringes of esoteric folk
culture and its latter-day revivalists. The cultural objects he draws in upon
are imbued with that hint of queasiness and dread that sometimes accompanied
old children's TV programs or public information broadcasts. Small boys falling
into tanks of farm slurry to the sound of grim electronic effects; the
psychedelic messages hidden in episodes of the Magic Roundabout; that sort of
thing.
The unifying trait drawing together
much of the writing featured in the book is the short lived and liminal iteration
of modernism that flourished in the UK from the end of the war up to the early 1970s.
It's an era which, for better or worse, has come to be associated with the
tenure of Tony Ben as the Minister for Technology and later Secretary of State
for industry. Jonathan Meades once dedicated an episode of his Even Further
Abroad (1997) to this period which
saw him travelling the country measuring various brutalist industrial edifices
with a mock-up instrument he called a Benometer. Much of the music covered by
Prince could be described as being haunted by the spectres of that era, and in
particular the form of electronic music that came to be associated with the BBC
Radiophonic Workshop.
Modern
acts like those on the Ghost Box or Polytechnic Youth labels hark
back to the aesthetics of that time, to its sense of educational paternalism
and possibility, to its wilful embrace of the avant-garde and rejection of
mediocrity. All a far cry from the commercialism and dead-end monotony that
characterises much of the BBC’s output and a good deal of electronic music
today. A Year in the Country have
themselves put out a series of themed compilations of hauntologically inclined
electronic music, featuring the likes of Howlround and Listening
Center. The titles include: The Forest / The Wald, The Restless Field,
and The Corn Mother.
The
esotericism hinted at by these titles is echoed throughout Paul Wright's superb
Arcadia which is broken up into several chapters with titles like Into
the Wild, Winter Solstice and Blood in the Soil. As you would
expect with a film made up of collaged archive footage, the narrative is
imposed and at times quite resolutely didactic; as when images of an Edenic
nudist colony are juxtaposed with early footage of what could be the London
rush hour circa 1920. The message from the outset - emphasised by the opening
chapter title Amnesia - is that something has been lost, forgotten, and
we are still living with the consequences. One of the things which makes
Arcadia such a treat is the way it weaves together a loose historical narrative
about the Industrialisation (and later financialisation) of Britain while at
the same time hinting at stranger and more occult goings on beneath the surface;
something reaching back into the deep history of the British Isles.
Scenes of
local festivities which fill the chapter titled Folk are beguiling
equally for their uncanny quality and for the way they depict a world now
almost entirely lost. The clip of an "ancient Cornish custom" in St
Ives from 1921 could be an outtake from The Wicker Man. And the scenes
in Lerwick (Shetlands) of locals dressed as walruses creeping up the beach is
remarkably surreal, belying the stereotype of dull, humourless islanders. The
pace quickens as we enter the 20th century and the chapter titled The Turning.
It's a time of enclosures (ancient and new), of industrialisation, intensive
farming and pesticides. In a clip we see 17th century True Leveller Gerard Winstanley's commune routed off the
land they have tilled by soldiers of Cromwell's New Model Army. The consequences
are made clear in the subsequent chapter, Blood
in the Soil. We're on the ground with fox hunters thundering across fields,
the land quaking as hooves and dogs tear through hedges and woods. We see
accidents on huge industrial farms and we see the country poor, no longer able
to support themselves and considered a blight by those seeking to maintain an
idyllic image of the countryside.
But we also see the rise of the
worker's movement in Britain and the sense of solidarity between workers across
town and country. The film's depiction of deindustrialisation and the neoliberal
take-over strikes a grim note; "the end of everything", as one unseen
voice whispers near the film's conclusion. But it's not all gloom. Wright
repeatedly returns to a lovely visual metaphor in the growth of rhizomes and
fungi, shown here in old footage, sped up under high magnification; always
growing beneath the surface; finding new pathways and forging new networks; awaiting
the moment when green shoots will rise up to meet the new dawn. The film ends
with scenes of fresh green growth, hard shoots breaking through concrete, the
dead rising again (no seriously) and a female voice: "The past is gone. The future is
unwritten". It's an ending full of messianic and salvific promise.
The truth is in the land.
3).
While Wright's film stages a constant
dialogue between town and country, highlighting the evolving nature of that
distinction, Stephen Prince’s A Year in
the Country deploys a more straight forward separation. In one of the early
chapters the author evokes an important orientating distinction between popular
and folk music. The latter, he claims, citing the music journalist Rob Young,
is to do with the Volk in the Germanic
sense of being to do with the wood, the wild, and resolutely opposed to the
settled urban environment in which we find both the populous - the mass of people - and pop music. Pop music in
contrast to folk (or volkish music)
is entertainment for the masses and concomitant with mass socialisation,
cultural homogenisation, consensus and levelling. Furthermore, the importance
of the relationship of the volk to
the land sets up a normative criterion which valorises organically rooted,
historically authentic forms of life and traditions. Prince is at pains however
to note that this does not constitute setting up an absolute dichotomy between
an evil urban/mass/pop culture and a good country/local/folk culture. In my
estimation, reading through the many short essays and reviews in the
collection, this distinction is the basic orientation in a way not mirrored in Arcadia. In the film, the dialectic
between town and country is depicted almost as a pact of mutual ruin. The
alienation of people from the land is echoed by their alienation from each
other in atomised urban conurbations.
A comparison might be made between
these projects and the work of film maker Patrick Keiller or the writer Iain
Sinclair. Both take the lived environment (and by association the land itself)
as an object of historically mediated intensities. Both of them deal in what
Sinclair has termed "occluded histories", using ideas from
psychogeography to unearth lost pathways and forgotten stories in the
countryside and urban environment. The difference for me between their work and
hauntology is in the genuine sense of loss that pervades many of their
reflections on the past. Their work of cultural memory does not admit the sort
of potentially redemptive quality that the hauntological thesis maintains. It's
not for nothing that Iain Sinclair's recent book is titled The Last London (2017) and laments the city's transformation,
wrought under the twin banners of the 2012 Olympics and totalised
gentrification, which have left it unnavigable and unwilling to yield up its stories
of the past; history teetering on the edge of erasure.
Taking the land itself as a possible redemptive
source of “lost futures”, as it seems both Paul Wright and Stephen Prince do in
their projects, is a rather different approach compared to Mark Fisher’s pop cultural
sifting or the psychogeography of Sinclair and Keiller. And since contemplation
of the historical sense of the land is inextricable from that land’s
relationship with historical peoples, we must acknowledge that along with
restitution of the memory of lost traditions and communities, come more
problematic ideas such as nativity, authenticity, and the modern obsession with
culture and identity.
The problem of the land - to use an insight
of Martin Heidegger's - is the problem of what constitutes a proper dwelling
for humanity in the technological age. There is something of the 'Fourfold' in
all these hauntological reflections on the land; that obscure Heideggerian
notion consisting of the relation between earth, sky, gods and mortals. And
just as Heidegger saw that the threat held over our relation to the land
consists in our forgetting to preserve the essential relation between things as
they appear in the fourfold, so too does Paul Wright's film begin with that
shadow of a slumbering figure passing across a field; an image of originary
forgetfulness. Nevertheless, Arcadia
ends with images of rebirth, literally rising out of the ground. The land as an
"origin", as a site of inexhaustible primordial potentiality, is
never used up, never truly lost; though it can be forgotten. The origin is not
something in the past but something that is always carried with us, as a
wellspring of renewal.
 |
| Image from Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's Winstanley (1975) |
The last article in Stephen Prince's
collection draws a pertinent comparison between Ben Wheatley's film A Field in England (2013) and Kevin
Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's biopic of Gerrard
Winstanley (1975), clips of which appear in Arcadia. Beyond the visual
similarities of these two films - both set during the period of the English
Civil war and bearing that era's distinctive apparel; both shot in black and
white - Prince notes the thematic congruence which locates both in the English
countryside. Winstanley, with his short-lived commune of True Levellers up on
St George's hill at Weybridge (now the site of exclusive estates and a golf
club) and the characters in Wheatley's film, who do battle with powerful cosmic
forces within the confines of an ordinary English field. Prince takes the
comparison further and draws inferences from the signal event of the Miner
Strike in the mid-1980s - the battle of Orgreave - dubbed the English Civil War
Pt2 by artist Jeremy Deller. Here again, in a field in England, the forces of a
progressive, socially minded and communal nation came up against their opposite
in the privileged classes of the emerging economy, of financialisation, of
Thatcher and Reaganomics. In each case the land plays the role of a site of
struggle; whether as the True Levellers "common treasury for all, both
rich and poor" or as the locus of eschatological powers in Ben Wheatley's
film (a messianic timbre which Arcadia shares). Finally, the land is both the
source of the miner’s labour and the site of their defining battle. In each
case the ultimate meaning of the land as origin is struggle.
4).
“To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor
is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free
is (...) to be capable of one's own impotentiality, to be in relation to one's
own privation. This is why freedom is freedom for both good and evil”. (Giorgio Agamben (1999) –
Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford University Press,
Stanford California, pg183)
By taking the land as an ontic
category, as a thing that might be contested, or owned, or carved up, we
unavoidably run into the problems of nativity and historical peoples;
unavoidably evoke parochialism, borders and territories. In doing so we are thrown
back onto the plain of the subject of rights and claims for recognition. This
has understandably been the strategy of post-colonialism in its approach to the
experiences of first-peoples around the world and the defence of their
traditions and historical land rights, which were often trampled upon during
Europe’s colonial period. However, in non-colonised countries like Britain,
that approach risks leading to a racialised discourse of so-called "white
culture", and British indigenous identities. It’s difficult to argue that
rallying round arcane customs and experiences of country life, in opposition to
urban cosmopolitanism, is a good starting point for so-called “progressive
futures”; at least insofar as those futures are meant to aim at a degree of
political universalism fit for 21st century Britain. It’s noticeable
how so much of the past recalled by writers on hauntology (with some notable
exceptions) is of a pale monocultural type, pre mass immigration and
exemplifying the kind of exclusory strategies that only during the last few
decades (indeed during the neoliberal period) have been eroded.
There are perhaps other ways we might
conceive of the idea of the land as an Origin. Withdrawal to the land, to the Origin,
is an archetypal form of renewal, not only in a geographical sense, but also
through the utilisation of memory. Machiavelli wrote of the historical memory
of the founding of every state - its origin in that first breaking of the soil
- as an eternal point of renewal that periodically needs to be evoked to shake
up institutions and breathe new life into the citizenry. He had in mind Livy's
political mythology of the founding of Rome, when Romulus carved out the sacred
boundary of his new city (the pomerium)
using a plough. Re-founding has forever had connotations of renewal linked to a
return to the grounding principles upon which things stand. This idea is more
political ontology than history.
The land is also a site of refuge
which gives us the time to remember. Montag's flight out of the city in Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451 leads to an encounter with memory in a forest, by the light of a
camp fire. Former academics, turned into living books after the destruction of
their libraries, are ready to re-found civilisation after the coming nuclear
apocalypse. "We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week
and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing,
you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long
run". The retreat to the land is a retreat to memory.
The parable-like ending to Bradbury's
book brings together elements of radical eschatological renewal and a concern with
technology; with humanity’s fate in the face of the annihilating power of that technology.
From this perspective the return in-land, this anabasis, is a reversal of the historical movement which opened
human existence into new spaces and new global political constellations over the
last half millennium; from the turn to maritime existence during the early
modern period, through the nuclear age of aeronautics and space exploration, up
to the contemporary colonisation of the digital, virtual realm. "Run to
the hills" is in fact a statement of metaphysics. And as metaphysics, it
is potentially open to far less “progressive” readings, as it is contested
across the political spectrum.
The German jurist Carl Schmitt wrote
extensively and attributed great weight to the distinction between terrestrial
and maritime cultures, viewing it as politically decisive to the march of
technology and key to understanding conflicts such as those between Britain and
the European powers in the 19th and 20th centuries and the Cold War. Interestingly
in his war-time text Land and Sea: A
World Historical meditation (1942), he attributes special significance to the
transformation he identifies in England during the 16th and 17th centuries when
"the children of the Lion" opted to become "children of the
sea". England - Schmitt claims - was unique in achieving a "planetary
spatial revolution", in displacing itself away from the land and deciding
for a maritime existence. In doing so it opened the way not only for Britain’s
global empire, but for the Industrial Revolution itself. In a fashion analogous
to Heidegger's critique of technology, Schmitt links together in a fundamental
way, the technological fate of a people with the "space" it occupies.
"The human receives a particular historical consciousness from his
"space" [lebensraum], which
is subjected to great historical transformations. The variegated forms of life
correspond to equally differentiated spaces".
 |
| Battle Of Trafalgar by Louis Philippe Crepin |
By the time of Schmitt's post-war Dialogue on New Space (1958) the
conflict between the two nuclear powers of Russia and the United States - each
standing on one side of the Land/Sea distinction - had grown due to "unencumbered
technology" to enclose the fate of the whole planet. And yet despite humanity
penetrating the cosmos and harnessing the power of the atom, Schmitt sees only
a repetition and intensification of the elementary separation which occurred
when England abandoned the land and decided for the sea. He has Mr. Altmann (a
character meant to ventriloquise Schmitt's historical sense) state: "For
me, the human is a son of the earth, and so he shall remain as long as he
remains human". Today's challenge - according to the same character is
"The binding of unencumbered technology ... It is from that direction that
I hear the call, the challenge of the present".
5).
The global historical movement
sketched here by Schmitt is a dark one, pregnant with the revolutionary
conservatism that characterises his work. The land is where we find "house
and property, marriage, family and hereditary right, all that is built upon the
foundations of a terrestrial mode of being...". For the people of a
maritime culture we instead find the ship, drifting from place to place upon
the shifting and uncertain surface of the sea. Against the repose of the house,
the restlessness of an uprooted technological existence, constantly alienating
itself from its origin. These are classical conservative statements of a type
which radicalise a volkish perspective
on terrestrial existence and the signal importance of land for specific
historical peoples. What is important for us in all this is how - like the
hauntological sources we've been considering - Schmitt frames the land as a
primordial Origin out of which and in which resides the fate of humanity as a
whole.
Schmitt's reflections on "the challenge
of technology" and the question of taming it within the horizons of a
"terrestrial existence" are pertinent for us in the 21st century,
when new communications technologies are threatening to collapse human
relationships altogether into the virtual world, and rampant capitalism
continues to drive the environment toward catastrophe. But we should stop short
of endorsing his conservative metaphysical reading of the originary quality of
the land, which in Schmitt’s account is shot through with barely veiled
Germanic chauvinism and a kulturkritik which
pre-figures today’s far-right attacks on both Muslims and non-Europeans as
culturally incompatible with Western society.
In Arcadia, clips from the Winstanley film offer up a different notion
of the relationship between humans and the land, one that does not tie it to
either a historical people or a specific tradition. This is in stark contrast
to nationalist (or worse, National Socialist) ideas which connect the land (or
soil, boden) to the historical
consciousness of particular peoples, construed in either cultural or racial
terms. Even after the holocaust, at the time Schmitt was writing his dialogue
on New Space, he retained his anti-Semitism and like Heidegger never
successfully disentangled his gloomy political ontology from the fate of
particular nations and peoples, namely the Germans. His grand theories remained
parochial and chauvinistic even when addressing “world historical movements”.
In concluding this brief analysis, we
should recognise that the originary quality of the land is not politically
specific, not open solely to ideas of progressive political and social renewal.
As a metaphysical operator rooted in the deepest experience of our species with
its environment, it is open to all, and its ultimate meaning remains contested
and perhaps ultimately undecidable.
The antidote to much of the rightwing
interpretation (and the risk of nostalgia, parochialism, anachronism) is to
recognise the Origin not as locatable to any particular time or place, but as
that eternal wellspring of human potentiality which is always carried with us. The
Origin is not an ontic but an ontological category and hauntology is the study
of that spectre which haunts humanity in its form of Being-Historical. If so,
what hauntology calls the spectre is in fact the other side of that original
potentiality, the side that doesn’t fall into non-being but remains active
beneath the surface, like the rhizomes in Arcadia.
Borrowing a term from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, we might call this
other side the “impotential” of the origin. The impotential is the revenant,
the left over that remains after the potency of the origin has passed into historical
actuality and been extinguished. It’s that part of every potentiality that
withholds itself and never fully passes into the actual, maintaining its being within
the realm of the virtual.
Is not every possible future a
spectre from the side of its impotentiality; its capacity not-to-be? If so,
then the term “lost futures” must be a misnomer. Rather than falling into
non-being, the potentiality implicit in any political moment at its point of
defeat goes underground, withdrawing into the impotential; into its capacity
not-to-be. This capacity is itself a positive value which resides in all political life, awaiting its moment to return. It
is from out of this positive quality of the virtual, from the other side of the
possible, that the spectre calls to us, haunting the present with its never
exhausted, but endlessly deferred promise of other possible worlds and
forms-of-life.
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