Figure 1: Aradale Psychiatric Hospital.

Hauntology – a term that I have never heard in my past 20 years. Either, it is not easy to find lots of information of this term. The general definition of hauntology is being described as, “a theory that highlights the discipline of academic history and eventual significance of them in human history”. To go a bit further, it explains the paradoxical state of the spectre, which is generally being called as “ghost” in today’s society.

The intangible idea of hauntology has generated the creation of ideas in the artistic field such as fashion, technology, musics and movies. I have also inspired by the hauntology expression expressed by Pilkington. Pilkington has stated that the musical hauntology is trying to pull the ideal listeners back to the past and also the future state of life. It allows us to understand via the feeling of future is actually the routine of past life, which is constantly bringing us forward and backward with a similar event but in a different stage of life perception. Musician, Burial, has been trying to emphasize on the feeling of loss as a kind of catastrophe. In other words, to connect back to the idea of Specters of Marx suggested by Jacques Derrida in 1993, individuals are actually haunted by the living souls, i.e. ghosts, of the past, and in a sense the ghost of the futures. This complex concept has also been brought in the movie “Ghost Dance”, directed by Ken McMullen in 1983. The film outlines Derrida’s argument of interconnection between opaque arts and science ghosts.

We can also find hauntology existence in the technology field. The smartphone and tablet adoption will be one of the examples. This example has suggested to investigate how the past brought human beings forward in that era, which many technological ideas and possible inventions were covered by the media, for instance, in the 90’s. And now, in the contemporary age, a higher level of technology investigation has been found as a sublimation of ‘furturistic’ ideology.

Reference:

Eldraque77, (2011), Ararat Lunatic Asylum – Aradale Psychiatric Hospital. [electron print] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ararat_Lunatic_Asylum_-_Aradale_Psychiatric_Hospital.jpg>, accessed 22 May 2013

Pilkington, M., (2012), “Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future”, BoingBoing,
http://boingboing.net/2012/10/12/hauntologists-mine-the-past-fo.html, accessed 22 May 2013

Wikipedia, (2013), Hauntology,
http://www.howtothinkaboutthefuture.com/?p=75, accessed 22 May 2013

hiperf289, (2007), “‘The Science of Ghosts’ – Derrida in ‘Ghost Dance'”, YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nmu3uwqzbI, accessed 22 May 2013