ACFM - ACFM Microdose: A Ghost Story For Christmas

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Ghosts have already got their own festival: Halloween. So why do they spook us at Christmas too? Do they represent forces of goodness and charity, or some nameless demonic evil? And what gifts have they brought? Jeremy Gilbert shields his eyes from the ghostly apparitions of Jacques Derrida, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and M.R. James as […]

This is acid man. This is acid man. Hello, listeners, this is Gem, Jeremy Gilbert, and welcome to this special microdose episode of ACFM. And our title for this episode is A Ghost Story for Christmas. This is just going to be me talking about this theme. Why did we decide to do this? Well, we've done an episode about horror for Halloween, we've done an episode about gifts for Christmas, and we thought we would bring this full circle, and talk about the phenomenon of the Christmas ghost story.

and some of the ideas which it might provoke for us and some of the ideas from theory and philosophy that might be relevant to thinking about it. A ghost story for Christmas, of course, is the title of this long-running BBC, I don't know, can you call it a series? Because it like happens once a year or a couple of times a year.

It's a phenomenon. And it first happened in the early 70s, and then it was revived about 10 years ago, I think, and the past few years there's been one or however many they do each year around Christmas time and what they do is they do a televised adaptation of a classic ghost story the classic era of the ghost story in English language fiction is usually thought of as being the Victorian and Edwardian period and the vast bulk of these ghost stories for Christmas both in the early 70s and now in the 21st century.

are adaptations of stories by one particular writer, Montague Rhodes James, M.R. James, a fascinating figure who, he was almost certainly a class enemy of people like me. He was a medievalist, a historian, not a class enemy for that reason, but a senior fellow and administrator at Cambridge University. I think he becomes the vice-chancellor or something, eventually. But he was also a brilliant literary story. If you don't mind the fact that there are no women characters at all in the stories, which, of course, one does sort of mind, but you have to put up with these things a lot of the time and reading old fiction. And he's a fascinating figure because his work does it represent the best example of the shift from the Victorian ghost story to the early 20th century, the Edwardian and then the post-Edwardian 20th century ghost and horror story.

mostly but not always ghosts in Victorian fiction is a sort of moral agent. Ghosts are helping people, they're telling people where buried treasure is or where the lost will can be found that will make sure that the orphan child has a home or they're helping to expose a murderer and have them sent to prison. But of course, it's the authorities that carry out the sentence. In M.R. James, the occult forces, the spirits that we engage in encounter are always malevolent. They are often malevolent towards somebody who deserves to be the object of malevolence, but they're not helping the police with their inquiries. They're killing the people who deserve to have vengeance wreaked upon them. A lot of the stories

involve people almost suffering harm at the hands of what seem to be these demonic forces who don't necessarily deserve to suffer anything. I say the demonic forces, yeah, it's worth noting those M.R. James stories, which are, they're all about, like, gentle gentleman's scholars, you know, discovering, either discovering evil artefacts or things like this. And they're not really about ghosts, most of them. They're referred to as ghost stories as a generic description, but they're more often about demons and black magic and this sort of thing. My absolute favourite, one of the most popular, M.R. James stories, is casting the runes,

which I'm not going to spoil the story, but it starts off with a scholar, very, very angry that his peer-reviewed paper has been rejected and for publication, or what would pass for publication at that time, which is to be allowed to read your paper to the relevant Royal Society. And he is his quest, the villain's quest for vengeance against the reviewers of his paper is what sort of drives the story. And M.R. James, he's now widely seen as this key figure and he is the main author of the stories in the ghost for Christmas TV series. Why? Well, because the story is that James would write these stories around Christmas time and the tradition was that he would read them out to his college on Christmas

Eve. And this itself was seen as being a modern iteration of a very old tradition of storytelling, of ghost storytelling at Christmas. Now there's M.R. James then is this key figure in the emergence of the idea of the Christmas ghost story, or not the emergence, but the modern crystallisation of that idea. Of course, the other key figure is Dickens, and a bit later I'll talk a bit more about a Christmas Carol, which I think has this extraordinary status now in our culture of being after the nativity, the biblical nativity story, and arguably, you know, arguably not even after the biblical the nativity story. It is the most popular Christmas story in the English-speaking world. It's

been subject to endless adaptations and interpretations. Of course, interestingly, as I'll come back to Dickens, Dickens' story, it presents itself as a ghost story for Christmas in the tradition of ghost stories for Christmas, but it isn't about ghosts. They're not ghosts, the so-called ghosts of the story. They are spirits belonging to this completely imagined cosmology. that Dickens makes up for the purpose of the story in a quite brilliant way and so it's interesting to think about that that both in the case of M.R. James and in the case of Christmas Carol,

what are often referred to as the classic Christmas ghost stories and basically they're not about ghosts, they're more about the supernatural, the weird, the liminal, the dark forces which we might or might not confront or be threatened by whether they are dark, forces or whether they are the forces of greed and selfishness within ourselves. So firstly, though, why this association between Christmas time and ghosts of whatever we mean when we say ghosts? Because Dickens didn't invent that idea, although he did do a lot to

popularise a particular idea of Christmas, which we still inherit today. And James absolutely didn't. I mean, James was writing his stories around Christmas time and reading them out for his friends at his college, because that was itself seen as some sort of a historic tradition. In his book, Haunted Seasons, Television and Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween by Derek Johnston, the author offers quite an interesting little history collated from various other sources of the idea of the Christmas ghost story. And as far as we can tell from the available history and historiography, the idea that you tell spooky, scary stories about ghosts or goblins. And often they do seem to have been about

goblins. They seem to have been scary stories, not necessarily just about ghosts. Around the Midwinter Festival, seems to go back a really, really long way. Pretty much as far as we can tell. It's worth thinking about why that is. Well, obviously, to some extent, it's because it's the darkest time of the year. So just sort of by definition, it's the spookiest time of the year. It's the time of the year when the shadows seem to have almost taken over the world. And one can imagine all kinds of strange and otherworldly happenings just out of sight and out of the corner of our eyes. And that is what these stories often play upon. Winter solstice, obviously, is a liminal time, meaning it's the time on the border between one thing and another. It's the beginning,

it's the end of the old year, the beginning of the new. It's the middle of winter. As I say, It's the darkest, coldest time. It's a time when death, all those who have died, might be on our minds. Because there is this sense that the year itself is dying, is coming to its end. On the other hand, it's also the time when we celebrate a few days after the solstice. We celebrate the sense that the tide is turning, that the light is returning. 25th of December, the classic, the date of Christmas, once upon a time, the date of the Roman Festival of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun,

is basically the first day when, if you're paying quite a lot of attention, then you can really start to notice that the days are getting a tiny bit longer rather than continuing to get shorter. This always creates a sense of being on a border between one state of existence and another. In the same way that ghosts sort of existed a border between a living state and a dead state. Obviously, this changes to light and also the changes to work patterns around this time of year because it's very common in cultures that have a winter as we recognise it, which of course doesn't happen in the same way in equatorial regions.

It's very common in such cultures for people to pause work and have some kind of a festival during this darkest, coldest time of the year. And so the way in which our work patterns change, our experience of the day, changes, our experience of time changes during those deep, deep midwinter weeks, creates a sense of sort of otherworldliness, which I think is the foundation upon which the whole Christmas festival is built, but which can easily be experienced as something slightly uncanny in a good way or a bad way. Usually in a good way, though. You think it's always worth reflecting on the fact that the Christmas ghost story, as its title might suggest,

as its name might suggest, isn't usually really scary. It's not supposed to be really scary. There's almost something sort of cozy about it a lot of the time, even in the case of M.R. James, even though it does sort of send a shiver down the spine. It's a bit like feeling a cold breeze on your neck while you're wearing a nice, cozy Christmas jumper, I suppose. Also, of course, we very deliberately do have this festival of lights during the middle of winter. And again, that's something that, I think not a lot of,

all but very many cultures around the world, which do experience a winter solstice in this way, have some sort of a festival of light during that period. It's a pretty, I would say, I wouldn't say natural, but I'd say obvious, pretty logical way of dealing with the fact that you're having to be subjected to, these cyclical changes in light patterns, which, you know, affect your sense of time, they affect your mood, they affect your sense of what you're able to actually get up and go out and do. It makes a lot of sense to just say for the week or so that's the darkest and coldest.

Let's just not work. Let's put up loads on lights everywhere, light fires, eat and drink stuff that temporarily raises your dopamine and serotonin levels, lots of sugar, alcohol, etc. Generally get through it together in a way which is as pleasurable as possible. But all this, of course, again, creates this sense of liminand. the sense of being at the edge, the sense of not being in a normal state,

the sense that time in particular has taken on a different quality. Ghosts as a concept, ghosts which seem to emerge in this interplay between light and darkness, just as shadows do. Ghosts are always about weird and disjointed experiences of temporality. You could say, and it was sometimes said by commentators, that are the music concrete, the earliest examples of tape-based music produced by people like Pierre Schaefer from the middle of the 20th century, had a kind of ghostly quality. They were often described as there being something haunting about these sounds which were made up of other sounds,

these traces of other bits of audio being used to make new kinds of music. I'm going to be. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. ...their. ... ... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... What is a ghost, after all, let's leave aside all together, the question of whether

the ghosts as such really exist. That's not what this is about today. But conceptually, what is a ghost? It's somebody who's there but not there. It's somebody who's there. It's somebody who's who's dead but not dead, who's alive but not alive. It's a being or a thing or a phenomenon or even just an audio-visual phenomenon whose very existence, the very existence of which problematizes the distinction between absence and presence, between past and future, between memory and present experience. A ghost is always a sort of memory.

It's a memory which is manifest in some way. It might take on a kind of agency. It might not. It depends on how this particular ghost is being conceptualised. A ghost is, to some extent, always a trace of the past in the present. But sometimes ghosts come to warn us of things. Sometimes ghosts are prophetic. And dickened in a Christmas carol very explicitly makes the scariest ghost,

the ghost of Christmas yet to come, the ghost of the future, an echo of the future in the present. Christmas being the most intense time of the year, the time of the year at which we implement collectively the most intense suspension of ordinary temporality. It's also a time for very intense feelings about the precise issue of presence, of being here, or absence. The question of who we are going to be with at Christmas on Christmas day

is an emotionally very intense question for many, many people, probably for most people in our culture today. The question of who is absent, who can't make it for Christmas, who you have to talk to him on the phone, or you're not going to see, or who you might have lost altogether, and who you're going to miss with particular intensity is always one of the questions which haunts us around Christmas time. The language I'm using here, a lot of the ideas I'm putting. across here are directly derived from the reflections on the nature of ghosts and specters

offered by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida, who was, you know, for many years, really, the most famous living philosopher, died a few years ago now. I had quite a lot to say about ghosts and specters. First, I started talking about ghost inspectors sometime in the 80s with reference to photography and film and the way in which these things create, sort of spectral experiences, if you like, or experiences of spectrality, ghostliness, which I think is sort of true, although it's also worth keeping in mind as far as we know, the idea of ghosts as sort of translucent, see-through, a bit like a piece of film or a photograph that's gone slightly wrong or a cinema projection. It is not an ancient idea. It's an idea that only comes

about once people start seeing a very early photographic technology and sort of starting to imagine though that's what ghosts might be like. Derrida starts publishing the 60s and he's a professional philosopher who's trained very much in the French tradition where you read all the ancient Greeks, then you read the German late 18th century philosophers, then the 20th and early 20th century German philosophers Husserl, Heidelgen Nietzsche, etc. And then maybe you read French commentators on those traditions from the first half of the 20th century. And that's the basic canon you're always engaging with. Of course, Derrida, is typical of French intellectual of his generation,

is always very engaged also with Freud and psychoanalysis. And his source have engaged with the Marxist tradition, but not really explicitly until 1994 when he publishes this book, Spectors of Marx, which I will talk about in a minute. So what is Derrida's interest? Well, Derrida's big interest in his early writing is what to make of the fact that philosophy, this great tradition of European thought, is fundamentally a written tradition. It's a tradition of writing and reading and reinterpreting writing. And yet that tradition has had very little to say about writing as a concept at all. And when it has said anything about writing, mostly what it said is. It's been negative. Going right back to Plato, you know, Plato often thought of as the fountainhead, the starting point of the Western philosophical tradition. Plato, of course, always at least claims that everything he is writing is not actually his own ideas, that he's just transcribing

the ideas of his teacher's Socrates. Socrates is positioned as the real origin point of Western philosophy and Socrates does not write because to write is always to subject your words and thoughts to the risk that they might be carried away into some strange place, put into some different context and misinterpreted in a way which is much less likely to happen if you are engaged in face-to-face communication between the teacher and the student. Really a lot of Derrida's early work is thinking about the implications of all this. what does it mean to be like really sort of against writing to think writing is a bit dangerous and to think therefore to think communication at a distance is a bit dangerous

and to think that materiality is a bit dangerous because writing is a way in which words are made concrete material of course spoken words are you know they are sound waves vibrating the air it's all matter it's all material but in some way the written you know the written document seems sort of more material, more corporeal, more bodily. And it's certainly true to this Western philosophical tradition, on the whole, doesn't really like bodies very much, prefers minds. And it would have us all beaming our thoughts into it to each other's minds telepathically if it could. One of Derrida's key concepts early on is this concept of the trace. The idea of the trace is really interesting because what is a trace? If you find a trace of something, you find a

mark of both its presence and its absence. And it's sort of a material mark, but it's a material mark of the fact that something was there, but is not now there. And really most of Derrida's writing, to be honest, is concerned with thinking about, thinking about the implications of that observation and thinking about it in lots of different contexts. So he writes about all kinds of different phenomena, which seemed to have this similar status to the concept of trace. And one of them is ghosts. They are traces of the living thing of which they were the ghost. They are material but not material. I mean, they're material enough to be seen and experienced, but they're immaterial. They're thought of as being as spectral just imply, the word in

modern usage, the word spectral just implies sort of translucence and it implies non-corporeality. The context within which Derrida writes about this is this book, Spectres of Marx, which he publishes in 1994. And it was a huge event book when it got published. Because, basically, because Derrida hadn't had that much to say explicitly about Marx and Marxism up to that point in his career. Derrida, I mean, Derrida has this very interesting career. He's never a massive star in France, for one thing.

He gets picked up as a sort of key philosopher by, really by American Literary Studies Department. This is during the time when literary studies are having a sort of golden age, partly because in the English-speaking world, especially in Britain, but also in the States for a while, colleges and universities are expanding. Literary study has this sort of status, a bit like classics had had in earlier centuries, as being the default humanity subject. Like if you don't really know what else you're going to do, you go and do a degree in English literature. It's seen as producing graduate to have the literate skills which are the main things which are expected of university graduates. This basically means there are lots of jobs teaching literature in academic departments, and it becomes quite easy to get a job, even if your main interest isn't particularly literature, even if you're more interested in things like French philosophy. This is what's happening a lot in the 70s and 80s in particular, is people in working in things.

literature departments which are growing and expanding and have plenty of money to spend are looking around for something more interesting to do than just tell middle-class students why Shakespeare and Dickens and James Joyce are brilliant and the more interesting thing they find to do a lot of the time is reading these French sort of post-phenomological philosophers like Derrida and thinking about some of their ideas and so as a consequence of this Derrida becomes a huge star, a huge intellectual star in the English-speaking world, largely because of the way in which he's taken up in American universities in the 80s. Derrida's own politics, or he's a little bit ambivalent.

He wasn't a sort of card-carrying communist, but of course he belonged to that generation of thinkers who had been very influenced by the events of May 1968. You know, he would say he always voted for the Socialist Party and, you know, saw the French Communist Party as being far too close to the Soviet Communist Party, far too Stalinist, far too orthodox, having been far too unsympathetic to the new social movements and the students in the late 60s and the 70s, rather like, as was also the case in Britain by the 1980s, actually, the fact that you were a member of, you know, being a supporter or a member of the Labour Party in Britain in the 80s did not at all by any means mean you were necessarily politically to the right of everybody who was a member of the Communist Party. Lots of, lots of people. Most of the Labour left in the 80s considered themselves to the left of the Communist Party. The situation in France wasn't exactly identical, but it was fairly comparable. So Derrida, this is all just

to say, Derrida, you know, had always been clear Derrida was like a left-wing thinker and a left-wing person. But most of the themes of his philosophical writing were not sort of classically ones which were, you know, classical concerns at the left. They were more sort of phenomenological, existential or about the nature of communication. Exactly what the kind of political implications of them might be was always a highly contentious subject. And there had always been a suspicion by some of these critics, especially in the English speaking world, that he was a sort of radical liberal, that he was somehow anti-Marxist.

And certainly one of the things that had happened, indeed, is that one of the uses to which Derrida's ideas had been put by thrusting young literary scholars was to make critical Criticisms are what they saw as the simplistic dogmatism of Marxist literary scholars, people more influenced by Altuzer, P.M.S.R.E., Raymond Williams, people like this. Then you have the whole end of the Cold War, the end of the Soviet Union. You have Francis Fukuyama, the Japanese-American conservative thinker publishing his notorious famous essay declaring the end of history in the early 90s. History was over and America had won. That was the answer. And therefore, we could consign marks to the dustbin of history. And in fact, all of history was now a dustbin. And Derrida's really writing a response to all this. And so Derrida writes this quite odd book, which is basically him sort of saying, well, of course, deconstruction is the name that was given

to Derrida's general philosophy. I'm not going to get into why it was called deconstruction or what that meant. but the idea that deconstruction was hostile to Marxism is something that Derrida wanted to sort of put to one side he wanted to refute and dispute it's not that he ever really had very much to say about Marx even in this book frankly doesn't really have a lot to say about Marx in some ways this book Derrida's Spectres of Marx

you can read it as one long Gallic shrug of the shoulders in which Derrida just says well like of course I'm not an anti-mars Marxist. Look, I'm a radical philosopher from Paris. Of course, I'm not against Marx. And of course, Marx is right about most of the fundamental things. He's right in his analysis of capitalism. He's right in his evocation of a future beyond it. Of course I support all that. Like, I wouldn't, why would I, you know, of course I do. And it's just sort of, to me, there's always a sort of there's a undercurrent in this book of Derrida saying, well, it's just a silly question, really.

The question people have been asking for years and years, like, what do you think? think about Marx. He has had to deal as well. Of course, Marx is right about the fundamentals. Of course, we should always read Marx. On the other hand, of course, you know, you can't be right about everything. You shouldn't make it into a religion. There are lots of different ways of reading marks. And there you go. And it's not really, and there isn't really much in Derrida's own philosophical work that would give you a particular way of reading Marx one way or another. And there's no reason why it should be. He's just, he's interested in a different set of questions to Marx for the most part.

One of the great classics of electronic music of the past few decades, a record which is really seen as a pioneering antecedent to things like Ambient House in the 90s was Brian Eno and David Burns' collaboration, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. you are a believer for the gate and yet you have righteous and you are for death okay

now you're ready to visit put your head up in there my life in the bush of ghosts it comes from a novel actually, doesn't it? It comes from a novel by a Nigerian writer. But again, the idea of ghostliness and the association

of sample-based music, because this is a real pioneering piece of sample based music, the ghostly quality of the sample. A trace in the Derridaean sense is there very much in their choice of that title. I wouldn't be

as dismissive of the book, Spectors of Marx, as some people have been, but I can see why they have been. even though I am an admirer of Derrida, he was a really important thinker for me. I was younger, and I think he does make some really interesting observations in his work and set out some really useful terminologies and problematics. So what is he doing with this concept of spectres in this book, Spectors of Marks?

Why is it called Spectres of Marx? Well, of course, the term is most obviously a reference to the famous first line of the Communist Manifesto published in 1848 in which Marx and Engels write a spectre is haunting Europe the spectre of communism

that's the English translation I think also the of the German I don't read German I mean Derrida in the book does write about the different uses of words like Geist in German which means sort of spirit and ghost

and he refers to the fact that in both English and French it's spectre in English it's spectre in French that's the term that gets used to translate it what does Marx mean by that when you see the spectre is of communism the spectre is haunting Europe

what is this spectre well I mean really that the beginning of the communist manifesto they're making fun of the fact that there's a sort of moral panic going on amongst conservative and reactionary forces across Europe, partly in response to the wave of liberal revolutions

that happen in 1848. People in many countries across Europe, the old sort of imperial monarchies of places like central Europe, what we were now called Germany, etc. France, where people are demanding constitutional government and liberal democracy as replacements for the autocratic forms of monarchy,

that have been prevalent in those countries up to that point. Of course, in Paris, like Britain and Holland, we already had those things. This is the thing you can trace right back to ancient Greece if you want to, but one of the things that enemies of democratic reform will always say, when there is a wave of demand for political democratic reform, they will say, well, you know, you can't have these, you can't have political democracy, because political democracy will lead to economic democracy,

and nobody wants that, that would be communism. And I mean, this does go right back, I mean, it goes right back to ancient Greece. And they are referring to the fact in the Communist Manifesto that part of the discourse, the language, the rhetoric of right-wing reactionary, anti-democratic, anti-liberal forces at that time is that they think that if the demands for political democracy and mass suffrage are met, which are being made by the revolutionaries who are mainly middle class. They're mainly bourgeois revolutionaries of the time. Then it will lead inevitably to the abolition of private property, to communism.

And on the one hand, of course, I mean, of course this was sort of ridiculous because the recent experiences in Britain should already have made clear to people what was going to become very clear over the next 50 years in Europe that the middle classes did not have any intention of allowing communism to be the thing that followed on from them becoming politically enfranchised. They had no intention of that whatsoever and they still don't. But on the other hand, of course, the Communist Manifesto, taking the name the Communist Manifesto and writing in this way

is a deliberate provocation and it's the document within which Marx and Engel say, well, maybe communism wouldn't be such a bad thing. Maybe we should do communism. Maybe it would be better indeed if these bourgeois liberal revolutions led quickly and directly to the implementation of full-scale state-led socialism, leading eventually to full communism. There's a tension even in the Communist Manifesto,

which is never really resolved, in my opinion, in Marx's entire career, between the fact that they are saying, Maybe the transition to fully bourgeois societies, which is taking place at their time, could lead very quickly and directly to socialism and communism. And they're saying this on the basis of a theory of history, according to which, well, it's really taken several hundred years for capitalism fully to emerge out of and to replace feudalism. So why it should only take a matter of decades to go from there to socialism or communism

is not a question which is ever satisfactorily resolved at all in Marx's own writings. I remember this was my very first thought. I read Marx, the teenager. I thought, I remember thinking, well, I can see how they say, yeah, you know, you get from feudalism to capitalism because in this urban middle class, this merchant class, grows and grows, it comes richer and more powerful, and more organised. Eventually, they have political revolutions and they create their own forms of state institution. you arrive at a situation in which they are the ruling class of Europe and America,

but you've only really arrived at that situation by the early 19th century after several hundred years. So why do we think that the working class becoming fully organised, politically conscious and implementing socialism globally, and why do we think that's only going to take like 20 years? That doesn't make any sense at all. We would like it to, I understand why Marx and Engels very much wanted that to be the case, but it doesn't really fit at all even with their own narrative. So, anyway, the specter that is haunting Europe is the specter of a potential communist future,

this scary prospect of a communist future. And this already introduces the idea that a ghost might not just be a trace of the past, but somehow a trace of the future. Calling the meek and the humble, welcome to Blackboard jungle. So don't. Don't you fumble, just be humble.

Once dub comes along, then the idea of dub as having this quality which seems to somehow play around, which seems to somehow play around with, it senses a presence and absence, have this haunting vibe about it. It is something that commentators will often refer to with reference to dub music from quite early on. I think if you just listen to a really famous classic dub, listen to something like Lee Perry's Blackpool Jungle dub, something about the quality of the melodica and the beats, the kind of sparseness of it, the lingering, melodic lines. It does have this sort of haunting, ghostly

quality, not in a scary way, often in a quite beautiful, sort of a theory or way. So Derrida, Inspectors of Marx, he starts playing around with this idea. Quite a big chunk of the book is in playing around with this idea of spectrality from Marx and seeing how it might come into some sort of dialogue with the image of the ghost in Hamlet, Hamlet's father, the vengeful spirit appearing to Hamlet. and demanding that he and at vengeance for his murder.

The phrase which Derrida borrows from Hamlet is this phrase, the time is out of joint. Derrida makes a lot of this. He makes a lot of the way in which the phenomenon of spectrality, the concept of spectrality, the concept of haunting implies a kind of liminal temporality or a non-linear temporality, a time that is out of joint,

a problematic relationship between both presence and absence and past and future. One of the phrases he uses to think about this or to is this term ontology. This is a typical derrida pun. It's a play on words because on the one hand in philosophical vocabulary we have the word ontology, which just means a science or a theory of being, of the nature of being as such. and we also have this french the french word haunt which is just very similar to the um english haunt it's written pretty much the same way but it's but whereas in english we say ontology hauntology the two words the word ontology in french are pronounced exactly the same so it's a pun and a hauntology

would simply be a study of haunting a theory of haunting or a theory of or a study of the ways in which of present and absence and past and present and memory and being and different modes of temporality can all be confused and can be less simple than they might appear to be according to ordinary common sense ways of thinking about it. So this is where ontology comes from. It comes from this observation that the ghost, the idea of the ghost, the idea of the spectre, the idea of the haunting is one example of a phenomenon like. writing, like the trace, like many other phenomena in Derrida's vocabulary, which seems to problematize any clear distinction between presence and absence, past and future, memory, and

experience. That's where Mark Fisher gets the term hauntology from, although he might also have got it from the fact that there have been lots of writing about the concept of haunting and lots of references to haunting in music and writing about music and writing about media since Derrida's Spectres of Marks, some of which showed something directly to Spectres of Marks, but some of which didn't seem to wear anything to it at all. So Mark Fisher's book, Ghost of My Life, is a collection of blog post, basically, the hero in the 2000s, about various things. But one of the things he writes about there was this concept of hauntology,

And at some point in the 2010s, I guess, Mark Fisher was trying to use this term ontology to refer to particular styles of music, particular genres of music, which for him seemed to somehow evoke a sense of nostalgia for a future that had been lost, a future that was not there. Derrida's inspectors of Marx is also very interested in the question of futurity, the question of the future, the question of what kind of a future we should think of ourselves in relation to. And he is very much responding to the sense that the end of the Soviet Union has robbed the left,

a lot of radical and progressive forces, of a sense of what a future might look like or what a route to a better future, a non-capitalist future might be. So this idea that there was a potential future, there was an idea of the future, and now it has gone. has been taken from us. And the polemical purpose of Derrida's book, Spectors of Marx, its whole polemical purpose is to condemn those who would say this means we should give up on any sense of the future. He absolutely doesn't say that. What he says, in fact, is that we should, we must,

and this becomes his great philosophical invocation in some ways, his great philosophical assertion this period of his work, we must be radically open to the possibilities of the future, the possibilities of democracy to come. The democracy which might wait for us in the future would be much better and more democratic than any kind of democracy we have now. Because Derrida here partly plays on the fact that in French, the term, the normal term for future, is just avenir, which just means to come. It's just made of the words which mean to and come.

So this idea of democracy to come of a radical openness to the future, which is partly borrowed a bit from Levinas' idea of a radical openness to the other and to the alterity, the difference, but also the being of the other. I talked about Levinas in the main episode on GIFT. This idea of openness to the future becomes a sort of ethical implication for Derrida. and I'm always very ambivalent about this. On the one hand, you know, when I first read it, I was really excited. I really liked Derrida, but I was also interested in Marx, and it was sort of great that he was saying this, basically refuting any sort of liberal complacency with emergent neoliberal capitalism.

On the other hand, there is something inherently banal about saying, or we just, you know, our politics is just about being radically open to the future. I would say, to be perfectly honest, in my experience, it's most people who think of themselves as Derridaeans. They love to quote that line and they love to quote that line as a reason for not explaining

what their politics actually are or why they are basically liberals. So it can sort of go either way this concept of radical openness to the future. But either way, what Derrida is interested in here is this sense which you get from the very beginning of the Communist Manifesto and the evocation of the spectators in Europe

through these various thinkings about the ghost and spectrality the Derrida offers in the book even reaching back perhaps to Hamlet and Shakespeare and that what you get from all of this is this idea that

we can be haunted by a future which was denied to us or has been so far denied to us as much as we can be haunted by a memory or a trace of the past and this is the idea which Mark Fisher really borrows with his concept of hauntology as a way of describing a particular aesthetic which might be

expressed in particular kinds of music which according to his theory are all sort of marked by a kind of nostalgia for a sense of modernity, a sense of things moving forward, a sense of real future possibility, which we might have experienced back in the 60s, 70s, through to some time in the 80s, but which we have been denied as the future has been slowly cancelled. Side note, that phrase, the slow cancellation of the future, I think Mark in that book, Ghosombo, he attributes that to Franco Baradi, or Bifo, this Italian philosopher, but Bifo was just, Bifo got that line from Raymond William. It's Raymond Williams in his novel border country

who first uses the phrase that refers to the slow cancellation of the future. It's interesting to think about this notion of Mark's idea of hauntology as referring to particular musical aesthetics. I mean, for my money, some of the music he was talking about under that heading was really interesting and it was a really useful way of thinking about it. Some of it, I think, wasn't as interesting as it could have been.

The key example, Mark was always, was giving was the music on this label ghost box, music by people like the focus group and Bellbury-Polly. I think a lot of them are the same producers working under different names. This sort of wistful, slightly pastoral electronica, which makes these quite obvious references, sometimes to Musac or sort of test-carb music from the 70s. And it is, I mean, it's kind of interesting. I've got nothing against it. I never found it particularly compelling as a, as a style of music but then you know some of the music mark was talking about using some of those headings was was really really important so burial's first album um it still is a real sort of

landmark of british electronic music i think that came out in 2007 it was called untrue it's very this very interesting record which is made by a fairly young producer it's released on on hyperdub records and it's coming out of garage and two-step and dub and step, but there's all these very obvious references, these kind of musical and sonic allusions in it, to the great radical moment of British rave culture in the early 90s, and to the sense of sort of wistful sadness that some young people experienced then in the early 2000s, having sort of missed that. I can say that definitely was a phenomenon. The number of my students, I remember in the early 2000s, really had this sense that they'd missed out,

Because by that point, Rave had become sort of fully commercialised. It had become about these super clubs like Cream. And they'd heard all the stories from older siblings and relatives about the free raves or the early hardcore scene in London, in the early 90s. And they were sort of very envious that I had been their age for all that. I used to tell them, like, it wasn't that great. You know, forget it.

And the only good thing about it was that it was a bit closer to the 70s when the real exciting stuff happened. But this is sort of the vibe. of burial and absolutely there does i mean just from the title the title is burial and the site and it is there's this kind of ghostly aesthetic to the whole thing and it seems to be quite self-consciously playing with the kind of sonic thematics of ghostliness um i guess maybe let's we could hear a bit of music let's hear a bit of archangel i think my favorite track from untrue by burial Better be alone

Be a loo Love it move Better be a little Could it be a love Kissing new Holding move Holding move Better be a little

Better be alone Better be alone Love it more Pursing me I'm a loo Tell me how to look at you. Hold it to me. Hauntology, as Mark Fisher describes it,

you could say it's a specific phenomenon to that moment and certainly Mark and the people read Mark really, really wanted to believe that you could identify a very specific phenomenon to the moment they were talking about and given a name, even if it was just a phenomenon of a sort of wistful nostalgia for a sense of a future that had once been possible and no longer was. The argument Mark was making about, you know, about, you know, classifying particular set of music in that way and identifying them as specific to that time, it was always a little

a bit tendentious, if for no other reason that a lot of the kind of qualities of music that he was identifying, I think you could see as being fairly typical of music in particular currents going back many years. So, I mean, Mark, that book was called Ghost of My Life. Ghost of My Life is the title of a classic drum and bass one. It wouldn't even been called drum and base at the time, would have been jungle, a jungle tune by Roughage Crew from even 19-194, and it is called Ghost at My Life. So that's roughage crew my life, with their kind of already quite ghostly and actually ghostly, kind of haunting sound.

And in fact, there's this sense, I think, from early on in the history, well, I was going to say early on in the history, of music that's coming out of dub, there's this sense of hauntedness and ghostliness being part of the quality of the music. But actually, as various media historians have pointed out, there's been an association between ghosts and ghostliness and just the idea of recording in general right through the history of film photography and sound. So we can see this theme of ghostliness and haunting in music and this idea of, to some extent, music's being haunted by music to the past is a pretty consistent theme that you can trace through a lot of, especially a lot of electronic music, all the way back to

music concrete. Of course, the point that Mark Fisher was making with his deployment of the concept of hauntology in the 2010s was that whereas there's a sense of sort of general existential ghostliness to things like my life in the bush of ghosts and haunted dance hall by the time you're getting burial recording untrue you're getting these ghost box records coming out as well a little bit later by that time there's this powerful sense that music itself has lost the sense of a future that it might have still had even when roughage crew recorded ghost of my life and save as a paradise recorded Haunted Dance Hall. So Jeffrey Scons, the American scholar,

publishes this book, I think it's in 2000, but it's certainly in the very early 2000s, which he calls Haunted Media. And the whole thesis of Haunted Media is that there is just something inherently ghostly, spectral about electronic media in general, from the moment when telegraphy and telegraphy and telephony make it possible for people to communicate across distances from the moment when

photography and then film and then radio and then eventually television make it possible for images to be to be captured to be stored to be circulated to be recontextualized and recreated that there's a kind of ghostliness to all of these phenomenon So Scantz writes in the introduction to Hornsie Media. He says the elaboration of electronic media's capacity for simultaneity into a more expansive ideology of presence dates at least as far back as the advent of electromagnetic telegraphy in the mid-19th century. The Telegraph not only inaugurated a new family of technologies, of course,

but also produced a new way of conceptualising communications and consciousness. Whereas messages had previously been more or less grounded in the immediate space and time of those communicating, the wondrous exchanges of the telegraph presented a series of baffling paradoxes. The simultaneity of this new medium allowed for temporal immediacy amid spatial isolation. So you can be talking simultaneously while you're very far apart from each other and brought psychical connection in spite of physical separation. so it's sort of extraordinary as maybe should be clear based on what I've already talked about in this show today it's sort of extremely sconce doesn't mention Derrida one time in the book

doesn't acknowledge Derrida as having written at all which is just weird given that Derrida is all about presence and absence it's all about temporality and spatial immediacy and temporal immediacy spatial isolation but also temporal differentiation I don't know if Scons just didn't know about Derrida or thought it just wasn't relevant at all. I mean, I think Sconson's a historian, and historians are often very sniffy about theorists and philosophers, even when they are obviously totally relevant and obviously saying something that obviously are saying the thing that the historian is trying to say, yeah, in my experience, historians will always often try very hard to ignore that fact. It might be also that Derrida's own sort of history of thinking about writing,

who sort of problematises Sconsi's claims for the radical break which he sees telegraphy as initiating because Derrida could very much come back and say, no, no, it's not really totally new. Look, what it, telegraphy, it means writing at a distance. I mean, graphy means writing in the Greek. And the whole point is actually people have been worrying and thinking about the fact that just being able to write

stuff down creates a kind of temporal and spatial differentiation or a way of being both together and apart in space and time, which wasn't possible before. But then I guess Sconsi's point actually is valid because his point is, yeah, well, writing allowed you to sort of put some, write something down and then have it be read by somebody else later. Telegraphy lets you write something down and have them read it right straight away, even though you were not face-to-face with each other. Much the same time, pretty much within a year or two of that of Jeffrey Sconsi's book, Haunted Weather being published. David Toob, the British musician and music writer, published his book, Haunted Weather, music, silence, and memory, which is a sort of

extended meditation on the ways in which, on the, the hauntedness of certain kinds of sonic experience or the haunting and spectral quality of certain kinds of musical and sonic experience of the relationship between space, place, music and memory. I've got to say, Tup is a brilliant writer a lot of the time. This book doesn't, it's never really clear what his point is. And the book is called Haunted Weather. But that's a reference to like one installation or performance that he talks about in the book. And the book doesn't contain any reflection at all on the concept of haunting, like at no point does he use that term, even use the term haunting, or think about what it means.

In the second half of the 90s and in the 2000s, literary scholars like Stephen Connor and Roger Luchhurst wrote some quite interesting things about the way in which there's a kind of affinity between the emergence of these new technologies, the ones that Scantz is talking about, electricity, telegraphy, telegraphy, telephones, cinema, et cetera, and the emergence of social phenomena like spiritualism, like the interest in the idea of ghosts, the idea of ghostliness. Because in all of these different contexts, people are experiencing and thinking about what it might mean to have disembodied forms of experience, the fact that the disembodied nature of communication that it becomes possible with things like telegrams.

seems to make people very interested in the possibility of the soul surviving the body. Of course, Derrida would keep reminding us that the technology of writing always made possible a sort of communication at a distance and has always worried people for that reason. A record, a quite famous British record, which made very explicit, again, in its title, The haunted and haunting quality of dub was Sabres of Paradise, again from 1994, called Haunted Dancil. you know, to be, ...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

That was a record released by Sabers of Paradise who were a British electronic group and it was Gary Burns and Jags Cooner but most famously Andrew Weatherall and the album was released in 94 by Walt Records. It's interesting because it predates Dubstep by several years but it is an early interesting example of people who've come out of the rave scene. Andrew Weatherwell was probably the biggest sort of rave DJ of the late 80s, early 90s, and Ray producer, rather. He was the person who did all the production for people like Primal Scream when they decided they wanted to stop being indie rock artist and become

sort of dance music. And this is a really only example of somebody coming from that scene, but wanting to pay tribute to their love of dub and dub music. So it's a sort of digital dub record. It's partly in the tradition of what was sometimes called Digi Dub, people like on-use sounds, Gary Clayle, people like this. But it's one of the best examples of that, and he's drawing a little bit on techno for some of its sonorities, but it's also, it's using classic dumb rhythms. And Haunted Dance Hall is, just as the title suggests, is very much evoking a kind of ghostly quality to the music and a ghostly quality that it hears in that music. Stephen Connor, in the chapter he wrote in a book called Ghost Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis,

history, edited by Peter Buse, friend of mine and Andrew Stott in the 90s. Stephen Connor writes, There is a deeper relation between the evolution of ghost phenomena and the developing logic of technological communications. For both involved the move from somatic to telematic processes. and relay as effects and manifestations that took place through the physical person of the medium. The easiest of these to produce being the production of the voice of the spirits by the medium's own physical vocal organs were replaced by manifestations separated from the medium's body.

So he's talking about the way in which spiritualists and people who claimed to be mediums in the late 19th century, they started off just sort of doing ventriloquism and then they started using these more and more involved techniques and illusions to sort of create this idea to create some ectoplasm and stuff and ghostly hands that didn't belong to the medium's body and he's relating that to the development of telegraphic technologies which sort of were able to separate communication from the physical presence of the body more and more effectively so in all of these contexts there's this thematics of haunting the sense that the haunting is a way of thinking about, and spectrality is a way of thinking about the complex

relationships between memory, presence and absence, which, as I said much earlier, Christmas always brings home to us in a very intense and often complicated way. And perhaps that's why, as I said I would talk about at the beginning, possibly the most popular story about ghost spirits. Certainly the most story about haunting is also, in the English language, is also the most popular story about Christmas. And the most popular story about Christmas is also the most popular story about haunting. It's a Christmas carol. I think it's always really fascinating to think about a Christmas Carol because, I mean, just stop and reflect on this for a moment. I've said it twice already in this show, but let's just think about this. Christmas is

such a big deal in our culture. Okay. There's really only one. There's one piece of of fiction associated with Christmas, which has a completely iconic status in our culture, and that is a Christmas Carol. It's been adapted so many times. I have this sort of fantasy sometimes of going back in time and meeting Charles Dickens and trying to explain to him the phenomenon of a Muppets Christmas Carol, now being a well-established iconic family favourite, part of Christmas for lots of people. How would you explain to Dickens the phenomenon of the Muppets and what the adaptation of a Christmas Carol into something acted out by the Muppets means in our culture.

I don't know. It's very complicated, but I think it's worth thinking about what is the potency of a Christmas Carol. Well, I mean, historically, you know, a Christmas Carol is a very specific political intervention into the culture of some mid-Victorian Britain. Dickens is a reformist liberal with some radical sympathies and he uses this whole cosmology which is very ambivalent as to whether it's Christian at all

in all this whole imagined universe and system of sort of calmic relations between actions and outcomes and this whole phenomenon of spirits and ghosts because both appear in the story There is the ghost of Mali, but then there are the spirits who are not ghost of living creatures. These are all used in order to create this really fascinating story of salvation. Scrooge is redeemed.

Appropriate use of language there, given that redemption. The idea of redemption is tied to notions of debt. And a Christmas Carol is partly all about the nature of money, or a society based on money. We find out that Scrooge is easy. evil because he had an unhappy life, or at least partly because he had an unhappy life. And we learn that by coming to terms with the nature of his trauma, he is able to become a better person. It's a sort of, you can read a Christmas Carol as this just parable of modern

liberal therapy. On the other hand, it's also a story about the danger of capitalist alienation, the sense of not just disconnection from other human beings, but the sense that it's only the exterior products of human labour and social activity, the money and the property, which have any real value and power, as opposed to the cooperative social relations which make them possible. The dangers that this experience of alienation poses, not just to the immediate victims, the slum tenants, the exploited workers, but even to the being of the bourgeois themselves.

Of course, rightly or wrongly, this was always, this was a theme for Marx himself. Marx and Engels came from the bourgeois class and as good romantics in the Anglo-German tradition, they thought that somehow their own people, the bourgeois class, suffered from a terrible spiritual and aesthetic impoverishment, from which only an end-to-capitalist social relations could actually emancipate them.

This is partly the story of Christmas Carol. It's a story about Scrooge, who is both the bourgeois. He's the exploiter, but he is also the most alienated of people coming to terms with his alienation. And I think this is sort of implied in the story, actually, because it's never quite explained, especially at the point in the story where we see him becoming alienated from his fiancé, becoming estranged from his fiancée as a young man, it's not quite explained why that should be happening because it seems at that time he's having a nice life,

he's well treated, he's got a nice boss, he's got a lovely fiancé, and yet his pursuit of ambition, his pursuit of money, his pursuit of unlimited, not limited and profitable, but unlimited capital accumulation, the fundamental activity of capitalism, is exactly the thing which destroys him.

So from that point, of view, it is not only a liberal reformist text, it is also a quite radically anti-capitalist text in its implications. And what is the role of the ghost in it? What is the role of the ghost and haunting in this tale, which is ultimately a sort of spiritual reflection upon the fact that, you know, selfish, egocentric bourgeois individualism is ultimately destroys its own practitioners and the fact that overcoming that, you know, to overcome that, one has to realize the extent to its giving and generosity benefit the giver as much as they benefit the receiver. What is the role of ghosts and spirits and the idea of haunting in that

story? Well, I think the point is that the ghost in that story, the haunting spirit in that story. They represent a kind of a sense of possibility. They represent the sense that the past could have been different, things could have gone differently, that nothing was preordained about Scrooge's path to perdition. They represent the possibility that even the present moment could be being experienced in a different way, on the basis of some different activities and different orientation. And of course, the future can be different. The future is unwritten. The future is changeable. We can and be open to the possibility of the to come, as Derrida says, and we are capable through changing our behaviour of changing our social relationships

and by changing our social relationships, changing ourselves. I think this is what makes it such a powerful story, really. It is a story of redemption, but it's not really a classic liberal story of redemption, because it's a story of redemption proceeding by way of Scrooge changing his behaviour in order to change, primarily in order to change his relationships of the people around him. By changing his relationships to the people around him, that's what he has to do. I mean, you could say he has to undergo some sort of spiritual conversion in order to be first, in order to be able to do that.

But I don't think that's really what happens. What he undergoes is a sort of consciousness raising. He undergoes this intense consciousness raising, which enables him to see that his unhappiness, is a consequence not of something intrinsic to him, not of something that was preordained, not of something which has to be that way, but is a function only of his relationships to others and the way in which he conducts them. And in this, it does have a very radical message, and it's fascinating to reflect that it's a message that could only really be conveyed in this fantastical form. It would be very difficult, and it would certainly be

much less popular, to convey all that through realist fiction, through hard realism. It's conveyed as a sort of fairy story in a way which gives it a potency and an accessibility and a kind of amount ofity of power which I don't think you could get from any other narrative form and I think that is why a Christmas Carol has become this completely iconic text of English language fiction has been adapted and there's been so many versions of it part of the thing that's so powerful about Christmas Carol is it iterability is the fact that it can keep coming back to haunt us, that it is always present as well as always being absent. It's always part of our culture, partly because it's never fully there, because one can

never completely exhaust the meaning of it, because one can never completely get to the bottom of, well, is it liberal, is it conservative, is it radical, is it a ghost story, is it a Christian parable, is it a completely non-Christian story, given that there's really no correlation motto effort between the view of the universe it puts forward in any form of recognisable Christian theology. It's all of those qualities of it that makes it able to continue haunting us and haunting us in a way which is not necessarily uncanny or debilitating. It is like the haunting of the ghost of Christmas present, something which we welcome, something which we want to know better and better. And I think that tells us something about why we like ghost stories at Christmas

so much, that the ghosts of Christmas are often, they are ghosts which enable us to reflect upon, to think about the contingency of our lives, the fact that the things that are present and the things that are absent are never simply fixed and given are things which are changeable, are things which always should remind us of the possibility of the future. And And as Derrida would say, as we come to the end of the year, we never know what's going to happen. The unknowability, the mysterious, uncanny, spectral unknowability of the year which lies ahead is something which should, if nothing else can, always give us a little sense of hope. Anything could happen, and it could be better than this.

So let's drink to that. And Merry Christmas. This is acid, man. I don't know what I'm a lot of the