What Is Hauntology?

Author(s): Mark Fisher

Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 16-24
Published by: University of California Press
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 WHAT IS HAUNTOLOGY?

Mark Fisher

The concept of hauntology gained its second (un)life in the

middle of the last decade. Critics were prompted to reach
for the term again by a confluence of musical artists—
Philip Jeck, Burial, the Ghost Box label, the Caretaker.
Their work sounded ‘‘ghostly,’’ certainly, but the spectral-
ity was not a mere question of atmospherics. What defined
this ‘‘hauntological’’ confluence more than anything else
was its confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure
of the future. By 2005 or so, it was becoming clear that
electronic music could no longer deliver sounds that were
‘‘futuristic.’’ From the end of World War II up until the
1990s, electronic music—whether produced by high-
culture composers such as Pierre Schaeffer or Karlheinz
Stockhausen or by synthpop groups and dance-music pro-
ducers—had been synonymous with a sense of the future, Handsworth Songs Courtesy of Smoking Dogs Films.
so much so that film and television would habitually turn
to electronic music when it wanted to invoke the future. that have been lost were more than a matter of musical
But by 2005, electronica was no longer capable of evoking style. More broadly, and more troublingly, the disappear-
a future that felt strange or dissonant. If electronic music ance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode
was ‘‘futuristic,’’ it was in the same sense that fonts are of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world
‘‘gothic’’—the futuristic now connoted a settled set of con- radically different from the one in which we currently live.
cepts, affects, and associations. Twenty-first-century elec- It meant the acceptance of a situation in which culture
tronic music had failed to progress beyond what had been would continue without really changing, and where poli-
recorded in the twentieth century: practically anything tics was reduced to the administration of an already estab-
produced in the 2000s could have been recorded in the lished (capitalist) system. In other words, we were in the
1990s. Electronic music had succumbed to its own inertia ‘‘end of history’’ described by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuya-
and retrospection. It was also clear that this was more than ma’s thesis was the other side of Fredric Jameson’s claim
a moment in a familiar pattern, in which, as one genre that postmodernism—characterized by its inability to find
wanes, another emerges to take its place at the leading edge forms adequate to the present, still less to anticipate wholly
of innovation. There was no leading edge of innovation any new futures—was the ‘‘cultural logic of late capitalism.’’
more. In music, as elsewhere in culture, we were living, in The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a vir-
Franco Berardi’s suggestive phrase, after the future. tuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning
What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first expectations and motivating cultural production. What
century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that hauntological music mourns is less the failure of a future
the twentieth century taught us to anticipate. The futures to transpire—the future as actuality—than the disappear-
ance of this effective virtuality. Leyland James Kirby, the
Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1, pps 16–24, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. man behind the Caretaker project, released an album
© 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
whose title captured perfectly the sense of yearning for
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http:// a future that we feel cheated out of: Sadly, The Future Is
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2012.66.1.16
No Longer What It Was. Faced with the collapse into a time

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Whistle and I’ll Come to You © BBC. Courtesy of BFI.

dominated by pastiche and reiteration, hauntological music while the object world of the present day—artifacts and
found itself at the heart of a paradox. Could the only oppo- appliances, whose styling would at once serve to date the
sition to a culture dominated by what Jameson calls the image—is elaborately edited out. Everything in the film,
‘‘nostalgia mode’’ be a kind of nostalgia for modernism? therefore, conspires to blur its official contemporaneity and
It is worth returning to some of Jameson’s argument make it possible for the viewer to receive the narrative as
about postmodernism here, especially because film plays though it were set in some eternal thirties, beyond real
such a crucial role in his theorization of this ‘‘nostalgia historical time’’ (20–21).
mode.’’ Jameson argues that postmodernism is character- What blocks Body Heat from being a period piece or
ized by a particular kind of anachronism. His analysis is a nostalgia picture in any straightforward way is its dis-
nowhere more vivid than in his discussion of Lawrence avowal of any explicit reference to the past. Jameson con-
Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981). ‘‘[F]rom the outset,’’ Jameson cludes that Body Heat’s anachronism constitutes a ‘‘waning
writes in Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late of historicity,’’ and that this brings home ‘‘the enormity of
Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991): ‘‘a whole battery a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of
of aesthetic signs begins to distance the officially contem- fashioning representations of our own current experience.’’
porary image from us in time: the art deco scripting of the By the twenty-first century, the kind of pastiche which
credits, for example, serves at once to program the specta- Jameson discusses was now no longer exceptional; in fact
tor to the appropriate ‘nostalgia’ mode of reception . . . it had become so taken for granted that it was not liable to
[T]he setting has been strategically framed, with great be noticed any more. But while Body Heat edits out ‘‘arti-
ingenuity, to eschew most of the signals that normal con- facts and appliances’’ in order to project us into a time
vey the contemporaneity of the United States in its multi- ‘‘beyond history,’’ what is perhaps more typical of early
national era: the small-town setting allows the camera to twenty-first-century Hollywood is the converse case: an
elude the high-rise landscape of the 1970s and 1980s . . . , obsessive foregrounding of the technological artifacts of

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 Kneale’s extraordinary BBC TV play The Stone Tape
(1972), which drew upon T. C. Lethbridge’s idea that
haunting may be actual recordings of traumatic events;
and Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man (1973), with its
sui generis condensation of paganism, folk music, and
horror. The Britishness of this lineage is no accident—
neither is the fact that most, but by no means all, of the
artists that have been described as hauntological are Brit-
ish. The yearnings detectible in much hauntological music
were no doubt stirred up by the expectations raised by
a public service broadcasting system and a popular culture
that could be challenging and experimental.
If the conditions for this ‘‘popular modernism’’ were
provided to a large extent by social democracy, its aspira-
The Stone Tape © 1972 BBC. DVD: BFI Video (U.K.).
tions were not confined to a hope that social democracy
would simply continue. The radical dimension of social
democratic culture, in fact, consisted in the way it pro-
the consumer present, together with a conspicuous use of duced a longing for its (self-)overcoming, that it was pre-
digitally enabled technologies such as CGI. Yet this anx- mised on the movement toward a scarcely imaginable
ious insistence on the paraphernalia of the contemporary future. As Owen Hatherley has argued, bulldozed brutal-
obfuscates the fact that the formal features of what we are ist buildings are one sign that this future did not arrive.
seeing and hearing are familiar to the point of being ex- The actual future would not be popular modernism, but
hausted. Relentless technological upgrades—the same populist conservatism: the creative destruction unleashed
thing, seen and/or heard on a new platform—disguise the by the forces of business on the one hand, the return to
disappearance of formal innovation and new kind of sen- familiar aesthetic and cultural forms on the other. It would
sory experience. not be British, but American; or at least it would a certain
How well does this take on hauntology translate into version of ‘‘the American’’ exemplified in consumer cul-
a discussion of cinema and television? As a first approach ture. This resurgence of conservatism was interrupted by
to this question, we should note that much hauntological a new normativity—the demands of the ‘‘new social move-
music is as much about film and TV as it is about music. ments’’ resulting in an intolerance of sexism, racism, and
The Caretaker borrowed his name from the role that Jack homophobia. But it now seems that the price of this new
Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes on at the Overlook Hotel normativity was the disintegration of social democracy and
in Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining (about which more of the workers’ movement that forced social democracy
shortly). In fact, the whole Caretaker project was origi- into existence in the first place. One of the futures that
nally motivated by a simple conceit, the idea of making haunts those who count themselves as progressive, then,
a whole album’s worth of material that could have been is the possibility of a culture that could continue what had
heard in the Overlook. The Caretaker subjects 1930s tea- begun in postwar social democracy, but that could leave
room pop to degradation (delay, distortion), rendering it as behind the sexism, racism, and homophobia which were so
a series of sweet traces that are veiled by one of sonic much a feature of the actual postwar period.
hauntology’s signature traits, the conspicuous use of ‘‘To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is nec-
crackle, which renders time as an audible materiality. Part essary to introduce haunting into the very construction of
of the excitement provoked by the Ghost Box label, mean- a concept,’’ Jacques Derrida wrote in Specters of Marx: The
while, was the canon of an audiovisual culture from the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New Inter-
near past—alluded to stylistically and in sleeve notes—it national (Routledge, 1994, 161). Hauntology was this con-
both revived and made a bid to continue. This mixture of cept. One of the repeated phrases in Specters of Marx is
genre film and public service broadcasting included the from Hamlet, ‘‘the time is out of joint,’’ and in his recent
work of BBC Radiophonic Workshop, whose experimen- Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Martin Hag-
tation with electronics translated musique concre`te into glund argues that this broken sense of time is crucial, not
incidental music in radio and television drama; Nigel only to hauntology but to Derrida’s whole deconstructive

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project. ‘‘Derrida’s aim,’’ Hagglund argues, ‘‘is to formu-
late a general ‘hauntology’ (hantologie), in contrast to the
traditional ‘ontology’ that thinks being in terms of self-
identical presence. What is important about the figure of
the specter, then, is that it cannot be fully present: it has no
being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or
not yet’’ (Stanford University Press, 2008, 82). Provision-
ally, then, we can distinguish two directions in hauntology.
The first refers to that which is (in actuality is) no longer,
but which is still effective as a virtuality (the traumatic
‘‘compulsion to repeat,’’ a structure that repeats, a fatal
pattern). The second refers to that which (in actuality) has
not yet happened, but which is already effective in the
virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current
behavior). The Shining: Overlook Hotel © 1980 Warner Bros. Inc. DVD:
Warner Home Video.
In addition to being another moment in Derrida’s
deconstruction—where ‘‘hauntology’’ would resume the
work formerly done by concepts such as the trace or of what Marc Augé calls the ‘‘non-place’’: airports, retail
différance—Specters of Marx was also a specific engagement parks, and chain stores which resemble one another
with the immediate historical context provided by the dis- more than they resemble the particular spaces in which
integration of the Soviet empire. Or rather, it was an they are located, and whose ominous proliferation is the
engagement with the alleged disappearance of history most visible sign of the implacable spread of capitalist
trumpeted by Fukuyama. What would happen now that globalization. The disappearance of space goes alongside
actually existing socialism had collapsed, and capitalism the disappearance of time: there are non-times as well as
could assume full spectrum dominance, its claims to global non-places.
dominion thwarted not any longer by the existence of Haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the
a whole other bloc, but by small islands of resistance such contraction and homogenization of time and space. It hap-
as Cuba and North Korea? Specters of Marx was also pens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular
a series of speculations about the media (or post-media) place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time.
technologies that capital had installed on its now global ‘‘What is anachronistic about the ghost story,’’ Jameson
territory—hauntology was by no means something rarefied; wrote it in his essay on Kubrick’s The Shining, ‘‘is its pecu-
it was proper to the time of ‘‘techno-tele-discursivity, liarly contingent and constitutive dependence of physical
techno-tele-iconicity,’’ ‘‘simulacra,’’ and ‘‘synthetic images.’’ place and, in particular, on the material house as such’’
But this discussion of the ‘‘tele-’’ shows that hauntology (‘‘Historicism in The Shining,’’ www.visual-memory.-
concerns a crisis of space as well as time. As theorists such co.uk/amk/doc/0098.html). The Shining in fact anticipates
as Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard had long acknowl- many of the preoccupations that have reemerged in the
edged—and Specters of Marx can also be read as Derrida twenty-first-century take on hauntology. The film refers
settling his account with these thinkers—‘‘tele- to hauntology in the most general sense—the quality of
technologies’’ collapse both space and time. Events that are (dis)possession that is proper to human existence as such,
spatially distant become available to audience instanta- the way in which the past has a way of using us to repeat
neously. Neither Baudrillard nor Derrida would live to itself. But it also engages with a specific historical crisis—
see the full effects—no doubt I should say the full effects a crisis of historicism itself—that would only intensify in
so far—of the ‘‘tele-technology’’ that has most radically the years since it was released. It is also worth remember-
contracted space and time, the Internet, and it is significant ing that Kubrick’s own work, along with contemporaries
that the discourse of hauntology should have been such as Coppola and Scorsese, was part of a popular mod-
attached to popular culture at the moment when cyber- ernism in American cinema that peaked in the 1970s and
space enjoyed dominion over the reception, distribution, which has haunted Hollywood ever since: both as some-
and consumption of culture—especially music culture. thing that it seeks to simulate (a simulation that Coppola
The erosion of spatiality has been amplified by the rise and Scorsese themselves increasingly found it impossible to

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 The Shining: Torrance and Grady © 1980 Warner Bros. Inc.
A Warning to the Curious © BBC. Courtesy of BFI.
DVD: Warner Home Video.

perform convincingly) or exorcise (all the better to replace as it can be seen in all the revenants from earlier moments
it with mediocre blockbuster spectacle). in the hotel’s history that menace and seduce Jack.
The Shining was released at a threshold moment in U.S. Given Derrida’s emphasis on the various tele-
and U.K. history, when neoliberalism and neoconserva- technologies, it is significant that The Shining is about
tism had just taken over, and the Fordist organization of telepathy as well as haunting—the telepathic sensitivities
industrial production was ebbing away in favor of more of Jack and his son Danny (Danny Lloyd), it is suggested,
precarious—and some have said ‘‘immaterial’’—forms of are what the malevolent forces in the hotel use to manifest
labor. The architecture of the Overlook Hotel reflects this themselves, a concept which perhaps reflects anxieties
threshold—the bland office in which Jack meets the man- about the ‘‘action at a distance’’ which is the form con-
ager (‘‘as multinational and standardized as a bedroom temporary power increasingly assumes. (The Shining was
community or a motel chain,’’ according to Jameson), looks part of a rash of films about telepathy in this period: in
forward to the non-places of coming corporate hyperdo- addition to Carrie in 1976—also based on a Stephen King
mination, while the rest of the hotel looks back to the novel—there was De Palma’s The Fury in 1978 and Cro-
repressed specters of American history: organized crime, nenberg’s Scanners in 1981.) Hauntology itself can be
atrocity, and the extermination of native Americans. thought of as fundamentally about forces which act at
Where anachronism is ‘‘blurred’’ in something like Body a distance—that which, to use Slavoj Žižek’s distinction,
Heat, it is staged in The Shining. This anachronism, this insists (has causal effects) without (physically) existing.
experience of a time that is out of joint, is in fact the very One of the novelties of The Shining is the way it connects
subject of the film. Many of the film’s most unnerving an older concept of the ghost story with the psychoanalytic
moments—Jack confronting his ostensible predecessor, emphasis on the agency of the past. All of the ambivalences
Delbert Grady (Philip Stone), in the bathroom and re- of Jack’s role as the Overlook’s ‘‘caretaker’’ are relevant
minding him of actions that he has ‘‘no recollection’’ of here: Jack is one who takes care, but also one who lacks
performing (namely killing his own family); Jack himself any agency of his own. Insofar as he belongs to the hotel,
smiling from the center of a photograph taken in the he exists only in a caretaker capacity, as one who merely
1920s—derive from the foregrounding of anachronism. insures that the past (the obscene, homicidal underside of
And what is the Overlook Hotel itself, where one door patriarchy) will keep repeating.
can lead into a ballroom endlessly playing dreamy deliri- The Overlook itself can be seen as an example of what
ous 1920s pop, and another can reveal a moldering corpse, Reza Negarestani, in his book Cyclonopedia: Complicity
whose corridors extend in time as well as space, if not with Autonomous Materials, calls: ‘‘Inorganic Demons or
a kind of architecture of anachronism? This can be heard xenolithic artifacts. These relics or artifacts are generally
in its soundtrack, which conflates the prewar crooning of depicted in the shape of objects made of inorganic materials
Al Bowlly with the electronica of Wendy Carlos, as much (stone, metal, bones, souls, ashes, etc.). Autonomous, sentient

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Quatermass and the Pit © 1967 Hammer Film Productions Ltd. DVD: Optimum Classics (U.K.).

and independent of human will, their existence is charac- works in which ‘‘time is out of joint’’ in our current dehis-
terized by their forsaken status, their immemorial slumber toricized, end-of-history moment.
and their provocatively exquisite forms . . . Inorganic It was James who established the template that the other
demons are parasitic by nature, they . . . generate their writers—consciously or not—would follow. James’s ‘‘Oh,
effects out of the human host, whether as an individual, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’’ (originally pub-
an ethnicity, a society or an entire civilization’’ (re.press, lished in 1904) was adapted—as Whistle and I’ll Come to
2008, 223). Negarestani could also be describing here a clus- You—for the BBC by Jonathan Miller in 1968; and ‘‘A
ter of British films and television programs made between Warning To The Curious’’ (1922) was adapted by Lawr-
the 1950s and the 70s. The fiction of M. R. James, Kneale, ence Gordon Clark in 1972. (Both have just been reissued
and Alan Garner is fixated on the encounter with such on DVD by BFI Video.) In both stories, an urban inter-
‘‘inorganic demons’’ in specific (hauntological) land- loper into the East Anglian countryside disinters a ‘‘xeno-
scapes—landscapes stained by time, where time can only lithic artifact’’ (an old whistle, a crown) that calls up
be experienced as broken, as a fatal repetition. To consider ancient, vengeful forces. The BBC adaptations are
the films and television programs based on these writers’ remarkable for their attention to place. The camera lingers
work now is to be caught up in a hauntology that is (at on the eerily empty Norfolk and Suffolk landscapes, which
least) double. For these works were hauntological in the become in many ways the most significant agency in the
sense that, like The Shining, they were about the virtual television films. Nigel Kneale’s masterpiece, Quatermass
agency of the no longer. In this, they constitute a kind of and the Pit (originally a BBC serial in 1958; remade as
‘‘pulp modernist’’ answer to Freud’s psychoanalysis and to a superior film version by Hammer studios in 1967), in
the attempt to recover lost time in the literary experimen- effect blew this narrative structure up to cosmic propor-
tations of Proust and Joyce. Yet this kind of public service tions. Here, it is London—and more specifically the fic-
broadcasting, and the broader popular modernist culture tional London Underground station, Hobbs End—which
of which it was a part, itself now belongs to the no longer. is the site for the encounter with a xenolithic artifact,
There is a special charge to be had from disinterring these a Martian spacecraft. The spacecraft exerts influence

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 The Red Riding Trilogy: 1974 © 2009 Red Riding 1974 Limited. DVD: Optimum Home Entertainment (U.K.).

telepathically, and Quatermass and the Pit amounts to noth- Garner saw: ‘‘Not really now not any more.’’ This
ing less than a retelling of human history. Phenomena that immensely suggestive phrase, Garner’s version of ‘‘the
seemed to be supernatural through the ages are explained time is out of joint,’’ captures what is at stake in so much
as encounters with the Martian travellers who—in a twist of the present discussion of hauntology. ‘‘Not really now
that anticipates the recent Prometheus—interbred with not any more’’ points to the postmodern impasse, the dis-
apes in order to produce the human species as we now appearance of the present and the possibility of represent-
know it. The xenolithic artifact triggers a traumatic, ing the present. But it also points to an alternative
deeply suppressed race memory of these alien origins. temporality, another way in which time can be out of joint,
Garner is the third figure in this triumvirate. His two a mode of causality that is about influence and virtuality
novels, The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973), are rather than gross material force.
about (mythical) structures that repeat by parasiting the What of hauntology now? Channel 4’s remarkable 2009
energy of adolescents. Both novels center on relics—in The adaptations of David Peace’s Red Riding novels (1999–
Owl Service, a dinner service decorated with an owl pat- 2002) constituted a kind of hauntological return to a model
tern; in Red Shift, a spearhead. Both are also new versions of public broadcasting supposedly made obsolete by neo-
of myths: The Owl Service is an updating of the story of liberalism. Peace’s novels were a disinterring of the
Blodeuwedd from the collection of Ancient Welsh folk 1970s—the fascination with this period over the last few
tales, the Mabinogion; Red Shift is a take on the Tam Lin years, as it has transformed from an object of memory into
legend, about a boy abducted by fairies who is ultimately historical narrative (via kitschy retro), is no doubt due in
saved by his true love. Both are also about particular land- part to the fact that it was the decade when, in the U.K.,
scapes—Wales and Cheshire—and the suggestion is that it social democracy fell into terminal decline, and neoliber-
is the combination of artifact, landscape, adolescence, and alism’s shock doctrine prepared the way for the total
mythic structure that potentiates the fatal repetitions reconstruction of social life. We see the shadow of this near
which the novels track. Both were also adapted for televi- future in the first of the televised trilogy, 1974, when Sean
sion: The Owl Service by Granada in 1969, and Red Shift Bean’s architect unveils the plans for a shopping mall
(by Garner himself) for BBC’s Play For Today in 1978. Red which will mean that there is no need to ‘‘fuck off home,’’
Shift was supposedly inspired by some cryptic graffiti that a perfect summary of the way in which the non-places of

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Robinson in Ruins © 2010 Patrick Keiller and the Royal College of Art. DVD: BFI Video (U.K.).

Content Courtesy of Illuminations Films.

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 consumerism will also eliminate time. The surface subject England. The England Keiller sees rising from the wreck-
of Peace’s novels—police corruption and incompetence, age of industrialism is a deterritorialized zone, a non-place
the crimes of the Yorkshire Ripper—rests upon his deeper that is sinister in its very anonymity. Yet, in their return to
fascination with the intersection of place and period. By sites of martyrdom and antagonism—Robinson in Ruins
contrast with the soft-focus kitsch of something like the (2010), for instance, touches upon Greenham Common
BBC’s Life on Mars series, in which police violence be- and the woodland where scientist David Kelly was found
comes one more wistfully evoked signifier of a longingly dead—the films attempt to counter the neoliberal erasure
remembered past, the 1970s appears here as a cursed of history, prompting us to speculate on what might have
period, just as Yorkshire becomes a cursed territory. (One been, or to contemplate how the struggles whose sites the
of the main failings of Tom Hooper’s disastrous 2009 camera captures could be revived. Chris Petit’s Content
adaptation of Peace’s The Damned United is its refusal to (2010) is, like Keiller’s films, an anatomy of the non-
engage with this question of territoriality.) And what is places of post-Fordist Britain—his camera capturing ‘‘the
a curse if not a form of hauntology? prosaic sheds’’ that are ‘‘the first buildings of a new age’’—
The work of John Akomfrah and the Black Audio and a study of the disappearance of time and space them-
Film Collective touch on similar (haunted) territory. selves in the ether of cyberspatial communication. But it is
When the BAFC’s 1986 film Handsworth Songs was shown also a stirring up of some of the potentials that late capi-
at Tate Modern in the wake of the English riots in the talism has closed off. Like Petit’s first film, Radio On—
summer of 2011, Akomfrah posed a question about haun- released in that threshold year, 1979—Content dreams of
tological causality—what is it about certain places, such as a different kind of British film, one that has more in
Tottenham, which means that riots keep happening? common with European art cinema than with the dreary
How, when the whole population of an area has changed, heritage-industry kitsch that came to dominate cinema in
do such repetitions occur? Handsworth Songs can be read as the U.K. Like the Red Riding trilogy, Content, which was
a study of hauntology, of the specter of race itself (an first broadcast on Channel 4’s spinoff channel More4,
effective virtuality if ever there was one), an account of seemed incongruous when it was aired, as if it did not to
how the traumas of migration (forced and otherwise) play belong in contemporary broadcasting at all. In one sense
themselves out over generations, but also about the possi- a throwback to older public service broadcasting and
bilities of rebellion and escape. Its experimental essayistic experimental cinema, the film was in fact more like a flare
form, driven as much by Trevor Mathison’s anempathic from a future that did not arrive in a country that, after
sound design as by the images, meant that it could in some 1979, as Petit puts it in Content, was ‘‘reversing into
respects be considered the culmination of popular modern- a tomorrow based on a nonexistent past.’’
ism in British public broadcasting. Handsworth Songs was
made for Channel 4, but it is impossible to imagine it or
MARK FISHER is a Film Quarterly Writer-at-Large. His book, Ghosts of
anything like it being commissioned by any U.K. public
My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, is forth-
broadcaster now. With its sampling of archive sources coming from Zero.
such as BBC radio’s production of Under Milk Wood ABSTRACT Consideration of the idea of hauntology encompassing
and documentary images of Caribbean immigrants arriving Jacques Derrida’s introduction of the term in Specters of Marx; Fredric
Jameson’s analyses of postmodernism and The Shining; and a British
in Britain, Akomfrah’s recent The Nine Muses (2010) was in tradition of literature, film, and television by such authors as John
part a requiem for this lost era of popular modernism. Akomfrah, Alan Garner, M. R. James, Patrick Keiller, Nigel Kneale, David
Peace, and Chris Petit.
Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy offers a different take
on hauntology and landscape. In one respect, the Robinson KEYWORDS Hauntology, The Shining, John Akomfrah, Patrick Keiller,
Chris Petit
films can be seen as a study of the rise of post-Fordist

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