Background to the modern world

I part. Hauntological reality

While the world rushes on and we seem to live in a future that never came, with a tinge of nostalgia and melancholy, the retrofuturistic electronica that plays at night seems to invite us to listen to a new reality, where objects and events shimmer like a surreal dream of lethargy in the lulled everyday life that has lost its shapes and meaning. According to the philosopher Mark Fisher, we live in a timeless present in which things and events never fully present themselves to us (9). We cannot experience them in the present moment, because even the simplest action is aligned with past and future events. Video blogger Charlie Looker, in discussing Ms Fisher's hauntological reality, gives an apt example: listening to music. In one moment we may hear only one sound - a note or a chord - but the present moment, without past and future, does not create a melody. So, in order to perceive the melody, the individual inevitably relies on the past and future moments. In other words, the present is merged with what does not exist - with the sound of the past and the present (10). This example seems to be quite close to the Triple O theory put forward by speculative realism, which in this context is particularly important when thinking about the reality of things. It is this theory that signals a rather clear and at the same time fluid relationship between objects.

According to K. Sabolius, all relations distort the objects they refer to and act as a translation procedure. The relation to an object cannot be translated into knowledge of the object or knowledge of the object, because finitude reveals itself not only as a definition of humanity, but also as the possibility of including in one's horizons all the objects that can establish a relation. The prerogative of such an ontology is to speak exclusively of things that are disconnected from the influence of the human mind, or else from anthropocentric thinking. This means that reflection must free objects from their practical uses and networks of signification. Thus, objects cannot be exhausted by a single exclusive relation or a multiplicity of relations with other objects (11). In Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, reality is defined as a qualitative definition (12), and so, when it comes to the relationship between objects in design, we want to break free from the dogmatic design clichés that have become dogmas, where too much space has been given to the use of functionality and logic to underpin human experience and conscious decisions, and to discover the correlations between the contemporary hauntological, somewhat depressing realities of capitalist realism, and the subconscious creativity of creation.

Moving away from the hauntological reality, the timeless present that is shrinking into a lethargic dream, I want to discuss more broadly the contemporary contexts and ideas in which this inclusive abyss is taking shape, which is not only changing how we see the world, but how we create it. Eugene Thacker, one of the most progressive thinkers of our time, in his book The Dust of this Planet, identifies the notion of cosmic pessimism in his reflections on modernity and defines it as a strange mystical stance of a world without people, like a hermetic abyss or a noumenal occultism (13) referring to Lovecraftian cosmic horror. It is a heavy idea of the world as utterly inhuman and indifferent to the hopes, desires and struggles of individuals and groups of people, and its marginal idea is that of absolute nothingness, unconsciously represented in many popular media images of nuclear war, natural disasters, global pandemics and the cataclysmic effects of climate change. These are, of course, images or ghosts of cosmic pessimism, images that are deeply ingrained in our psyche. According to the philosopher, without these spectres, the idea of extinction is impossible, no human being can think of the absence of all human beings without thinking of this conceptual idea. Later on, in his book, Thacker gives a black colour to this concept and states that the meaning of black is not Satanism with its contradiction/inversion and dark techniques, not paganism with its displacement/changeability and dark magic, but cosmic pessimism with its dark metaphysics of denial, absolute nothingness, without a human origin (14). We can also note here that the ideas of absolute nothingness, or the anti-anthropocentric approach, recur in both speculative realism and the hauntological contexts of cosmic pessimism. However, even if we accept this coincidence as a series of philosophical concepts that are not always directly related to the perspectives of the future and the present, we cannot avoid interpreting the principles of the workings of memory through the prism of a cognitive psychology that argues that none of the memories is entirely real. False memories become embedded in the memory because, by moving an event from, for example, short-term memory to long-term memory and then pulling the memory to the surface, part of the event is lost or distorted, with the imagination filling in the missing information. The second factor influencing the abstractness or uncertainty of memories is the limitations of the human being in the context of the event: it is impossible to cover the entire field of events as they unfold, and each event has a subjective relationship to a particular person. It should be borne in mind that such a relationship between the field of events is always highly dependent on many factors, incomplete and subject to constant change. The relationship can be influenced by many stimuli, ranging from the most basic - the field of thought, distance and values. Frequent memory errors prevent us from preserving moments and, in the end, our memories, whether retrieved from long-term or short-term memory, are only an illusion of reality that never existed15. Thus, on the basis of the latter theories, it is tempting to think that even the reality we thought we knew is just a hauntological ghost, lulling gullible humanity into a timeless void.

Somewhat steeped in the ideas of nihilism, the philosopher Thacker, both in interviews and in describing his thoughts in the book, does not shy away from quoting or interpreting the aforementioned horror writer H.P. Lovecraft - a lush, juicy, and timely imagining that the writer himself described as a cosmic aside: "The most pitiful thing in the world is, I think, the human mind's failure to correlate its entire content. We live on a calm island of ignorance among the black seas of infinity and do not need to think that we have or can go further. Science, in its rapid advance, has so far done us little harm, but one day, knowledge disconnected from each other will open up such frightening pictures of reality and of our terrible situation that we will go mad, or flee from the deadly light into the peace and security of a new dark age" (16).

And indeed, since H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", in the first chapter of "The Horror of Clay", almost a century later, the resonance of the idea of absolute nothingness does not seem to have diminished at all, on the contrary, and the nihilistic past is finally catching up with us. We are wandering in the caves of time, trying to find a way out, and the world's thinkers are describing our efforts as a new, post-modern reality - a hauntological present. And while many of the ideas expressed about cosmic pessimism seem to refer directly to this area of ontology, hauntology identifies even more precisely and definitively the contexts of the unknowable and the direction in which reality can be reflected upon.

The neologism of hauntology was first used by the French philosopher Derrida in his book Specters of Marx, published in 1993. The term (French: hantalogie) combines the two words hantologie (haunt) and ontologie (ontology). The term itself is also interesting for its ghostly structure: in French, when we say the word Hauntology, we do not pronounce the letter H, but it becomes a supposed ghost in the ontological context of Hauntological research. In short, hauntology should thus be understood as a branch of philosophy that deals with being and existence through a timeless present haunted by the ghosts of the past (17). Hauntology proponents argue that the linear perspective of time is disappearing. In the age of technology, images, sounds and memory are intertwined, until eventually it all becomes a dance of a nostalgically grotesque timeless continuum.

Hauntology can be understood simply as the mystification of a space or a phenomenon, blurring the boundaries between the reality of actual experience and fiction. Temporality does not exist where there are no boundaries subordinate to the space-time continuum. In hauntological experience, it is as if time - past, present and future - merges. There are no clear boundaries. Similarities can be seen in the Surrealists' favourite contexts of dreams, memory and visions, which do not have a clear spatial and temporal boundary (18), which is why the hauntological background of the world could also be considered as a component of the new Surrealism, bringing the mutated concept of perceiving reality into the visual arts and using it as a way of seeing. The perception of hauntological reality is a ghostly experience, without clear dimensional boundaries. Nostalgia, by the way, also finds its place in this theory, but it is also indefinite, with no clear object or purpose - it is nostalgia for something that never existed 19).

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard, best known for his theory of simulacra, in Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995, in a nihilistic aphorism, defines the hauntological theory well: "Imagine the wonderful happiness of becoming the generation that will see the end of the world. It is just as magnificent as to have existed from the very beginning" (20). This thought seems to refer to dystopianism, an unbearably desperate lust for the future. It is not only the arguments of hauntology that are relevant when it comes to the somewhat gloomy background of modernity. If hauntology can be seen as a backdrop, an invisible breath of the timeless present, or a way of reflecting on the world, horror is equally important in order to grasp a picture of the continuum of existence.

9 FISHER, Mark. Ghost of my life. Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures.Winchester: Zero books, 2014. p.245. ISBN 978-1780992266

10 Intro to Mark Fisher: Hauntology and Music. Charlie Looker. [ Žiūrėta 2021 lapkričio 10 d.]. Prieiga per internetą: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF47dPlMemo

11 SABOLIUS, Kristupas.Apie tikrovę. Vilnius: Lapo leidykla, 2021. p. 384. ISBN 9786098198348

12 KANT, Immanuel. Grynojo proto kritika. Vilnius: Margi raštai, 2013. p. 740. ISBN: 9789986094395

13 Noumeninis - filosofinė sąvoka reiškianti objekto ar įvykio egzistavimą nepriklausomai nuo žmogaus jutimų ir (ar) suvokimo.

14 THACKER, Eugene. In the Dust of this Planet. Horror of Philosophy vol. 1. Winchester: Zero books, 2011. p.179. ISBN: 9781846946769

15 SOLSO,L, Robert; MACLIN, M, Kimberly. Cognitive psychology 7th ed. New Zealand: Allyn & Bacon, 2005. p. 624. ISBN-13: 978-0205410309

16 LOVECRAFT Howard Phillips, The Call of Cthulhu, Feedbooks, 1926.

17 DERIDDA, Jacques. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge. 2006. p.288. ISBN 9780415389570

18 COVERLEY, Merlin . Hauntology: GHOSTS OF FUTURES PAST. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books. 2020. p. 224. ISBN 978-0857304193

19 FISHER, Mark. Ghost of my life. Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures.Winchester: Zero books, 2014. p.245. ISBN 978-1780992266

20 BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995. London: Verso. 2007. p. 148. ISBN 1844675734.