I had to do some googling here and I got very excited reading a little more about hauntology-- it feels very relevant to themes I revisit in fiction and things I want to be able to convey and explore in my own writing.
I found this on wikipedia:
Writers such as Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds used the term [hauntology] to describe a musical aesthetic preoccupied with this temporal disjunction and the nostalgia for "lost futures". So-called "hauntological" musicians are described as exploring ideas related to temporal disjunction, retrofuturism, cultural memory, and the persistence of the past.
The idea of people writing about "nostalgia lost futures", broadly but especially as it pertains to music, feels very exciting to me, like learning there's a name for a phenomenon I experience. I have a playlist of music that makes me feel a very specific way titled "nostalgia for a future that doesn't exist anymore" and seeing someone doing philosophy about this exact thing is blowing my mind a little bit.
The idea of utopia does feel retrofuturist to me (by which I mean, it feels like it belongs to a view of the future from a certain point in the past, not that it feels like it belongs to the retrofuturism art movement).
Muñoz concludes with the need for a queer criticism that does not abandon the queer past, even if that past is currently considered unsavory or a “bad object” in some way, the wrong ideal to hope for.
This makes me think that Muñoz brings in hauntology to utopia to say that the queer past's "lost futures" aren't dead ends and that even if utopias of the past have become some kind of "lost futures" they still have something to offer us in shaping the real future.
Hmm maybe I shouldn't have tried to read this and write about it after midnight :P
Having read some of the other comments on this post I'm also interested in reading Mark Fisher's books Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie so if you do end up reading and posting about them I will be following along. Thank you for your analysis and for this new concept, if nothing else I am going to be thinking about hauntology for days.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2022-03-26 05:49 am (UTC)I found this on wikipedia:
Writers such as Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds used the term [hauntology] to describe a musical aesthetic preoccupied with this temporal disjunction and the nostalgia for "lost futures". So-called "hauntological" musicians are described as exploring ideas related to temporal disjunction, retrofuturism, cultural memory, and the persistence of the past.
The idea of people writing about "nostalgia lost futures", broadly but especially as it pertains to music, feels very exciting to me, like learning there's a name for a phenomenon I experience. I have a playlist of music that makes me feel a very specific way titled "nostalgia for a future that doesn't exist anymore" and seeing someone doing philosophy about this exact thing is blowing my mind a little bit.
The idea of utopia does feel retrofuturist to me (by which I mean, it feels like it belongs to a view of the future from a certain point in the past, not that it feels like it belongs to the retrofuturism art movement).
Muñoz concludes with the need for a queer criticism that does not abandon the queer past, even if that past is currently considered unsavory or a “bad object” in some way, the wrong ideal to hope for.
This makes me think that Muñoz brings in hauntology to utopia to say that the queer past's "lost futures" aren't dead ends and that even if utopias of the past have become some kind of "lost futures" they still have something to offer us in shaping the real future.
Hmm maybe I shouldn't have tried to read this and write about it after midnight :P
Having read some of the other comments on this post I'm also interested in reading Mark Fisher's books Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie so if you do end up reading and posting about them I will be following along. Thank you for your analysis and for this new concept, if nothing else I am going to be thinking about hauntology for days.