"Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the Singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time."
That's how Derrida defined "hauntology," and that quote defines why college years me raged at and loathed any time I would see Derrida on the assigned reading list. There is now a small piece of me that is proud, if only for the comedy of it and not actually that proud, to have stumbled and struggled and faked my way through a couple of Derrida books. One class in which we read Derrida was so Derrida that we spent something like two weeks just discussing the cover of The Post Card. I suppose my impression of Derrida was more impactful than anything I actually read of his writing, and my memory of it now, though most certainly largely incorrect, has been useful. If I had known he was alive in 1991, I would have written him a rude letter.
The genesis of "hauntology" as it is understood now as a blanket word for a group of spiritually connected but not always similar works of art, traces its origin to blogs and discussion boards and was most succinctly fashioned by essayist Mark Fisher. "Think of hauntology," he wrote, "as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing." A poorly-focused old photograph of a child at a lake or in a park, marred by fading and light leaks. A memory of a memory that perhaps we do not really have. It’s a history we want to remember, we who are adults with certain tastes who were children with certain tastes, the memories we wish we had of the way we wish things had been—strange, mysterious, mystical, and full of sinister wonder.
The origin of hauntology, again like folk horror as a style or genre or school of art may be uniquely British, but it did not stay unique to Britain. The world is full of memories, after all, and many of the elements that contributed to the creation of hauntology and folk horror exist elsewhere, in some form similar but not identical to their form in Britain. I grew up in the United in the 1970s and '80s, in a place that was transitioning from rural to suburban, with an urban center off in the distance a way. I lived in a housing development that was something like a suburb but where large parcels of land were still reserved for cattle grazing or were simply left wild and untouched. My grandfather owned a farm (tobacco and horses) and a hundred acres of unkempt and untamed woodland full of cliffs, creaks, caves, snakes, and wild dogs—with a grotesque scar of a clearing carved through it down which paraded steel power line towers like tripods from John Christopher's “Tripods” trilogy (an oddball British folk sci-fi series that was one of the first young adult books I read).
I was, like many, a latchkey kid, largely left to my own devices at a very young age. And while, like any kid who served as their own supervisor, I got up to some hijinks, for the most part, I spent my time either reading or exploring the wilds with friends and making up stories that quickly became "facts" and then memories about what we would find or wanted to find: a witch's grave, a Nazi war criminal hiding out in a shack in the woods, indisputable proof of the existence of Bigfoot, the detritus left behind form a Satanic cult's midnight revelries. My best friend's older sister lived in a haunted house. The pond on Rebel Ridge Road was where devil worshippers went to sacrifice children. I would ride horses by that pond often and later convince myself of a harrowing supernatural encounter there that I'm not entirely sure actually happened. But the memory of it did.
American television at the time was a cheerier, less intellectual, less challenging reflection of British television. We had supernatural shows for kids, but they were rarely as unsettling as The Owl Service or Children of the Stones. We had public safety commercials, but they were generally more upbeat. With the exception of a few near-mythical gory drivers' safety at venereal disease scare films, the U.S. just didn't go in for the same grim surrealism traumatizing our British cousins. We were less likely to be confronted with Donald Pleasance voicing the voice of a Grim Reaper lurking around ponds and playgrounds waiting for children to do something deadly stupid, and more likely to have Shipwreck from G.I. Joe pluck us out of danger at the last second and remind us to wear a bike helmet. American kids in youth safety spots were usually saved and learned their lesson and did not have visited upon them the sundry maimings, disfigurements, and deaths inflicted upon British youth.
Further Reading
Return of the Tripods (Cultural Gutter)
Interesting to hear your perspective on hauntologically infused childhood experiences. A good comparison between US and British media of 70s and 80s too. If you look for what you were warned against, of the horrors that didn't come to pass, you'll find something that compares maybe.