Co-Agency Node Dossier

Diego Giménez Vila (Daga) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Valencia, Spain. He is the creator of the YouTube channel Indagando, a space in which he shares analyses, reflections, and commentaries on the readings accompanying his process of academic formation and research. His work is characterized by a defense of eclecticism and freedom of thought, understood as fundamental tools against dogmatism and as pathways toward an open-ended search for meaning.

• YouTube: Indagando

• E-mail: [email protected]

Note: This trilogy is extracted from Diego Giménez Vila’s (Daga) master’s thesis. 📄 The original text can be accessed at the following link

PART II: Nostalgia and Cultural Critique

At first glance, many of us might find it strange to establish a relationship between two seemingly disparate things, such as an emotion and a socioeconomic system. Unlike in previous historical periods, nostalgia is an emotional response that has become increasingly present in our everyday lives. Our particular context, as we discussed earlier, reveals itself as a powerful catalyst for ruminating over all kinds of past experiences within the shell of our memories.

In the historical conjuncture examined in the preceding subsections, we find a system of production straining to innovate while, at the same time, cultural newness appears to be undergoing a process of atrophy. Meanwhile, objects from our recent past evoke nostalgia because of what they represented in our personal biographies: all kinds of cultural products—cinema, films, video games, devices, toys, and so on. It would seem that the capitalist system exhibits a tendency to look forward while simultaneously preserving all the trinkets that formed part of our lives in the recent past. Nostalgia may knock at our door through many different channels, but if we pay close attention, we find that they all emerge from the immanence of the capitalist system: an economic and social system that gives us what we want—or makes us desire what we desire—only to replace it with something else. Yet each person’s past cannot be replaced. It will always remain there, waiting to be remembered.

Thus, among the diverse epiphenomena unfolding within the capitalist system, we are particularly interested in everything that converges with the nostalgic tendencies of its users. This nostalgia is increasingly intensified by multiple factors, both direct and indirect. Clearly, this is not an irrelevant development. If we currently coexist with a nostalgic feeling on an unprecedented scale, this phenomenon conceals a symptom characteristic of our societies and our historical moment. Accordingly, we will now examine the principal indicators of the growing presence of nostalgia in late capitalism—a nostalgia that responds to concrete causes but appears to conceal the origins of its own emergence.

In this second part, we will approach this question through two of the principal voices reflecting on nostalgia and its relationship to cultural critique.¹ The first is Simon Reynolds, whose work Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past explores the growing tendency—particularly in music and, more generally, in culture—to resort to pastiche and turn toward the past when creating new cultural productions.

We will then examine the concept of “hauntology,” proposed by Jacques Derrida and subsequently reworked by Mark Fisher. This concept is particularly relevant to the question of nostalgia, especially insofar as it allows us to understand its form from a metaphysical perspective and to grasp its cultural determinations.

1. Addiction to the Retro and Obsession with the Past

Cultural critic Simon Reynolds examined the contemporary landscape, bringing to light the obsession we feel with the cultural products of our past. More specifically, his concern is situated within the current music scene. Nevertheless, his analysis extends to and can be generalized across various areas of our culture. In response to this phenomenon, Reynolds develops the concept of “retromania,” a term he considers necessary to demonstrate how we tend to ritualize, collect, recall, and compulsively venerate the cultural artifacts of our immediate past. As Reynolds himself explains:

We have become victims of our ever-increasing ability to store, organize, instantly access, and share enormous quantities of cultural information. Never before has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past; nor has there ever been a society able to access the immediate past with such ease and abundance.²

Reynolds demonstrates that technology and the new forms of experience it provides are among the principal triggers of this nostalgic tendency. For example, the possibility of recording—whether through photography, audio, or video—is one of the conditions that makes the retro possible: by being able to store the past, we can also return to it compulsively. At the same time, the Internet has brought about a radical transformation in the storage of all kinds of data, making it practically unlimited while also providing immediate access to it. This is an unprecedented phenomenon: we are capable of preserving all kinds of files and sharing them instantly. More specifically, platforms such as YouTube and Google Images have established themselves as “humanity’s repository,” allowing us to reconnect with our past by locating all kinds of audiovisual documents and images.

It does not matter when something was recorded; as long as a record of it exists, it can be stored within the vast data network that is the Internet. Reynolds tells us the following about this development:

We have at our disposal—as individuals, but also at the level of civilization—much more “space” to fill with memorabilia, documentation, recordings, and all kinds of archival traces of our existence. And naturally, we are busy trying to fill that space, even as its capacity continues to expand. Yet there is no evidence that our ability to process or make good use of all that memory has increased.³

The final sentence reveals the problematic contrast underlying this historical transformation in late capitalism: we are provided with unlimited memory alongside instantaneous access. But are we capable of normalizing and confronting this development without radical consequences for our way of life and our psyche? After all, as Reynolds points out, our ability to process and make use of memory remains biologically the same as it was in the past. Yet we now possess an elephantine capacity to return to our immediate past.

Reynolds argues that this very development intensifies our obsession with the past:

The presence of the past in our lives has increased immeasurably and insidiously. […] Until not long ago, we lived most of the time in a cultural present, while the past was confined to specific zones, trapped in particular objects and places.⁴

Today, we maintain virtual contact with what came before us in a manner that would have been unimaginable in the past: all kinds of documents are preserved in the Internet’s archive. This phenomenon causes our relationship with the past to change radically. Every kind of inspiration and return to the past becomes possible, insofar as memories remain within this virtual archive. The past is thereby transformed into a possibility for reactivating the present; consulting it is only a few clicks away. The specific historical moment no longer matters. What matters is finding the appropriate information in order to be redirected toward a moment that preceded us, making forgetting accidental rather than necessary. Reynolds writes the following in this regard:

On the Internet, past and present mingle in a way that makes time soft and spongy. YouTube is Web 2.0 par excellence insofar as it promises immortality to any video uploaded: theoretically, content can remain there forever. With a single click, one can move from the archaic to the latest breaking news. The cultural result is a paradoxical combination of speed and paralysis.⁵

The temporal movement involved in this phenomenon is peculiar, since it brings our cultural past into contact with the present without doing so in a linear or diachronic manner. The past coexists across different layers, regardless of the actual chronological distance separating them. We can, for instance, watch Iniesta’s goal in the 2010 World Cup final and, immediately afterward, a video of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in 1969. This is a direct virtual encounter with our past as a society: a synchronic past that persists on the digital surface of the present that contemplates it.

The constant metamorphosis of technology is a fundamental trigger of our nostalgic tendency. At the same time, technological change expands our communication with the past, making it far more present than it once was. This phenomenon cannot be separated from the nostalgic factor, since it completely reshapes the way we experience our relationship with the past. As we begin to acquire new habits in our modes of consumption, we also assume a new role in relation to the things with which we interact.

Reynolds provides an example through the way we consume music. In the past, music was something limited and ritualistic; today, it resembles going to an all-you-can-eat buffet. In Reynolds’s words:

First music was reified, transformed into a thing (vinyl records, analogue cassettes) that one could buy, store, and keep under personal control. Then music was “liquefied,” transformed into data that could be carried anywhere and transferred between different devices. With the MP3, music became a devalued currency in two senses: because there was too much of it (as with hyperinflation, when banks issue too much money), but also because of the way it flooded people’s lives like a current or a liquid. This made music begin to resemble a public utility (such as water or electricity), understood as the opposite of an artistic experience to whose temporality one submitted oneself. Music has become a continuous supply that is fatally susceptible to discontinuity (pausing, rewinding/fast-forwarding, saving for later, and so on).⁶

The transformation in the way music is consumed—as a commodity—also implies a radical transformation in the way it is experienced. These changes are not only associated with particular objects—for example, listening to music on vinyl, with a Walkman, or through a mobile phone using Spotify—but are also connected to lifestyles and ways of understanding the world.

The fact that people once purchased a record at a specific price implied a particular relationship with the object, a monetary limit on record purchases, and therefore the repeated listening of the same music. Today, however, we can access as much music as we want. The same applies to Netflix and the now-defunct video rental stores. In the past, selecting a film meant not selecting everything else: it involved physically standing in front of shelves and experiencing the anticipation surrounding the chosen film. Today, streaming platforms offer an insatiable catalogue of films, series, documentaries, and so on. This transformation in experience has enormous implications for the way we engage with culture. The experience of boredom, for example, is no longer a matter of scarcity but of excess. Reynolds states:

Today’s boredom is not caused by hunger; it is not a response to deprivation. It is a loss of cultural appetite, a response to the excess of demands placed upon our attention and time.⁷

The fact that our way of life can change so drastically within a matter of years does not come at no cost. Our emotional attachments to the things we once desired eventually become part of our idyllic memories. Nostalgia thus emerges as a response to our fascination with those lost objects that constituted a person’s life at a particular moment. The longing for a way of experiencing something that was once contemporary now gives way to a virtual memory of what once was. This memory can only be conjured as a ghost through the fetishism of collecting, the anachronistic reproduction of the ritual, and a return to the original experience—listening to music on vinyl, playing on a 16-bit video game console,⁸ watching a film on VHS, and so on.

This phenomenon reveals a contradictory movement between the incessant advancement of the cultural mode of production and the backward glance toward what constituted our everyday lives in the immediate past. Reynolds explains the issue as follows:

If the fetishism for dead media such as the cassette is, at a certain level, an instinctive impulse to put the brakes on technological progress, perhaps there is a similar stubbornness in the face of the relentless obsolescence of pop culture within the entertainment industry: a desire to hold on to all that material that so powerfully captured our attention and affection, that consumed so much of our time.⁹

The tension between the destruction of the “old” and the emergence of the “new” would appear to be characteristic of our culture. Our obsession with innovation—with everything original—collides directly, or perhaps indirectly, with the old. Our tendency to remove old cultural products from our field of vision and relegate them to the trunk of memory clashes with this nostalgic movement. Our affection and instinct for preservation do not forget those cultural products, even when they are no longer at the center of attention or have gone out of fashion. Their presence is relegated to a secondary position within the antique shop of our society.

The transformation of consumption patterns through technological advances is a consequence of the capitalist mode of production: we want new products, but we remain emotionally attached to those that once made our days happier. It is within this sphere that we encounter the obsession with the “retro,” the object of our study insofar as it is the object of nostalgia. Reynolds states that the retro:

Refers to a self-conscious fetish for the styling of a period (in music, clothing, and design) that expresses itself creatively through pastiche and quotation.¹⁰

The issue is that this taste for the past becomes evident in the incessant production of film remakes, musical remixes and mash-ups,¹¹ endless film and video game franchises, and so on. It would seem that the collective imaginary is deeply connected to individual biography. Each person comes into contact with objects from their own past that have, in turn, been part of the cultural past of capitalist societies and have therefore become objects of nostalgia for many. Reynolds states the following:

Nostalgia is now tightly intertwined with the consumer-entertainment complex: we feel a piercing desire for the products we consumed years ago, for the novelties and distractions that filled our youth.¹²

Thus, we find that the retro and nostalgia are aligned in a reciprocal relationship. However, it must be noted that not every object or cultural product becomes retro simply because it belongs to our past. Reynolds identifies three characteristics of the retro that are important to emphasize.

The first is that the retro always refers to a relatively immediate past. In other words, something that belongs to our past but is separated from us by considerable temporal distance is incompatible with the retro.¹³

Second, the emergence of the retro requires a precise memory of this immediate past, which is only possible through easy access to the archive of our culture.¹⁴ Our ability to consult, reproduce, simulate, imitate, or draw inspiration from the past depends on our capacity to identify the characteristic features of that earlier period.

Finally, the retro is intimately connected to popular cultural artifacts. It is evident that something belonging to a privileged class cannot be shared generally throughout society and therefore cannot acquire the same value within the collective imaginary. Reynolds expresses the point as follows:

The territory of the retro is not the auction house or the antique stall but the flea market, […] secondhand shops, and places where old junk is sold.¹⁵

Having established this, we can observe how the retro possesses characteristics that cannot be detached from the context of late capitalism in which we find ourselves. The retro appeals to the popular spirit of those participating in the cultural logic of late capitalism, insofar as all the objects it references are products from an earlier, not-quite-so-late capitalism—a “recent past” of late capitalism itself. They are reminders of things people experienced or never managed to experience but nevertheless long for.

We can say that the retro reactivates the virtual layers of our past as a culture and returns to us, in the present, products that are simultaneously close and distant.

This phenomenon has significant implications, both because of the reasons why cultural artifacts of all kinds are revived and because of the nostalgic effects they may have on us. Reynolds’s concern is not limited to the nostalgia generated by this fixation on our past; it also involves the way this fixation reveals a form of creative fatigue concerning originality and cultural innovation.

We find ourselves trapped in a context where references to the past are more ubiquitous than ever, within a state of creative exhaustion that uses the past as a tool for pastiche rather than drawing genuine inspiration from it. This is a symptom of our times with regard to the creation of new artistic or cultural forms. It would seem that originality today increasingly tends to function as an extension and reformulation rather than as genuine creation, at least in comparison with other historical periods.

Our current historical position places us between a rock and a hard place when it comes to understanding the reason behind our compulsion toward the past. Reynolds raises several evocative questions concerning this issue:

Does nostalgia impede our culture’s ability to move forward? Or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward, and therefore we are inevitably compelled to look backward in search of more powerful and dynamic moments? But what will happen when we run out of the past? Are we heading toward a kind of cultural-ecological catastrophe, in which the resources of pop history will have been exhausted?¹⁶

Our position is not as radical as Reynolds’s. We do not believe that everything new has already been chewed up, reshaped, and put back into circulation. Nevertheless, it is true that many cultural products today tend to rely on the past more heavily than they did in other historical periods. At present, change does not seem to occur so much through the process of challenging or surpassing a previous stage, but rather through the tendency to draw inspiration from and create collages of interesting elements taken from different places.

This problem is intensified primarily by the teleological bias that leads us to believe that everything new must displace what came before, as though the movement toward the future inevitably transformed things into an evolutionary process and, consequently, into qualitative overcoming. This assumption may appear meaningful within the technological and scientific spheres, but in the cultural sphere it is absurd.

We cannot classify a film or a song, for example, as better simply because it is newer. We can, however, argue that a scientific theory or a new technology is more precise and efficient than its predecessor. It would therefore seem that we have adopted a similar framework within the cultural sphere, even though cultural creation and production operate according to criteria that are far less precise and largely subjective.

These fixations and expectations concerning the role of the new are propelled by fashion. Fashion does not merely elevate certain products and symbols above others; it also encourages the widespread purchase of those possessing the temporary quality of being “in fashion.”

We can see that fashion and capitalism are intimate companions, since everything that corresponds to mass desire remains fashionable for as long as it occupies the spotlight or until people lose interest—in other words, until it “goes out of fashion.” Fashion is established through the cyclical movement of what is generally desired and therefore consumed. Dramatically, it subsequently declines into indifference, ugliness, or bewilderment at why we ever liked the thing we once liked.

Thus, the tension between the static and the dynamic reflects the movement of fashion. Everything that is fashionable is desired because it is fashionable, but what is fashionable constantly changes and ceases to be so, making way for something else that will become fashionable. Reynolds writes:

Fashion is related to changes but not to Change in the sense of progress. As a system in motion but fundamentally static, fashion is not only the opposite of change but, in some profound sense, opposed to change in the artistic or political sense. We speak of artistic movements or political movements because they advance in a particular direction, and in the process definitively cast aside earlier stages of development or outdated ideas. But in fashion, everything démodé eventually becomes à la mode again.¹⁷

In this way, we can identify a gap between fashion and art. A revealing quotation from Jean Cocteau expresses the point:

Art produces ugly things that frequently become more beautiful over time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things that always become ugly over time.¹⁸

At first glance, art and fashion may appear to move together, but they ultimately diverge in their fundamental ontological positions: art endures, whereas fashion fades away. This is not a trivial matter, since, as we have observed, our culture tends toward the constant pursuit of novelty—an attempt to provide freshness and status to those who possess something or adopt a particular style.

However, this process has consequences for the way we relate to our cultural products. By believing that we can always access something new to replace what came before, we assume that there will always be something new, something unprecedented, something capable of eliminating the boredom of familiarity. This demand places considerable pressure on our culture, since it is something that cannot, and should not, be forced.

In this way, we find that the retro becomes a remarkable refuge for the creation of the new—something new, even if it is fundamentally dependent on the old. We can observe the same phenomenon in vintage clothing: the consumption of garments from another period and the recovery of earlier styles as a means of opposing what is currently fashionable.

This is, of course, a paradoxical movement, since vintage—as an opposition to fashion—becomes fashion itself once it is popularized. Nevertheless, we can see how this gaze toward the immediate past provides the desire for novelty with a point of reference on which to base its ambition for social differentiation. Regarding the retro and the vintage, Reynolds states:

Retro and vintage are obviously related: they are two sides of the same coin, which is fashion’s relentless drive toward constant change. This rapid movement generates an immense mountain of passé products, clothing that is no longer discarded or destroyed but drifts around the world. Based on the construction of “psychological obsolescence” through advertising and other forms of pressure, fashion insists that clothing be discarded prematurely, long before its potential for use has been exhausted. The symbolic value of a garment expires long before its use value disappears. When that clothing is resold or donated to a charitable institution, it enters a subsidiary economy where it circulates indefinitely. Some garments acquire a second life when they regain symbolic value.¹⁹

Beyond the fact that fashion amplifies and reverberates the promotion of the retro and nostalgia, the real difficulty lies in expecting there always to be something new. After all, fashion constitutes the link between culture and late capitalism: it is the space where they intersect and, therefore, where desire and cultural production are forged.

Thus, we can see that:

The future is never invented quickly enough, and the recent past accumulates in heaps of symbolically depreciated goods.²⁰

This impulse is even more concerning than the impulse to consume and remain fashionable. We can see that our culture burns through its reserves of creativity and redirects them toward the past in an attempt to lubricate the machinery of cultural production once again. However, this becomes problematic for the following reason:

Aesthetic innovation can never be a constant flow; it is subject to stagnation, blockage, and the exhaustion of ideas. To a certain extent, it may be tempting for artists to look toward the immediate past and reinvestigate ideas that were prematurely abandoned during the creative process. The retro thus becomes a structural feature of pop culture: it is the inevitable downward phase that follows the preceding manic phase, but it is also a response to the accumulation of styles and ideas whose potentials have not been fully extracted.²¹

As we can see, the gaze toward the past resembles a mine from which untapped resources can be extracted—a place from which creative inspiration can be drawn through all the nuances that may be recovered and elevated once again.²² However, the hidden side of this process reveals the fatigue of a creative crisis, a crisis sustained by the acceleration of the search for novelties capable of matching the quality and distinction of those that crystallized in the past.

In an illustrative manner, Reynolds evokes an insightful analogy between economics and cultural production:

It is a process analogous to the syndrome economists call “overaccumulation” (when a surplus of capital is created that finds no suitable outlets for investment because the consumer market is saturated, leading capitalists to turn to financial speculation to avoid collapse). Like an economy in full expansion, the more fertile and dynamic a genre is, the more it prepares itself for the arrival of the musical-cultural equivalent of recession: the retro.²³

We can therefore argue that much of this cultural recession, produced by the nostalgic tendency within our cultural products, is an effect of exhaustion. Nostalgia emerges as a consequence of looking toward cultural products that possess greater force or an irreplaceable singularity, alongside the corrosion of any compass capable of guiding novelty and change in the cultural products of the future.

Ultimately, this problem is played out on the terrain of what has already been done and what remains possible. The distinction Gilles Deleuze made in Quad, his analysis of Beckett’s work, is particularly precise and revealing with regard to the problem under consideration. After all, the problem of the constant resonance of the past derives from the exhaustion of the possible.

Deleuze discusses the distinction between tiredness and exhaustion, since both conditions entail different consequences:

Exhausted is much more than tired. The tired person no longer possesses any subjective possibility, and therefore cannot realize any objective possibility. But possibility remains, because we are never aware of all of it. Possibility remains because we never realize everything that is possible; we even give birth to new possibilities as we realize them. The tired person has merely exhausted realization, whereas the exhausted person has exhausted the possible itself. The tired person can no longer realize, but the exhausted person can no longer make possible.²⁴

The central question is the following: Is our culture tired, or is it exhausted? The ontological consequences of this distinction are profound. First, as Deleuze observes, tiredness refers to subjective sterility, a lack of inspiration, or the absence of conditions that would make the possible possible. Exhaustion, however, concerns the capacity to make possible—as though possibility itself were a natural resource.

If the terrain where the raw material of the new lies has become sterile, every possibility is relegated to the revision of known possibilities. The problem, therefore, lies here: Have we exhausted our possibilities? Or has our culture entered a crisis concerning its ability to make new possibilities possible? The difference is crucial: one condemns us to an abyss without brakes, while the other illuminates the possibility of better times to come.

For this reason, our culture “exhausts what is not realized within the possible,”²⁵ as though every virtual possibility were compelled to become actual, as if the fuel of creativity were infinite.

2. Hauntology: Ghosts of the Past

In 1993, Jacques Derrida delivered the lectures that would give rise to his work Specters of Marx. In this rather peculiar book, Derrida attempts to reread Marx and formulate a non-Marxist defense of Marx. As a response to Francis Fukuyama’s controversial and widely cited work, The End of History and the Last Man, Derrida sets out to challenge its messianic claims. Let us recall that, in this book, the author views the collapse and fall of the USSR as the event that forces the glorious triumph of capitalism over communism and, by extension, the victory of the Western bloc over the Eastern bloc. The consequences Fukuyama derives from this event constitute the objective manifestation of the predominance of the liberal-democratic model as the champion of civilizational progress. Fukuyama seeks to “plant the American flag on the moon,” attempting to demonstrate the end of history as the barriers resisting globalization collapse and everything becomes framed within the logic of the market and liberal democracy. In response to these assumptions, Derrida’s critique seeks to be incisive and direct. However, our concern, or the reason why we introduce this work, is not the critique of Fukuyama itself, but rather certain effects that Derrida derives from it.

The point that interests us is how Derrida retrieves from Marx the notion of the specter or ghost in order to sharpen his critique. The victory mentioned by Fukuyama rests on the surrender of communism and, consequently, on the demonstration that Marxist ideas were mistaken. Derrida’s argument, however, consists in reminding us that, even if communism as a model dies, the specter of Marx has not died.²⁶ In other words, the idea of Marxism—what withdraws from what it once was when it was in force, as well as what it may become for those who wish to rethink it—will remain alive as a ghost. Derrida takes pleasure in exposing Fukuyama’s naivety in believing that, by killing the dead, the ground would be completely cleared for the liberal model to be applied without interference, as though the collapse of the Eastern bloc also implied the imminent collapse of every system of belief. In Derrida’s words:

At the moment when a new world disorder attempts to establish its neocapitalism and its neoliberalism, no denial can free itself from all the ghosts of Marx. Hegemony continues to organize repression and, therefore, the confirmation of a siege. Siege belongs to the structure of every hegemony.²⁷

As we can see, the question of the siege and the ghost will be central to Derrida’s critique. We must bear in mind that, through this notion of the ghost, Derrida seeks to point toward a problem or reality that extends beyond the ghost of Marx. The specter of Marx, after all, is presented as an example through which to explain and reveal the ambivalent figure of the ghost. What Derrida intends to develop is a hauntology.²⁸ We should understand this unusual concept as a play on words between the notion of ontology—the branch of philosophy concerned with being—and the French terms hanter, hanté, and hantise, which carry several meanings: to torment, obsess, inhabit, haunt, besiege, and so on. Haunt in English shares the same root.²⁹

The point we wish to reach is that, through the concept of hauntology, Derrida seeks to understand or analyze the hauntological nature of ghosts. The conceptual figure of the ghost moves between that which is and is not at the same time: ontologically absent and present, an amphibious and ambiguous figure. We recognize it as present in its virtuality, yet absent in actuality. Derrida writes the following about the ghost:

Repetition and first time, perhaps that is the question of the event as the question of the ghost: what is a ghost? What is the actuality or the presence of a specter, that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual, inconsistent as a simulacrum? Is there there, between the thing itself and its simulacrum, an opposition that holds? Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, for the singularity of every first time makes it also a last time. Each time, the event itself is a first time and a last time. Completely different. Staged for an end of history. Let us call this a hauntology [fantology]. This logic of haunting would be not only broader and more powerful than an ontology or a thought of being (of to be, assuming that there is being in to be or not to be, and nothing is less certain than that).³⁰

Derrida’s insight lies in giving positive value to a concept that identifies the recesses of what dissolves within the subtle movement between absence and presence. The notion of the ghost points to those entities that exist out of joint, dislocated, like things that lack an effective or actual presence, but whose being/non-being manifests itself through this intermittent movement. The power of the notion of the ghost lies in this dual nature; the example of Marx makes this clear. Although Marx, communism, and Marxism may be dead, the specter of Marx continues to haunt the collective imaginary; its presence remains virtual.

The movement of haunting—hanter—implies an obsession, a return, or a reappearance of what once existed in the past: something that no longer is, but whose presence torments the present. It is a kind of enchantment, a virtual entity that stalks the present through its reappearance, regardless of the fact that its actuality has become obsolete. The ghost is difficult to conceptualize because its presence is not actual; its position is paradoxical. Derrida states that the ghost is “inside him outside him: this is the out-of-place place of ghosts everywhere they pretend to take up residence.”³¹ The contradiction inherent in its nature begins when it inhabits and moves while breaking with linear temporality.

The ghost may have had an actual presence in the past, or it may acquire an actual presence in the future, but its presence/absence manifests itself in the present: it stalks and haunts the present. Derrida retrieves the expression used in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “the time is out of joint.” Its translation would be that time is out of joint, dislocated, disarticulated. Time is off its hinges, insofar as the past and the future communicate with the present in a hauntological, spectral manner that seems to break with the expected linearity. Derrida writes:

To maintain together that which does not hold together, and the disparity itself, the same disparity—we will constantly return to it as to the spectrality of the specter—is something that can only be thought in a time of a dislocated present, at the juncture of a radically disjointed time, without any assured conjunction. […] What is said here about time consequently applies, or applies for the same reason, to history, even if history may consist in repairing, through the effects of conjuncture, and the world is this temporal disjunction: “The time is out of joint,” time is disarticulated, out of joint, unhinged, dislocated; time is disrupted, haunted, and disturbed, deranged, at once disordered and mad. Time is out of joint; time is deported, outside itself, maladjusted.³²

In this way, we can observe how the figure of the ghost displays distinctive characteristics for understanding and interpreting certain entities that escape the metaphysics of presence, insofar as their manifestation points toward a beyond that brings them back into a here and now.

If we have considered the concept of “hauntology” indispensable to our research, it is because of the affinities we find with the movement of nostalgia itself. We can state without hesitation that nostalgia is hauntological. Everything we have previously shown concerning temporal ambiguity is representative of nostalgia: being dislocated in one’s temporality, an actual affect projected by a virtual ghost. We can therefore continue examining this question through the lens of nostalgia.

Simon Reynolds himself, whom we analyzed in the previous section, had already addressed this issue in a more secondary manner. However, in his work The Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher interprets nostalgia through a hauntological framework and reflects extensively on this connection, bringing it into his personal life and the cultural sphere.

First, if we say that nostalgia is hauntological, it is precisely because it is an emotion with implications characteristic of this state between being/non-being, absence/presence, and dislocated temporality. If we consider the matter carefully, our object of nostalgia, whatever it may be, comes to mind as a virtual memory with implications for our present reality. Nostalgic temporality, therefore, would appeal to our ghosts of the past; their return to the present would always occur through the ambivalence of an absent presence, of a being that, undoubtedly, no longer is.

Nor should we forget that nostalgia also haunts us. A trigger that produces a nostalgic memory causes it to return to our minds unexpectedly, even obsessively: a ghost that reappears because of the implications it once had for us. Drawing on Hägglund, Fisher demonstrates the structure of the hauntological movement:

Referring once again to Hägglund’s distinction between what is no longer and what is not yet, we can provisionally distinguish two directions of hauntology. The first refers to what is no longer but remains as a virtuality that in reality is, such as the traumatic “compulsion to repeat” a fatal pattern. The second sense refers to what has not yet actually occurred, but which already is virtually effective: an attractor—to use the mathematical term designating a set of values toward which a system tends—or an anticipation that influences present behavior.³³

As we can see, hauntology has two directions: that of ghosts from the past toward the present, and that of ghosts from the future toward the present. Evidently, the one that concerns us is the first: ghosts that were once actual but now, in their actual absence, slip into a virtual presence. The ghosts of the future have never been actual, although they may become so; their mode of being is different.

The ghosts of the past, however, haunt nostalgia because we know that their return will never again be actual, that they can only return as a present absence, as a passing dream. Thus, by understanding the direction of the ghost from the past toward the present, the hauntological movement, as a form of haunting, also reveals itself as a kind of pursuit or torment.

Our memories, or our nostalgia, may tend toward compulsive repetition, an eternal spectral return of what no longer is but, insofar as it presents itself, continues to exist in its absence. Fisher states that “hauntology can be constructed as a failed mourning. It is a refusal to let go of the ghost or—what is sometimes the same thing—the ghost’s refusal to let go of us.”³⁴

Fisher’s book, The Ghosts of My Life, does not merely analyze hauntology in a general sense. With an entirely autobiographical dimension, Fisher recalls cultural products from his past and uses them as examples for reflection. We should not overlook the fact that depression, which ultimately led him to suicide, is a central element of the work: the ghost of his depression. In this regard, it is important to point out that, ultimately, ghosts are always intimate; each person has their own ghosts that haunt them and bind them to their past.

In connection with the foregoing, Fisher recalls a song that marked his life and that illustrates what we are attempting to demonstrate. The song, titled Ghosts—“ghosts” in English—by the British band Japan, contains the following refrain:

“Just when I think I’m winning / when I’ve broken every door / the ghosts of my life / blow wilder / than the wind.”

[Just when I think I’m winning / when I have broken every door / the ghosts of my life / blow more wildly / than the wind].³⁵

As we can see, the refrain of this song is decisive both for the title of the work and for its content. It is also remarkably precise in capturing hauntological haunting and the supposedly buried past. This interstitial space between the present and the past is what gives rise to hauntology and, by extension, to nostalgia, as we have attempted to demonstrate throughout this research.

The repression of the past does not suppress it; every effort to exorcise it merely gives rise to its return with greater force. Fisher writes the following on this matter:

The present—or rather, the hesitation between past and present—creates an ambiguity that suggests a fatalistic eternity, a compulsion to repeat that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ghosts return precisely because of the fear that they will…³⁶

This hauntological torment does not reveal itself merely as an isolated effect in certain individuals. It also emerges as a nostalgic symptom characteristic of our era, a constant reverberation of the past within our present. As we saw with Derrida, the problem is situated particularly in our temporality: “the time is out of joint,” time is out of joint.

Our relationship with the past is more disrupted than ever; our ability to return to it is more accessible than ever. The psychological implications are evident: the possibility of hauntology is a consequence of the existence of conditions that allow an analysis of this kind to emerge. We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation, and our historical context drives this temporal dislocation forward. As Fisher demonstrates:

The Internet and mobile telecommunications technology altered the texture of everyday experience until it became unrecognizable. Yet, or perhaps because of all this, there is a growing sense that culture has lost its ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it may be that, in a very important sense, there is no longer any present capable of being grasped or articulated.³⁷

We can represent the image of linear time through the metaphor of a chain: in this chain, each link is a temporal fragment that follows the preceding one. It would seem that, in earlier times, access to a previous link in the sequence was far more limited. Today, this is no longer the case; we can now establish direct contact with all kinds of access points to our past. Our memory is more powerful than ever, insofar as it has been externalized through technology.

As Fisher aptly states, “it seems that what we have lost is the very capacity to lose.”³⁸ We are condemned to permanent remembrance; we have lost loss itself.

As developed in the previous subsection, it is no longer simply that the past is more present than ever, but that our use and abuse of it are also more recurrent than ever. The idea of the future has lost its momentum; the past now possesses a greater sense of novelty than what lies ahead.

Insofar as the future appears exhausted, the return to the past involves a revision and restructuring of what once was: an attempt to discover unrecognized details and extract something that had previously been overlooked. Ultimately, hauntology is a reflection of, or an attempt to capture, the congenital disarticulation of our time.

Within the context of late capitalism, we live through this fragile fragmentation, through different sequences overlapping across the past, present, and future. Goals, schedules, and calendars function as projections of a “to-come,” while memories of all kinds operate as retrojections toward “what was.”

The underlying issue that reverberates throughout is the breakdown of our time and space.³⁹ As in the title of the film by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, “everything everywhere all at once.” It would seem that, amid the accumulation and frenzy of constant technological change, we have lost our bearings regarding where and when we are.

For this reason, nostalgia and the gaze toward the past remind us with certainty of that when and where, offering the possibility of an anchor through which to idealize and remember a lost past. A lost past that can only reappear in the form of a ghost.

In short, Fisher explicitly expresses the desolation to which we are referring:

The present, broken, desolate, constantly erases itself, leaving few traces. Things capture your attention for a moment, but you do not remember them for long. Yet old memories persist, intact… Constantly recalled…⁴⁰

Memory and forgetting have been disrupted; temporal fragmentation drives us toward the recollection of those fragments that hold value for each of us.