Ghostwriting journal 4: ambiguity & uncertainty

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

Ambiguity, it turns out, is everywhere in teaching. Not just in the big theoretical sense but in the tiny emotional shifts of the classroom, in the between certainty and not-knowing, in the uncomfortable but generative spaces where I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing and perhaps neither are my students.

And that’s the bit I keep returning to: ambiguity not as an obstacle but as a strategy. Uncertainty not as a gap but as a dimension.

When I try to tease apart the difference, I realise I’ve been operating with both for years, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by accident.

Ghostwriting journal 3: AI-dentity and emotional labour

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

Experimental week!

This week was my big experimental session....the one where I leaned into the AI stuff. AI-dentity. Emotional labour. The unsettling weirdness of being seen (or mis-seen) by a machine. I’d been planning this session for weeks.

And it turned out to be one of my favourite teaching moments this term.

Ghostwriting journal 2: dark pedagogy

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

Reading Lysgaard on dark pedagogy left me thinking about how loaded the word pedagogy already is. It disguises itself as neutral but it always carries the weight of human-centred assumptions: what we value, what we call knowledge, what we erase and it gives us a comforting illusion that the world is narratable, graspable. Yet beyond that little bubble lies Thacker’s world-without-us: indifferent and unmoved.

Ghostwriting journal 1: why discomfort?

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

There’s something deliciously strange about lecturing from a glowing rectangle while my colleague, the ever-brilliant Dr Jeremy Chang, holds court in the flesh, oceans away. Together we co-teach a course titled Dark Pedagogy for master’s and PhD students at the Institute of Education, National Sun Yat-sen University. He walks among them, I haunt them from afar (a spectral presence through Wi-Fi) and it’s all very on brand.

Craft, clay and chronotopes

A feature piece by Lance Peng with reflections by Roderick Geerts

There is something haunting about craft….about the soft spiral of a thumb pressed into clay, the dusty ridges of a pot retrieved from earth after centuries of burial, the quiet alchemy of throwing, shaping, firing. The past is never just the past in archaeology, especially not when it takes form again (not metaphorically but literally) on a wheel, under the hands of someone who knows. This is what first struck me when I encountered Rodericvs, the living, breathing, spinning extension of Roderick Geerts, whose work as both a PhD researcher in Roman archaeology and a master ceramicist/experimental archaeologist slips and slides across temporal boundaries with an ease that is anything but casual. To me he is a time traveller of a particular kind: one who neither romanticises the past nor reduces it to data. Instead he crafts it….coils it, shapes it, burns it and in doing so, opens up a different kind of relation to history: one that is intimate, material, affectively charged.

Turning from the Ruin: A Hauntological Analysis of ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium

A Bachelor thesis with reflections from Lilja

Link to thesis, Turning from the Ruin: A Hauntological Analysis of ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium
https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn%3Anbn%3Ase%3Ahh%3Adiva-55473

Synthesised nostalgia: Exploring Inal Bilsel’s retro-futuristic sounds

A feature piece by Lance Peng on Inal Bilsel

With over two decades of experience in the music industry, Inal Bilsel has carved out a unique artistic identity—one that fuses music, visual arts and speculative narratives. A multifaceted composer, performer and educator, Inal’s work is a journey through contrasting worlds: fact and fiction, nostalgia and future dystopia, narrative and conceptual abstraction. His sound is influenced by science fiction, retro-futurism and musical hauntology, a genre that evokes the echoes of lost futures and fragmented memories. Whether through electronic compositions, orchestral pieces or immersive audio-visual performances, he pushes the boundaries of what music can communicate.

Hauntological Form: Where We Might Find the New in Contemporary Videogames

A post by James Sweeting

Introduction

To answer the question “where might we find the new” this paper will provide insight into the circumstances that encapsulate contemporary videogames. Acknowledging that since the start of the new millennium the future has been increasingly difficult to locate, simultaneously, contemporary videogames have been preoccupied with looking towards the past for answers. Nostalgia has often been considered as a potential source for the state of reverie that the past provides, whether that be from history or media form. However, nostalgia is not the source of the increasing reliance on the past, rather it is the identifiable symptom of something else, that being hauntology. 

Hauntology and nostalgia in the touristed landscapes of Sarajevo

A post by Marta Roriz

Introduction

Tourism has today a significant impact on cities and urban lives around the world. Urban tourism and the exploration of local topographies as tourist destinations have led to a complex co-production and co-consumption of urban spaces by tourists and local residents. The significative increase of tourism following the Second World War, in both developed and developing countries, is the result of various economic, technological, social and political changes (Wearing, Stevenson and Young 2010; Graburn 1989; Urry 2002), leading Crick (1989: 310) to describe it as “the largest movement of human populations outside wartime”. People travel for pleasure, but also to experience new places as well as to return to the familiar and the known. Some are motivated to learn about other people and cultures, while others seek to gain insights into the self through travel (Wearing, Stevenson and Young 2010).

The Synthetic Landscape

A post by Ian Chamberlain

In the following paper ‘The Synthetic Landscape,’ I will highlight and examine some of the core values at the heart of my practice. These will include my approaches to making, the themes and concepts I explore, and most importantly how I see these connections. I will overview some of my past works and focus on three bodies of work that I see as pivotal in the development of my practice, bringing together process and core conceptual concerns.

Hauntology and Lost Futures: Trauma Narratives in the Contemporary Gothic

A post by Emma Dee

Introduction

We begin, not with a text, but with an image.

This is a depiction of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, a well-known German Romantic painter and explorer of the sublime. Not only is this a representation of what many of us might think of when we hear the term ‘Gothic,’ but the story of this particular image might help elucidate a concept of hauntology that this article is exploring. This picture is not the original.

Monsters in Qualitative Data

A post by Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Understanding qualitative data poses a significant challenge for many researchers. Despite available resources providing insights into data management strategies, researchers often struggle in this area. Researchers, especially those operating within collaborative contexts, ought to go into how individuals’ self-perceptions and their perceptions of others influence their environments, and to position themselves accordingly in relation to the varied narratives encountered.

Re-imagining the History of British Abolition: The New Historical Consciousness in Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights

A post by Xiting Qiao

Introduction

Abolitionism, the movement that aimed to end the Atlantic slave trade and to free the enslaved people, was important in the historical development of countries in Western Europe and the Americas. Although the movement began earlier in France and Britain, the United States is written in the history of abolition to have played a more important role. From a historiographical perspective, the movement in the United States was more intense, as a backdrop to the American Civil War. Moreover, it operated in tandem with other social reforms, such as the Prohibition and women’s suffrage movements, thus adding the complexity. On a literary level, slave narratives, abolitionist fiction, and neo-slave narratives also constitute important genres in the African American literary canon, playing an ongoing role in opposing slavery, preserving historical memory, and documenting the progress of civil rights. In the 21st century, the neo-slave narratives produced by cultural industries (musicals, films, documentaries, etc.) have also occupied a central place in the representation of abolitionist history.

Hauntology of Trash in Environmental Education

A post by Rangga Kala Mahaswa, Gloria Bayu Nusa Prayuda, and Luthfi Baihaqi Riziq

1 Introduction

In Postscript on the Societies of Control (1999), Gilles Deleuze argues that capitalism is geographically separated into first-world capitalism and third-world capitalism. First-world Capitalism is characterised by the absence of involvement in production, more about regulating the flow of surplus, signified by stocks, and offering services instead of products. The third world still maintains the old way of buying raw materials and selling finished products (Deleuze, 1999, p. 4). The levels of production, types of products capitalism offers, and geographical conditions, therefore, separate the first and third worlds. The term “Third World” itself has become bad connotative nowadays: it signified poor and developing countries starting in the Cold War period (Wolf-Phillips, 1987, p. 1313). The connotations “poor” and “developing” are a kind of stigma. Many countries have tried to overcome it to reach the ultimate stage: becoming a developed country using economic or educational policies. Indonesia is one of the many countries in the Global South that has attempted to become a developed country characterised by rapid economic growth.

Are you haunted by ghosts of the past and phantoms of your future? Welcome to the spooky realm of hauntology

A post by Alasdair Macintyre

Do you believe in ghosts? Every year, Halloween serves up the usual images of spooks, skeletons and witches – but these ideas aren’t just the domain of fiction or trick-or-treating. There is also a philosophical concept that embraces ghosts.

It is called “hauntology”, and it might just make you a believer.

The word hauntology was invented by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida for his 1993 lecture Spectres of Marx.

Derrida was a whimsical guy, and the words “hauntology” and “ontology” both sound identical when spoken in French.

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence and being, dating back as far as ancient Greece. In Derrida’s mind, ontology was shadowed by hauntology, a state of non-being.

Hauntology is that eerie zone where time collapses and our past memories and associations haunt our minds, like a ghost.

(2/2) “If It’s Love, It Must Work Out:” Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela and Modes of Hauntology

A post by Edward Guetti

**This is the latter part of the article, with the preceding component coming before.

Finding a Home, Putting Words to Rest

The character of Vitalina in Cavalo Dinheiro reminds Ventura not only of his neglected obligations to his wife, but she also reminds Ventura of his role, in Cavalo Dinheiro, of bringing about the despair that killed Joaquim. Only after reciting letters from official bodies, detailing information related to the burial of her husband, her birth, her marriage, all of which cannot approach a truthful account of her situation, does she put to Ventura the claim that he had brought ruin to her and Joaquim by cutting Joaquim’s arm during a fight so as to render it paralyzed. It is impossible to tell if this same accusation carries over into VV, as the circumstances surrounding Joaquim’s death in VV do not mention any sort of paralysis, and Ventura is a different avatar of the Ventura character. What further complicates or blurs the distinction between the movies is Ventura’s (i.e., the actor’s) presence as the priest of an empty church. This priest, too, is fleeing a personal shame from Cape Verde (related to his refusal to baptize or bless a group of people who are shortly killed in a gruesome car crash). The priest passes his time alternating between repeating certain phrases to himself or beseeching God to cast His eyes to the “shadows.” In many ways, it is not obvious that Ventura-as-a-Priest is meant to be a different character than, say, the Ventura of Juventude em Marcha.

(1/2) “If It’s Love, It Must Work Out:” Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela and Modes of Hauntology

A post by Edward Guetti

Pedro Costa’s most recent movie, Vitalina Varela (2019), begins with a slow procession of a funeral cortège that emerges from the almost total darkness of an alleyway bordering a cemetery wall. The priest, whether from exhaustion or the tremors that constantly shake his hands, is shown collapsed on the sidewalk. The audience, like Vitalina, has arrived too late to see the funeral service, and the priest’s exhaustion provokes the question how many dead have been buried in this dark night. In a recent interview with Film Comment, Costa himself describes the lives of those who are the subjects of his Cape Verdean movies as condemned long before they were born. But Costa’s Cape Verdean films are not simplified allegories of colonial violence or of damaged life in relation to this superhuman inheritance. There is nothing so abstract or diagnostic in these movies, and Vitalina Varela (‘VV’), in particular, represents a crowning achievement of this series not only because it takes up the perspective of a woman as exemplary as Mrs. Varela, but, uniquely in this series, VV celebrates the autonomy of its protagonist. But to see this autonomy rightly, we will need to contrast this against the primarily male dynamic of the earlier films in this series that begins with Casa de Lava (1994), and re-commences in the third film of his Cartas de Fontainhas trilogy, Juventude em Marcha [Colossal Youth] (2006), the short film Tarrafal (2007), and the precursor to VV, Cavalo Dinheiro [Horse Money] (2014) in which Mrs. Varela made her debut as herself.

(2/2) Specters in the Computer: A Hauntological Interpretation of Vaporwave

A post by Borna Šućurović

**This is the latter part of the article; the former comes before.

Fisher's Intervention: Lost Futures and the Spectral Not Yet

Before we bring Derrida's hauntology in connection with vaporwave it is important to note two additional points, the first of which has to do with terminology. Throughout the French original of the Specters of Marx Derrida uses two 'names' for specters: la spectre and le revenant. While the former tries to express at once all of the properties explained in the previous chapter, the latter places particular emphasis on the reversible function of spectral existents. Le revenant – in both French and English languages – denotes a 'returning ghost', one who returns from somewhere. By using this name Derrida is attempting to show how specters return into temporal planes they do not belong to and within which certain forms of the work of mourning are already underway. As Merlin Coverley writes in the third chapter of his Hauntology;

(1/2) Specters in the Computer: A Hauntological Interpretation of Vaporwave

A post by Borna Šućurović

Introduction

 

On February 29th, 2016 a video entitled S U N D A Y S C H O O L was uploaded to YouTube and quickly became known as one of the first examples of what has since been dubbed simpsonwave. The video follows Bart Simpson's time spent going to Sunday school and getting to know Jessica, the daughter of reverend Lovejoy with whom he falls unhappily in love. While these events are taking place, the song Teen Pregnancy by Blank Banshee – in which an androgynous voice repeats the phrases "I'm just a kid" and "It was just a little mistake" over the beats of synthesizer-infused music – is playing in the background. A VHS filter is present throughout the entire duration of the video, giving off the impression that the footage was saved from a video cassette from the mid-1990s and subsequently digitized.

"Minny don’t burn chicken": humour, hauntology, and fried chicken stereotype

A jubilant International Women's Day post by Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

In the 2011 period drama film, The Help, there is a memorable scene where Celia and Minny share a meal at the same table. This scene marks the beginning of their budding friendship, as Minny teaches Celia how to cook. However, there is a humorous twist when Celia, who hired Minny as help without her husband’s knowledge (though he was actually aware), jokingly suggests that she might overcook the chicken. Minny, in a somber manner, responds with, "Minny don’t burn chicken". This engaging and witty exchange serves as a captivating starting point to explore the historical significance of fried chicken through the lens of hauntology (Derrida, 1994), looking into the persistence of past cultural phenomena in the present and uncovering hidden layers of meaning within its history.