Merlin Coverley

the no longer and the not yet

In such circumstances hauntology may be regarded as post-nostalgic, describing a world in which the present can no longer be experienced as anything other than a sum of its pasts.

The goal, for Mark’, he writes, ‘was to stay one step ahead of capitalism’s consolidatory forces and its “blobjective” nature. Alternatives were of no use if they could be immediately folded back into the system they were attempting to escape from.’11 In as far as its appropriation of cultural forms appears as rapacious as that of capitalism itself, it seems to me that this is a term equally applicable to hauntology, in which all that comes within its reach is likewise rendered hauntological.

Chief amongst them was the now all but forgotten JW Dunne, whose theory of serial time was both impossibly abstruse and hugely influential.

TC Lethbridge, who employed a similar temporal model in his theory of residual haunting, in which he proposed that materials such as stone could record and store moments of heightened emotional intensity through time, which might then later be replayed

Andrew Gallix writes: ‘hauntology is not just a symptom of the times, it is itself haunted by a nostalgia for all our lost futures.’ See

Helen Macfarlane’s first English translation of 1850 was to proclaim: ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.’

had been embraced by the public both in the US and Europe, and 31 March 1848 remains the founding date of the movement

Spiritualism didn’t reach London until 1852

the Ghost Club, one of the first paranormal research organisations, was founded in 1862.