Hantuologi dan Kemandekan Kita

The future belongs to ghosts - Jacques Derrida

The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production. - Mark Fisher

Pada 1993, Jacques Derrida mempublikasikan sebuah buku berjudul Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Spectre dalam judul buku tersebut berasal dari kalimat pertama Manifesto Komunis, “Ada hantu berkeliaran di Eropa – hantu komunisme”. Dalam dinamika sejarah tahun 1990-an, setelah keruntuhan Tembok Berlin yang beberapa tahun kemudian diikuti oleh runtuhnya Uni Soviet, hantu Marx itu nampak penting buat diperbincangkan.

Bagi Derrida, kegagalan komunisme dan hantu-hantu Marx tak bisa dilepaskan dari peradaban hari ini. Satu yang kemudian diistilahkan dalam konsep Hauntolog__y, sebuah permainan kata dari Ontology. Kalau ontologi menjadi ilmu tentang sesuatu Yang-Ada, maka hauntology menjadi negasi keilmuannya dan berusaha menyibak pengaruh Yang-Tidak-Ada dalam kehidupan sehari-hari.

Pada perkembangannya, hauntology kemudian berkembang ke dalam berbagai aspek keilmuan. Melampaui kritik gerakan Marxisme yang mulanya diperbincangkan Derrida. Dalam padanan Bahasa Indonesia, Good (2020) menawarkan istilah Hantu-ologi sebagai padanan dari hauntology. Hantu menjadi istilah yang akrab buat masyarakat Indonesia dalam bentuk kekuatan spiritual yang mengambil banyak bentuk. Frasa ‘dihantui’ juga digunakan baik secara literal maupun metaforik.

Good sendiri menggunakan Hantu-ologi dalam kerangka antropologi psiklologi untuk memahami subjektivitas. Menurutnya, konsep itu demikian penting untuk menggali ingatan-ingatan kolektif masyarakat yang terpendam. Sebagai sebuah pisau analisis untuk mendedah the complex processes through which traumatic dimensions of contested historical experience are simultaneously kept hidden from view and made visible (2020).

Selain antropolog, para arkeolog seperti Dickinson juga menggunakan Hantu-ologi untuk membebaskan tendensi ‘Demam Arsip’ yang dikritik Derrida. Demam arsip sendiri merujuk pada kecenderungan para arkeologis untuk meyakini kemampuan keilmuannya dalam menemukan kehadiran sejarah yang objektif dan asli. Dickinson menjelaskan bahwa:

Derrida was rightly concerned about, and critical of, those archaeologists whom he believed suffered from ‘archive fever’, such as Freud, Foucault and Agamben, who, he argued, sought to dig through the dirt of history in the hopes of uncovering an overlooked object or presence of some sort that they might then utilize in order to construct a sovereign narrative of their own (2020).

Di Indonesia, Manurung menggunakan Hantu-ologi – dalam istilah aslinya – untuk memahami fenomena kemunculan kembali karya musik lama dalam medium baru. Manurung menjelaskan, bahwa proses perilisan kembali karya lama yang mengandung konten, narasi, dan lirik yang khas dan spesifik itu sebagai usaha yang dilakukan secara sadar untuk menghadirkan komoditas budaya baru untuk dikonsumsi (2022).

Dengan merilis album musik tahun 1970-an, pendengar musik di Tanah Air dapat menikmati nostalgia dalam wadahnya yang baru, yaitu rilisan musik dalam mediumnya yang paling kiwari juga arsip foto dan poster yang bisa kembali dipandang.

Dari sekian banyak pembacaan dan penggunaan Hantu-ologi itu. Barangklai Mark Fisher, kritikus budaya kelahiran Inggris yang mengakhiri hidupnya di usia 8 tahun, jadi sosok terpenting kedua selain Derrida yang punya peran penting buat memperkenalkan istilah itu.

Dalam kumpulan tulisan yang dipublikasikan pada tahun 2014, Fisher memberikan banyak contoh Hantu-ologi dalam konteks kajian budaya. Lewat film dan musik, mulai rilisan Joy Division, Arctic Monkey, sub-kultur rave, hingga film-film Stanley Kubrick dan Christopher Nolan. Fisher sendiri memberikan definisi paling konkret tentang Hantu-ologi yang disebutnya sebagai “the failure of the future” (2012).

Hilangnya masa depan, menurut Fisher, merupakan konsekuensi dari Akhir Sejarah yang dideklarasikan Francis Fukuyama. Hantu-ologi menjadi cara masyarakat untuk menantang sekaligus menerima kebudayaan yang mandek dan politik yang tak lebih dari sistem administratif yang monoton (2012). Masa depan menjadi sesuatu yang menghantui masyarakat kita hari ini dan muncul secara tidak sadar dalam berbagai produk kebudayaannya.

Fisher sendiri punya definisi yang cukup jelas tentang apa itu masa depan. Menurutnya:

But when I say future .. I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectation that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War (2014).

Peradaban hari ini, dengan perkembangan teknologi dan tendesi kebudayaan yang melekat, telah ‘membatalkan’ masa depan. Kemungkinan munculnya budaya baru kian tersendat dengan kepungan masa lalu yang muncul lewat Youtube dan interaksi di media sosial. Oleh karena itu, Hantu-ologi menjadi pelarian kita.

Hantu-ologi jadi kemungkinan tak terhindarkan. Ketika hidup semakin cepat, kebudayaan justru melambat, kata Fisher. Hantu-Ologi menjadi cara kita merawat melankolia dalam cara pandang freudian. Dimana meratap atau ‘mourning’ dipahami sebagai proses pelepasan libido dari objek yang hilang sementara melankolia, menurut Fisher, adalah usaha untuk mempertahankan libido dari hilangnya objek.

Haunting, then, can be contrued as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or – and this can sometimes amount to the same thing – the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfications one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism (Fisher, 2014).

Yang bisa diperbincangkan kemudian barangkali adalah bagaimana Hantu-ologi itu bisa melampaui hasrat melankolia kita sebagai manusia. Bagaimana bayang-bayang not-yet itu mampu menghadirkan jalan alternatif yang bisa kita tapaki, sebagai respon atas kegagalan peradaban kapitalisme dan posmodernisme yang pada akhirnya tidak menawarkan apa-apa.

Kemana hantu-hantu itu membawa langkah kaki kita?

Daftar Kutipan dan Bacaan Lebih Lanjut

Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Zero Books.

‘non-places’ – the generic zones of transit (retail parks, airports) which will come to increasingly dominate the spaces of late capitalism.

But when I say future .. I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectation that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectation were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegel-Marxist mythology of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge; and so on.

The 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectation.

In the last 10 to 15 years … the internet and mobile telecommunication technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore,

Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal – from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms – but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of Youtube links has made withdrawal more difficult than before

everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down

In Freud’s terms, both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawal of libido from the lost object, in melancholia libido remains attached to what has disappeared.

Haunting, then, can be contrued as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or – and this can sometimes amount to the same thing – the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfications one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.

One way of thinking about hauntology is that its lost futures do not force such false choices; instead, what haunts is the spectre or a world in which all the marvels of communicative technology could be combined with a sense of solidarity much stronger than anything social democracy could muster.

What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more confortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental,

Fisher, Mark. 2012. What is Hauntology dalam Film Quarterly, Vol.66, No.1 (Fall 20012), pp 16-24. University of California Press.

What defined this “hauntological” confluence more than anything else was its confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future.

The disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to concieve of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live. It meant the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system. In other words, we ere in the “end of history” described by Francis Fukuyama.

The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Routledge.

The future belongs to ghosts

One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present presence, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge.

To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept,

should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet.

Lorek-Jezińska, Edyta. Więckowska, Katarzyna. 2017. Hauntology and Cognition: Question of Knowledge Pasts and Futures dalam Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, Vol. XIV. Nicolaus Copernicus University.

The general mistrust toward metanarratives identified with postmodernism and the sense that uncertainty was indeed becoming a permanent condition of life were execarbated at the turn of the millenium by anxieties about the future, in particular about the ways in which the past might influence the world to come.

The extent of this millennial anxiety was demonstrated by the increasing presence of supernatural creatures in popular culture and by the growing interest in ghost and hauntings in theory and criticism, eventually leading to the development of Spectrality Studies.

Derrida’s book is a call to reconsider the status of knowledge and one’s relation to the past, and to listen to the voices that perhaps do not really exist or are perceived as too marginal to be taken into consideration. Hauntology demands a new understanding of the object of study that escapes the traditional frames of knowledge.

Hauntology conceptualizes the spectre as a crisis of knowledgem, as a defiance of “semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy”. An encounter with the spectral results in and perhaps from the condition and acceptance of the state of unknowing. Hauntology is concerned with the readiness to accept and acknowledge uncertainty, inbetweenness, absence, paradox, since a confrontation with the spectre always demands the reformulation of one’s expectations and frames of reference.

The ghost not only distorts the self-sameness of the present but it also forcefully announces the need for transformation and change, for “something-to-be-done” which would not merely be “a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had” (Gordon, 2004). Thus, haunting explicitly points to the need to face the past and to accept its multifarious inheritance, and this is another major function of the ghost,

The figure of ghost is frequently approached by scholars as a symptom of repressed memories that points to the need, the necessity even, to confront the past in order to be able to create a future.

In Derrida’s formulation, the spectre is simultaneously from the past and the future, returning like a repressed memory which must be recognized and acknowledged in order to enable a move forward. This paradoxical nature of the spectre as “always both revenant (invoking what was) and arrivant (announcing what will come)” (Blanco and Peeren, 2013a),

Lewis, Tom. 1996. The Politics of “Hauntology” in Derrida’s Specters of Marx dalam Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 9:3, pp 19-39.

Derrida views of marxism not as constituting a living tradision but rather as belonging, quite precisely, to the realm of the undead. In Derrida’s terms, Marxism today is at one “spirit” and “specter”,

The specter may be said to represent more than the instability of the real: it also represent the ghostly embodiment of a fear and panic provoked by intimations of an impossible state of being. Recognition of the flawed or incomplete nature of being, Derrida suggest, can trigger emotional reactions aimed at denying or exorcizing such a recognition.

Rahimi, Sadeq. 2015. Ghosts, Haunting, and Intergenerational Transmission of Affect: From Cryptonymy to Hauntology dalam Psychoanalytic Discource Issue 1.

For Derrida … a text, a life narrative, an identity, is always already haunted, with no hope for a final interpretation or decryption. This is the sense in which hauntology is a theory of text as such, a theory of reading rather than one of readibility.

Consider the significant implication of locating ghosts and haunting in the most basic layers of production of meanings and experience, where a hauntological theory of meaning and experience offers broader and much more general applicability.

The notion of intergenerational transmission in this sense can be used for example to examine such issues as mechanism of class continuity and cross-generational reproduction of behavioral and affective pattern that sustain poverty/wealth, education/illiteracy, or health and disease across time.

Dickinson, Colby. 2023. Archaeology and Hauntology: An Ongoing, Stalled Conversation dalam Religions 14, No.10:1286.

Facing our vulnerability as a species frequently means listening to the extreme moments of witness testimony concerning the many and ongoing failures that humanity has encountered and that we must learn from as they register themselves within our collective past.

The critique of archaeological methods that Derrida undertook on multiple occasions was a direct outgrowth of his own deconstructive practice that sought to keep a healthy distance from any historical claims to (sovereign) power. Though religion might be rightly critiqued as attempting to sacralize its mythological origins, there was yet another side to religion that he tried to recover and uplift in order to provide a corrective tension to any given representational claim.

Religion, especially in the Judaic–Christian strand that he directly analyzes in his Specters of Marx, emphasizes a messianic logic embedded within every history or historical form that undid each and every representation in a bid for more justice to appear upon the face of this earth. To be fair, this is precisely the place where Foucault and Agamben converge with Derrida, especially insofar as the latter explicitly called attention to those Benjaminian ‘weak messianic forces’ that undo our most normative representations.

Archive fever—as the name for Derrida’s diagnosis of the archaeologist’s madness in believing their methods might reveal a previously concealed presence within history—takes over, he argued, when we believe that we can locate, once and for all, a presence beyond all of the copies, an ‘original’ presence that is nothing more, and nothing less, than a metaphysical claim to sovereign power. We are haunted by the fact that no representation that we will construct or find is authentic or original, yet we are unable to locate such a presence because it cannot be represented in any form or made intelligible in any language.

The one suffering from archive fever believes that somehow, by sifting through the documents and narratives that constitute an ‘official’ record of the subject of history, they might be able to locate, once and for all, its point of origin. Thus, if they might, they would be able to possess the subject in some sense, to be master of it, to be sovereign over it, even if that subject is one’s own self.

Derrida was rightly concerned about, and critical of, those archaeologists whom he believed suffered from ‘archive fever’, such as Freud, Foucault and Agamben, who, he argued, sought to dig through the dirt of history in the hopes of uncovering an overlooked object or presence of some sort that they might then utilize in order to construct a sovereign narrative of their own.

Humankind’s nostalgia for ruins and its fascination with haunted houses and sacred lands converge through the various ways that our identities are constantly subverted by the material existence of these phenomena.

Good, Bryon J. 2020. Hauntology: Theorizing the Spectral in Psychological Anthropology dalam ETHOS Vol.47m, Issue 4, pp 11-26. The American Anthropological Association.

Interestingly, these ideas translated rather directly into Bahasa Indonesia. Hantu, a generic term for ghosts in Indonesian, are for most Indonesians real spiritual forces, which take many forms. Dihantui, to be haunted, is used both literally and metaphorically—so that to talk about being haunted by events in the past makes sense in Indonesian and incorporates both the literal term “hantu” and its metaphorical meaning. Indeed, when lecturing about “hauntology” in Indonesian, I found myself translating the term as hantu-ologi, the science of ghosts or haunting, in a way that makes full sense of Avery Gordon or Derrida’s writing.

“hauntology” is one critical analytic category for psychological anthropologists investigating subjectivity. It stands alongside and in close relationship to studies of violence—interpersonal, gender, or political violence—and its persistent effects in postconflict societies. It is thus inextricably linked to—though not reduced to—conversations about “trauma” as a construct and its usefulness in cross-cultural work. It is linked to questions of psychological processes through which political authority and structural violence are enacted, as well as those enabling individual and social moments of resistance and liberation. And it stands in close relationship to studies of historical forgetting and remembering, to silences as well as the partiality of that which is spoken—and to the eruption of ghosts of the past and the hidden present at unexpected moments.

a “hauntology” requires that we address the complex processes through which traumatic dimensions of contested historical experience are simultaneously kept hidden from view and made visible

Hauntology is precisely a language for exploring ways of simultaneously knowing and not knowing, of the politics, suppressions, and ghostly appearances of contested memory. These issues have been particularly charged, politically and in scholarship, in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia.

any adequate account of the way historical experience is simultaneously kept hidden and made visible requires that we address the complex interactions between individual psychological experience and social processes, and such analyses require a conception of the barred self and its relation to haunting. This is a modest claim for psychological anthropologists. The simultaneity of processes of knowing and not knowing for individuals, the complexities of memory, of “forgetting” and “remembering,” and the haunting qualities of the partially remembered are fundamental and theorized in diverse ways within psychoanalytic traditions, as incorporated in psychological anthropology.

attention to ghosts, to that which we, as well as members of societies in which we work, experience as uncanny or haunting, is critical for understanding how societies deal with violence and injustice. Remembering and forgetting, and re-remembering amidst efforts to exorcise memory, are continuous processes for individuals as well as societies

Manurung, Gregorius Tri Hendrawan. Umam, Khotibul. 2022. Reissuing Indonesian Independent Music: Technology-Mediated Nostalgia, Hauntology and Future Projection dalam E3S Web of Conferences 359, 02017. ICENIS.

Reissue is one of those cultural products. Reissue contains not only the past (musical content, narratives, lyrics, etc); reissue were intentionally brought back (released again) into the present as a commodity for us to consume

Eventhough main content of any reissue release are immaterial objects (tone, vocal harmony), these immaterial objects are still related to material object(s). Distinctive sound of piano of the 1970s rock progressive era found in Harry Roesli’s album, Philosophy Gang (1973), can be reproduced because the vinyl record re-released by Lamunai Records in 2017 was playing on turntable.

Reissue releases by Indonesians independent record labels can be viewed as a part of attempts of excavating past elements in order to project the future. Reissue releases from these three labels present not only recorded media but also liner-notes, photographic archives and other supporting archives such gig poster documentation and promotional posters.

The presence and development of technologies have been changing the style of music ecosystem significantly, but also were opening up opportunity for new practices. In reissue, technology, the past, and nostalgia are closely related and, consciously or not, have an impact on people’s personal live.