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Author: OmarKarindu

Aug 25th 2011 at 11:49:17 AM

I think the Venture Bros is an example as well, but even the two descriptions offered don't do a good job of showing ''why'' it's a good example. It's more than just the present being overshadowed by the past, for one thing; Derrida is very specifically talking about the way unfulfilled ideological aspirations that have never been subjected to the test of historical implementation forever 
"haunt" the present, denying meaning to today and destabilizing any "retro" aesthetic.

TheRoadNotTaken always seems like the road to utopia ''because'' it's the road not taken.  The other side of this is that The Road Taken is always beset with complications, realities, and practicalities, and so we grow nostalgic for lost utopias, or for historically foreclosed and impossible choices. Thus retro aesthetics are both an attack on the present from the perspective of a ghostly vision of unreality and, paradoxically, only possible from the vantage of the "actual" present. Thus they are unstable.

I also have to disagree with Andrew J's statements about Communism not being subject to hauntological appearances. Hauntology its not about ideologies that were tried but failed: Derrida's major example is Marxism, after all. Rather, it's the idea that a world where those ideologies ''had not failed'' forever haunts our world, where they either never happened or failed the test of pragmatism. Marx haunts us today ''because'' Communism was tried and failed, and this failure makes it possible to imagine a "pure" Marxism that wasn't tried or that wouldn't have failed, even to desire it despite its apparent practical impossibility. Hauntology is why failed ideologies '''don't''' go away, and why excuses always seem possible to make. Paradoxically, the failure of an attempt at utopia can actually prompt a stronger desire for that utopia's realization; the fact that an ideological dream became, in practice, a nightmare can lead us to dream all the more insistently.

In short, hauntology is a way of describing that uneasy paradox that animates nostalgia, retro, even the No True Scotsman fallacy in some instances. (Derrida was more concerned in his book with philosophical and political thought in this instance than with art, so it's not really intended as a pop culture trope in the original essay.)

It's not really TooRareToTrope -- any work with retro aesthetics or referencing retro ideology might fit -- but rather requires way too much explanation to ever become a facile, oft-cited trope. The WikiMagic will doom it. (And then we can be hautned by the vision of a successful Hauntology trope page!)

That said, a more general trope about the idea that the present is constantly being overshadowedby the past in some works could include Derrida's Hauntology as an example, and would work very well