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‘The future belongs to ghosts, and… modern image technology, cinema,
telecommunications, etc
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Discuss
with reference to two of the texts studied
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Hauntology is useful when looking at the numerous
forms of haunted media we are presented with in Snow and Pattern Recognition,
where we can see mourning, memories and ghosts all presented to us through the
use of haunted media
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Both texts present situations
that provide an insight into a possible future where mourning may take place on a
digital platform
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The term ghost in literary terms has a slightly altered meaning from a traditional
ghoul
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133) and
Colin Davis (2007) states that it has ‘nothing to do’ with whether you believe in
ghosts
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8)
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Hearing Whitney Houston singing on the radio, in person she is dead yet
she lives on through her music, she is both here and not here; hence the existence
of being, is haunted
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Bennett and Royal (2004) also debate whether the ‘ghost’ is part of oneself, that we
consider ourselves ghosts because we believe we are haunted by our own spirits
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We can see this every day, especially with the
developments in technology, like seeing a person in a film or hearing someone’s
voice on the radio are all forms of Hauntology
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For Derrida Hauntology it is not about ‘actual’
ghosts but the spectre as a metaphorical trope for challenging our underlying binary
logic: it is ‘the spectre as possibility’ which is most interesting (2006:13)
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1497) The spectre is both absent and present which is ambiguous

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and demolishes a reality based on binaries hence Derrida is suggesting that the
state of being is haunted, as the ghost is within us
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He states time
travel ‘[emerged] at the end of the 19th century (…) a phenomenon linked to cinema’
(Pg
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307)
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Cinema and television is
captivated with the post-apocalyptic future world and Coates (1987) believes it is the
‘ideal apparatus for visualising a journey through time’ (Perrine, pp 2-4, 1998)
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In that sense, we have
no future’ (Pattern Recognition Pg
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The same happens with mobile phones we
collect and preserve our memories, allowing a skip to points in the past giving the
appearance of an absence of time; an illusion of time travel
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Hautologists believe that
we are at an end of ‘time’ or time as we know it, the digital era requires its own time
therefore it has stopped history
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R
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E
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D
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If technology, our own existence and being is haunted then the question arises, what
does this mean for the future? William Gibson states in Dead Man Sings that ‘time
moves in one direction, memory in another’ and that especially in this new digital era
‘we construct artefacts to counter the natural flow of forgetting’ such as the
expanding use of technology however we use it every day so do not see the effect it
has on our lives
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He argues that not forgetting is
a relatively new experience because ‘as a child the flow of forgetting was
unimpeded’ and denotes technology as a ‘global, communal, prosthetic memory’
suggesting it is part of us or an extension of our own memories
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Media such as this is allowing us to exist in the in-between dimension between
existence and non-existence or between life and death, we are keeping people ‘alive’
and becoming haunted, thus only expanding the ‘prosthetic memory’ which may
make a digital future difficult to exist within
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Derrida even states that ‘the future belongs to ghosts and
(…)are only increasing the power of ghosts’
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Marina Warner provides a great insight into this ‘future’ by
investigating different types of mythology; regarding spirits and communicating she
depicts how the dead effectively ‘live on’ in our culture as we are taught not to forget
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To further this argument, she discusses old communications with the dead;
Ouija boards and psychics, the modern equivalent being through your own videos
and photos
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Memories natural or artificial are in themselves a form of haunting and allows the
events/persons to still be effectively ‘alive’ and viewed endless amount of times, this
means that all forms of representation are haunted, art, film and literature
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22) however ‘ghosts’ have always been around; the
evolution in technology has made ghosts more prominent, as evident in Derrida’s
quote above
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245) the uncanny in terms of
technology comes from the undefined binary border it gives us between the real and
not real
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Both Snow and Pattern Recognition deal with various forms of haunted media; they
both contain ghostly presences of someone being kept ‘alive’ that presents media
and technology in this uncanny way
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1234)
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The narrator
goes to view memories from his ex-girlfriends life that had been captured on a
storage device
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‘But what I
had been waiting for had already occurred and was past’ (Pg
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5-6) which strengthens the argument that like a film he is
transported into the past, a different time zone, a form of uncanny, haunted media
where Georgie is being kept ‘alive’ in present time
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Referring above memories break the chronological train of thought, therefore
memories are a natural occurrence and to mourn we must start to forget, technology
however does not allow the process of forgetting as Gibson mentioned
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6)
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However the unnamed narrator struggles
with this mix of memory and technology, although, much like natural memory the
system at ‘The Park’ appears to be random and has no chronological order, he tells
us ‘Access was random
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The
Park had supplied no program’ (Pg
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This random access is something we are not
used to with technology, the beauty of it, we believe is that we can pinpoint a
memory we are looking for, finding it within seconds not for technology to have no
system of ordering or finding our treasured memories
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He is unable
to recount some of the memories he is watching ‘I couldn’t remember this day’ (Pg
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Here we can
see both positives and negatives; one positive being if access is random the process
of forgetting is restored as it is highly unlikely that you would ever access that
memory again, ‘Odds were on the order of eight thousand to one (…) that I would
never light on them again by pressing this bar
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8)
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16) we presume technology to be omnipotent and omniscient to our needs
whenever we need it hence why the narrator becomes fixated on viewing these
memories because the technology is not allowing him to access the memories he
has forgotten
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In Snow the quality of the video begins to degrade much like
our natural memories, it begins to get slower and more pixilated showing that
technology is not always a reliable source of memory, if the files are lost they are
gone forever and so the fact remains that it can only ever echo real memory, our
own ‘ghosts’ in the sense it does for the narrator in Snow, it cannot replace natural
memories
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We are collecting more
memories than we will ever get chance to sort through
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He
tells us ‘There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then unpredictably,
when I’m sitting on the porch (…) a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and
startling’ (Pg
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The forgetting of the archived memories and the past in this
instance has allowed him to recover, to mourn and move on
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Derrida suggests that ‘the work of mourning’ helps to overcome the
past by ‘ontologizing’ its remains in order ‘to make them present’ (2006: 9)
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In
essence the ghosts in these memories serve to remind us that we should not forget
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the ghost remains that which gives one the most to
think about- and to do (Derrida, 2006:122)’ This is most evident to us on days of
memorial for trauma such as Remembrance Sunday, which are attributed to the
existence of ghosts
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If mourning in the future is to take place on a digital platform it would construct a
‘sense of distance between the viewer and the event’ (Appadurai pp
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In Snow
this happens on the cinema type screen while in Pattern Recognition it takes place
online through a series of internet videos
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Pattern Recognition has an interesting subplot; the
character of Cayce cannot mourn for her father who was ‘lost’ in 9/11, strangely he is
not dead but missing meaning again there is an absence of mourning
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The videos act as a form of haunted media
due to the images of ghosts from 9/11, and the ‘sightings’ of her father only appear
due to the human ability pattern recognition in which we make connections and find
meaning in seemingly random clips of footage
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Snow ends with the lines ‘Or like that funny experience
you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and
distinctly by someone who is not there’ (Pg
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McKenzie Walk examines a term called Xenocommunication a form of alien
language, he examines various media we use today and how our reality and media
act as an ‘artifact or portal to other- worldliness’ (Pg
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162)
...
The

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media and mode of communication is completely out of character with the image
which forms this portal, so could be argued that the future is being used up by
repetition of the past
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Everything, today, is to some extent
the reflection of something else’ (Pattern Recognition Pg
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However no two videos are the same because to keep
moving forward we must forget which allows us to fill in the blank spaces with
something new
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Spectrality emerges
from the reproduction and repetition of images’ (Pg
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Walk even states that ‘The era of digital hyper
communication again raises the question of what can’t be communicated’ (Pg
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162)
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Pattern Recognition
applies this approach, as the mother listens to white noise sounds on blank
cassettes with the presumption that she can hear her husband’s voice
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Death is meant to be a definitive end of life; this is in jeopardy due to our digital era
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The extent of
haunted media in Snow keeps the character of Georgie ‘alive’ in the present time
and so the narrator lives in the past being transported into her reality to relive these
memories whilst in Pattern Recognition the videos show a reworking of the past into
the present, technology has allowed for a repetition of what has gone before
however the nature of forgetting allows for the progression to the future
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Bibliography

Appadurai, A
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Modernity at large
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Minneapolis, Minn
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Baer, U
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Stanford: Stanford UP
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(2002) Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma
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and Royle, N
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London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheastsheaf
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and Peeren, E
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Davis, C
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Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return
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Derrida, J
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Forbes, 162, pp
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Gibson, W
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New York: G
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Putnam's Sons
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