THings you find hauntological that no one else does

[Sebastian Cobb]

the idea of dog, not just dog, no, but dog with wings!

I heard some cunts made a temple out if them and everything.

[jamiefairlie]

The Family

[Jerrykeshton]

Ahh yeah, your not wrong you know.

I had a car crash a few years ago and was on some pretty serious painkillers for whiplash. I fell asleep in front of the TV and woke up to the Frank Sidebottom test card, assumed I was tripping. Damm you Channel M

[gilbertharding]

Hauntology is to being reminded of tiny details from your own past what psychogeography is to going for a walk in the fog then writing an essay about it.

I mean, maybe. Perhaps I don't understand.

[Fonz]

I was sat with my parents in their garden last Sunday and heard the chimes of an ice cream van up the road giving it 'O Sole Mio/Just One Cornetto/It's Now Or Never'. The archaic sound of those chimes, utterly unchanged since I was a child in the 1980s, feel like the last sprouts of hauntology impinging into real life existence. On top of that a lot of them still have a badly drawn too tall Mickey Mouse on the side, looking like something from the pages of a bootleg Greek comic book called MICKEEE ποντίκι glimpsed in a shop on a childhood holiday. That's my nomination, then. Ice cream vans driving about in the here and now with their disquieting doppler effect chimes and lanky Mickey Mice on the side, hauntological as fuck. 

I get the 'ice cream van' thing.
Maybe because, when very young they were associated with a pure joy and excitement, but as you get older you notice they are a trope for paedophilic murder/horror plots in films/telly, which is mirrored in real life. Plenty of criminal ice cream van men. So, we're left with a conflicting experience, which the chimes provoke every time.

[dissolute ocelot]

Stephen Yardley

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

I don't know if this counts, but a while ago I saw Paradise Lost: The Robin Hood Hills Murders (documentary about three murdered little boys and the subsequent stitch-up of three teenagers by the police) and Pure Fucking Mayhem (about the band Mayhem and wider Norwegian black metal scene) and... have you ever associated a feeling with a decade? For a long time I've had a sense that the 90s were gaudy colours and The Simpsons on the surface, but underneath there's something unhealthy and rotting. Probably because I became a teenager in the 90s and started to clue into all the horror in the world generally.

[poodlefaker]

our local ice cream van plays the Harry Lime theme, which is genuinely creepy.

[chip]

This all sounds interesting enough, and I wouldn't mind trying to get into it, but it's just so culturally alienating for anyone like myself who was born in the early 90s. I never experienced any media at all like this, so it would feel quite inauthentic to claim any sort of disturbed nostalgia for it.

Like we didn't have 'PIFs' anymore, for example - they were just adverts. TV had generally gotten over its weird creepy stiffness by then, I feel (where every voiceover was done by a man in their 60s for some reason), having moved onto loud, flashy 90s and 00s nonsense. Just an opposite kind of vibe completely.

Instead, I'm looking forward to the mid-2040s when the proper wave of 90s childhood nostalgia activates, whatever form it will take.

[Alberon]

I'm not sure you can get proper hauntalogical beyond the early eighties at the latest. TV is generally too professional to do it anymore so it seems unlikely it will be a thing for future generations and anyone who didn't experience it as a kid (as Chip says) in the 70s won't feel it now. It'll just be odd stuff from a previous generation they don't connect to. Like when people who were kids in the 70s see TV and films from the 50s and earlier. There's no direct connection.

Here's the Picture Box titles which definitely qualifies.

[Bad Ambassador]

The nostalgia of unease, fuelled by the psychological projection - consciously or unconsciously - of a very uncertain world from the mid-60s to the early 90s into the media of its time. Traditional values were being overturned, nothing was safe, obliteration was just around the corner, and this was being reflected into the culture to create a mediasphere of oppressive fear and barely glimpsed or understood dangers, where every stranger was a potential kidnapper, every beach had a broken bottle just under the surface, every wardrobe contained a nameless horror and there was no way out of any of it.

[holdover]

This all sounds interesting enough, and I wouldn't mind trying to get into it, but it's just so culturally alienating for anyone like myself who was born in the early 90s. I never experienced any media at all like this, so it would feel quite inauthentic to claim any sort of disturbed nostalgia for it.

Like we didn't have 'PIFs' anymore, for example - they were just adverts. TV had generally gotten over its weird creepy stiffness by then, I feel (where every voiceover was done by a man in their 60s for some reason), having moved onto loud, flashy 90s and 00s nonsense. Just an opposite kind of vibe completely.

Instead, I'm looking forward to the mid-2040s when the proper wave of 90s childhood nostalgia activates, whatever form it will take.

It'll be much trickier for folk who were young kids in the 2010s. While I could figure out the origins of things that freaked me out as a nipper (Dark Towers on Look And Read) cuz I knew it was on the bbc schools schedule (and plenty other folk have mentioned it online) I wonder how they will track down the made YouTube video they saw with Else from Frozen dressed as a policewoman pulling teeth out the head of a distressed Peppa Pig.

[Des Wigwam]

I dont believe in any of this but that old screen you got on telly with the girl and the creepy doll with a chalk board in the background is definitely haunted or just evil.

I wont link or post it.

That used to freak me out not because of the doll but because I thought the balloon was a false leg.

That could go in the Childhood Misconceptions thread. Damn.

[Mr_Simnock]

Noseybonk

[Norton Canes]

Electrical substations

[machotrouts]

My 183rd most played song of all time is Lieutenant Pigeon - Bobbing Up and Down Like This, which I listen to because of how haunting and menacing it sounds to me, and I've never been sure that it's supposed to sound haunting and menacing or that other people would perceive it as haunting and menacing.

[chabrol]

For me, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - the titles with the Russian dolls, the Soviet dread, the old shops, Michael Fish on the telly and the boarding school stuff...

You're not completely alone on that one- Mark Fisher had a short essay on Tinker, Tailor... in his collection of Hauntology writings Ghosts of My Life. He mostly focuses on the character of Smiley as a hauntological figure though, representing the ghosts of British Empire and Post-War institutions interacting with the lost futures of Communism and particular strains of social democracy, in-keeping with his more Derrida-derived conception of hauntology, but there's some interesting comparisons between the look and feel of the series and the failures of the film remake in conjuring that time.

[George White]

I'd read parts of Fisher's book but I thought he didn't lump it in with hauntology specifically in the hauntology section of the book.

[Clatty McCutcheon]

My 183rd most played song of all time is Lieutenant Pigeon - Bobbing Up and Down Like This, which I listen to because of how haunting and menacing it sounds to me, and I've never been sure that it's supposed to sound haunting and menacing or that other people would perceive it as haunting and menacing.

Just listened to that 3 times in a row and it's extremely menacing in a strange, warped, curdled sort of a way - like if a condemned man had been forced to record an attempt at a jolly novelty song.

Seems to be based on an old music hall song, with the Pigeon's version being released in 1981, both of which facts make sense when you listen to the thing.

http://folksongandmusichall.com/index.php/bobbing-up-and-down-like-this/

[Video Game Fan 2000]

When someone on this forum uploads or links to some 1980s comedy, and there's an impressionist doing all the Frank Spencers and I Don't Really Knows, but there's an impression in there I remember hearing before when I was a kid, but I don't recognise who its supposed to be anymore. Recognising the impression but not the person.

[chabrol]

I'd read parts of Fisher's book but I thought he didn't lump it in with hauntology specifically in the hauntology section of the book.

Yeah that's true, I forgot about that (its in the general 70s section, right?), but I suppose it also sort of feels like everything he wrote around that time seemed to obsessively come through that sort of hauntology filter- probably as there's something a bit nebulous about the concept to begin with even in his writing (which imo is part of its seductive appeal).

[touchingcloth]

As with many words, yes, it's a word for things.

From an earlier post:

Hauntology was a phrase coined by Jacques Derrida and he described it thus.
'"To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration".

I took that to mean "hauntology is a synonym for "concept", e.g. "being" or "time" are both concepts and therefore haunted.

The quote even mentions ontology. So, could this thread equally be titled "things you find ontological"? Or have I missed something?

[Zero Gravitas]

Think of it like a ghost that haunts you backwards and sideways from the future timeline where things went all quite nice actually.

Oh, and the ghost isn't scary, it's nice, and that's hauntology.

[touchingcloth]

Oh, déjà vu, but without needing to remember how to type accents.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

From an earlier post:

I took that to mean "hauntology is a synonym for "concept", e.g. "being" or "time" are both concepts and therefore haunted.

The quote even mentions ontology. So, could this thread equally be titled "things you find ontological"? Or have I missed something?

No, you've nailed it. Hauntology and ontology are pronounced the same in French. Just go hon hon hon and you're half way there.

When you say "ontology" out loud and are talking about the presence of things, you're simultaneously also saying the made up word "hauntology" which is his word for the absence of things. I think he means synonym here because the words he's using for example like being and time are things we don't know directly through presence but through the absences of things. The difference between the two only appears when we write things down because he doesn't like the idea that speech could ever carry more meaning than text. 

I take the pop culture usage to just mean a negative or uncanny kind of nostalgia. Or just like Broadcast records and Ghostwatch.

[Zero Gravitas]

Oh, déjà vu, but without needing to remember how to type accents.

We all know precisely how you 'type' accents.

Scum, some of us use alt-gr and the number row, we don't even have a numpad!

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Hauntology is when you're talking to a group of people about the Fall and you're so into talking about the Fall that you don't notice that the group of people have mysteriously GONE before you've finished speaking, leaving you alone with dreams of a future communism that won't come true, what'll you do?

[Zero Gravitas]

A whole handful wasn't it?

[touchingcloth]

No, you've nailed it. Hauntology and ontology are pronounced the same in French. Just go hon hon hon and you're half way there.

When you say "ontology" out loud and are talking about the presence of things, you're simultaneously also saying the made up word "hauntology" which is his word for the absence of things. I think he means synonym here because the words he's using for example like being and time are things we don't know directly through presence but through the absences of things. The difference between the two only appears when we write things down because he doesn't like the idea that speech could ever carry more meaning than text. 

I take the pop culture usage to just mean a negative or uncanny kind of nostalgia. Or just like Broadcast records and Ghostwatch.

I get it now. In the context of this thread, hauntology are the things that could go in a Peter Kay routine.

Do you remember Peter Kay routines?

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Peter Kay

how many times has he died so far


talk about a presence persisting through its absence