Hauntology II - The End of History

from video above:

...contemporary postmodern culture has lost its ability to creatively imagine the future. In 2020. Merlin Coverley published his book, "Hauntology: Ghosts of Future's Past". In this Book Coverley traces hauntology back to the mid-19th century. Although the term was first introduced in the late 20th century by Jacques Derida. And the decision to look for the origins of hauntology in the dusty lanes and alleys of the Victorian era seems justifiable and reasonable. The Victorian era was rich in ghost stories, and various thinkers with rather esoteric ideas. Most importantly, it was the time when technology, such as photography, became available. Ghosts have to be "captured", and what better way to capture them than with a camera, or an audio tape? Coverley points out that technology is a vehicle for the capture of ghosts, so it's not paradoxical that hauntology is relevant at the time of technological development. Access to recording and playback opens a window for hauntological activity. Humans have always been obsessed with archiving and documenting their experiences through technology. But now, in the age of smartphones and cameras, the past is not only remembered, it is constantly replayed. What is television, but a parade of future ghosts? What is this video, but a recording of a future ghost's walk?

In "Hauntology", Coverley excavates a few long forgotten British thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century. One of them is John William Dunn, an aeronautical engineer and philosopher, author of "An Experiment with Time". According to Dunn, there isn't just one timeline, but an endless sequence of parallel timelines. We can access a higher dimension of time, for example while dreaming, since Dunn's theory was that dreams are made up of images of past experiences, and images of future experiences, mixed together.
Deja Vu, or the feeling of having seen something before is also embedded in this Theory, Deja Vu being seen simply as cases where this breach in time is visible for a short period. This theory is rather esoteric, and is based soley on the experiences reported by the author. But this principle of uncovering layers and layers of time is relevant to hauntology because hauntology is, in a way, the manifestation of cultural Deja Vu, the Eternal repetition of identical moments that by repeating themselves, cease to be identical. like the Droste's Effect. This effect was named after the design on the Droste's Cacao tin, which used an image that eternally reappears within itself. This process is also called "recursion", where something is defined in terms of itself, but by referring to itself, it transforms. In his 2019 book, "Recursivity and Contingency", Yuk Hui defines recursion as "an incessant self-referential movement that integrates contingency into its own functioning in order to realize its' ultimate goal.

Recursion seems to be relevant to many fields such as Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, Art, and so on. As Michael Corbalis points out in "The Recursive Mind, recursion allows us to mentally travel through time, to project ourselves into the future, and the past. If we approach hauntology from the perspective of recursion, it seems that the spatial temporal ambiguity of our current cultural moment is not so paradoxical. It is par for the course. As Simon Reynolds points out in his "Retromania", we are currently witnessing a deceleration of culture compared to the acceleration of Technology. Technological development coincides with cultural stagnation, because technology itself allows us to constantly repeat ourselves, to relentlessly engage with the ghosts of the past. It feels like I've seen this (place) before, but where...?

America, a nation trapped in a flat, technologically constructed, infinitely recursive, Cultural Loop of Un-Time