The time is out of joint…
—Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V
It feels so often, is remarked on so often, that history repeats itself. And while this is reductive—the history we know (largely written by victors), or the history that existed before us in reality—there is a feeling right now that the past will not rest. That we live with ghosts from the past who insist on making space for themselves in the present, refusing to quiet, demanding to continue to be a part of the future.
Or as Jacques Derrida wrote, a hauntology:
I believe that ghosts are a part of the future.
I’ve been trying to sit with that idea, of how ghosts are always a part of the future, that the past is never the past—we rehash, we recondition, we memorialize. We bring the past into the future, a constant, unruly, persistent, companion.
Or as Fredric Jameson writes, perhaps we need to acknowledge that:
…the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us.
We cannot escape the ghosts of places and times that remain unburied, that continue to affect the present. Derrida coined this hauntology—a belief that being and haunting are interwoven: to be is to be haunted.
In the 1990s, following the fall of the Soviet Union—along with the independence of Ukraine and other countries under Soviet control—philosopher Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “the final victory of Western liberalism and with it the end of history.” Fukuyama’s thesis didn’t mean it was the end of time, but that while time will progress, nothing new would be needed, innovated. It was a hubristic, triumphalist message—we figured it out, capitalism and democracy are the only way to live—we did it, it worked.
Derrida was unsurprisingly not a fan of such rhetoric. His science of ghosts demonstrated that, as Marc Fisher writes:
like all ghosts which have yet to be laid to rest, [they] would return, repeatedly, disrupting the present and continuing to remind us of another possible future.
Derrida’s concept is not that the ghosts of the past are something to avoid, but are also gestures towards the future. He thought of this as hauntolgy, a concept where
we can interrogate our relation to the dead, examine the elusive identities of the living, and explore the boundaries between the thought and the unthought.
Hauntology is essentially asking us to pay attention to that which is beyond what is visible. The patterns and grooves that are so easy to fall into because we’ve seen them before. To find a future that is not a future past. To imagine fictions beyond our own reality that can guide us towards something truly new.
Science fiction has long acknowledged this need to break free of the ghosts that haunt our present. It’s a genre that opens space for the unrepresented, for example—to imagine and create new worlds, despite a world that doesn’t offer representation. It’s why many Indigenous artists have created an Indigenized Star Wars and other science fiction—offering space for a different idea of the future.
In a 2020 NYTimes article on the popularity of science fiction by Indigenous writers, Alexandra Alter writes:
Some authors say that sci-fi and fantasy settings allow them to reimagine the Native experience in ways that wouldn’t be possible in realistic fiction. Writing futuristic narratives and building fantasy worlds provide a measure of freedom to tell stories that feel experimental and innovative, and aren’t weighted down by the legacies of genocide and colonialism.
“We’ve already survived an apocalypse,” said [Rebecca] Roanhorse, who is of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo descent.
We need the ghosts of future imaginings to refute the past and allow its ghosts to rest. We need to imagine our way into new worlds. As Walidah Imarisha writes in the introduction to Octavia’s Brood: Science fiction stories from social justice movements:
Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.
In what is often cited as possibly the first science fiction novel, Margaret Cavendish—an English woman and philosopher from the 17th century—wrote a novel that imagined a new world—a blazing world one can reach through a portal at the North Pole, and enter a different, adjoining, contiguous world of animal-human hybrids, with centers of philosophy and science that challenge gender roles.
It’s a wild tale and she was a truly wild personality. Living in the early modern period and dealing with the aftermath of the English Civil War, Cavendish was a daring figure with the privilege of courtly proximity. A shy woman who detested being at court but was pressed to continue to do so by her family, she followed the royal family into exile. She had a reputation for dressing flamboyantly, sometimes in men’s waistcoats and clothing—somehow cripplingly shy and yet determined to be a public superstar. She didn’t believe in editing, wanting to write as much as she possibly could of her thoughts. She was self-taught and supported by an older, loving husband who encouraged her writing and philosophy. Cavendish was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society—where the male assembly members protested her presence (women were not admitted until 1945). She believed that future audiences would view her philosophical and wholly creative works with equanimity, and had conviction in her ideas to write and publish under her own name. As Michael Robbins describes, Cavendish’s
…philosophical and scientific views—regarding such matters as the lives of animals and the materiality of the mind—challenged those of the most renowned thinkers of her day. If she occasioned scandal, perhaps it was because she said what she thought, dressed as she pleased, and insisted on publishing her multifarious writings in her own name (“a provocative step for a woman” in seventeenth-century England, as Richard Holmes notes).
Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own wrote about Cavendish, with rather derisive praise:
There is something noble and Quixotic and high spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm. And although they', those terrible critics who had sneered and jeered at her ever since, as a shy girl, she had not dared look her tormentors in the face at Court, continued to mock, few of her critics, after all had the wit to trouble about the nature of the universe, or cared a straw for the sufferings of the hunted hare. . .
In her preface to The Blazing World Cavendish writes:
I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which is the cause, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavour to be Margaret the First.
The Blazing World is a fascinating read. It mixes imaginative, otherworldly fiction with utopia, science, philosophy, and reason. Emily Lord Fransee writes a synopsis that is hard to match:
It is the middle of the seventeenth century and a Bear-man is helping an empress attempt to examine a whale through a microscope. After this task is found to be impossible, a group of Worm-men explain how creatures can exist without blood and how cheese turns to maggots. In her turn, the empress scolds an assembly of Ape- and Lice-men for their pursuit of tedious and irrelevant knowledge, such as the true weight of air, and commands they instead get busy with “such Experiments as may be beneficial to the publick”. Armed with such knowledge of the natural world and equipped with the resources of her vast dominions, she then sends flocks of Bird-men and navies of Fish-men to a parallel planet to make war on and conquer her many enemies.
In a plot that is twisting and wholly imaginative, the story tells the journey of a young woman who is kidnapped from her homeland but escapes to arrive in a new and mysterious land populated by human-animal hybrids. There are bear-men, worm-men, fox-men, green-men, fish-men, and lice-men, along with many others. She is made empress and she establishes societies of natural philosophy, funds theater and the arts, and destroys enemies with fury.
The empress also communes with spirit beings and is determined to write her own cabbala; in a very meta-fiction turn, the empress summons Cavendish herself to be her scribal companion, and the two authors become close friends within the Blazing world. When Cavendish wishes for a world of her own, they determine that a ‘terrestrial realm’ would be insufficient—that the best way is for Cavendish to write her own celestial world, with immaterial beings. In this way, the empress shows her that anyone can make “what World you please”—one without restrictions on gender and race, for instance.
The narrative is most certainly based on the imperial ‘explorations’ that were occurring around the world at the time, and it’s certainly supporting monarchism. But what makes her vision so compelling is how it deconstructs issues of gender and race and their relationship in a patriarchal society that proclaims to follow reason. Cavendish imagined a world that was contiguous, but independent—in community, but not subsumed or ruled by another.
Cavendish wrote of other worlds because she could not reconcile her experience of the world—the ridiculous politics of court, of war, of exile—and that of the mind.
She was obsessed with the scientific principles and discoveries that were occurring with the invention of telescopes and microscopes, of atomism and worlds within worlds—and above all of reason as a means to understand what cannot be seen. She argued that humans are not the only animals to have reason, and therefore should never be considered above animals. She used these ideas of atomism as a discourse to understand social and political conflict—but she could not escape the conclusion that the mind and world were in conflict. Her writing, as Anna Battigelli writes:
…reflects Cavendish’s lifelong attention to the incongruity between ideals and reality, between the worlds of her mind and the conflicting external world.
Like Emily Dickinson centuries later, Cavendish withdrew from society to live an interior life. She returned to England but never again to court, choosing to be at home so that she could write, to withdraw from a world that she could only make sense of if she had contiguous worlds of the mind for balance. Battigelli writes:
Yet her retirement from the world was, due to her prolific publishing career, very public; in fact, she explored interiority more openly and more publicly than any other writer of her time. Writing itself had become her chief link with the world, transforming her private experience into publicly shared experience. Within her texts, interiority is presented as a refuge, a space in which ideas could be pursued freely and safely. Thus, although she was no longer banished [in exile], after 1660 she presents herself as inhabiting an exclusively textual world, one that allowed her to sustain the ‘strange enchantment’ of living both in the world and out of it.
In the past two years, we’ve retreated, we’ve watched, we’ve imagined. I keep thinking that we’ve watched the hauntings of so many ghosts that society has never allowed to rest, never fully listened to. We imagine worlds beyond the world we live in so that we can find a different way to live, allowing the ghosts of the past to finally rest. Cavendish argued this too—to imagine blazing worlds, worlds that are not afraid to burn and release that which is haunting us, to give ash and heat to the seeds that grow only after the scour of fire.
To live both in the world and out of it, and in the balance between imagining something, someday, that might be an unhaunted future.
I believe deeply in this idea of ghosts, of haunting. For me it manifests most noticeably with American border policy, the efforts we make to keep people OUT who existed culturally before there was a border, when the land that makes up a huge chunk of our current nation was just their HOME. That feeling doesn't leave with arbitrary lines and the passing of a mere century or two. It echoes for me in my people and where we come and I am often haunted by the spirits of those whose stories have not been told.
Also, I can't hear the word "utopia" and not think of this wonderful Eduardo Galeano quote:
"She’s on the horizon ... I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking."
One more thing, speaking of Natives and Star Wars, I have this print hanging on the wall next to my desk in my Missoula lair:
https://stoodis.com/product/darth-vaders-teeth-hey-ya/
Wonderful work as ever, my friend.