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July 21, 2010
If election campaigns are exercises in marketing then the frame of the marketing in which the content messages are then poured to persuade us to vote for a particular party are undercut by a haunting differance or the trace of the past.
Workchoices for the Coalition is an obvious example. It is a spectre--something that is gone, or dead, but that refuses to be altogether absent; something that is not here, not now, but that continues to stain or contaminate or affect or impinge upon the here and now. Workchoices creepily returns at the very heart of its supposed absence like a zombie arising from its grave:
Hauntology means that the present exists only with respect to the past, and that society after the end of history begin to orient itself towards the "ghost" of the past.The ghost in the sustainable population debate that has emerged from the focus groups is the Whitlam Government in the 1970s, with its emphasis on urban infrastructure and liveable cities.
I emphasis emerging from the focus groups because no way of tackling unliveable cities has been put on the table. There is noting about continual urban expansion into good farmland; nothing about better public transport; nothing about rolling back the car etc. All we have is soothing words
No doubt the idea of hauntology goes back 1848 when Marx and Engels stated “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism” in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, by which they meant the looming threat of communism.
Derrida in his Spectres of Marx addressed the talk of the "new world order" and the "the end of history" in the 1970s and the recurrence of the continual attempt to exorcise the "spirit" represented by Marxism. Neoliberalism cannot exorcise the spectre of Marxism, even as the “end of history” results in the definitive triumph of the market. Derrida, in this text, was trying to describe the conditions of history and society in a post-utopian era: In the post-communist period we are haunted by the lost sense of an imagined future.
In Australian public life Gough Whitlam is a haunting figure: revered, mourned, despised. It is a spectre. Steven Shapiro in The Pinocchio Theory says that a:
specter is something that is not present, not real, not there, but that nonetheless enters into (and disrupts the closure and self-presence of) whatever is present, real, and there. The ghost addresses us, interrogates us with its voice and its gaze; it’s a call from Otherness to which we must respond, even though we are unable to adequately respond.
In terms of the sustainable population/liveable cities debate that is emerging we are haunted by the ghost of Whitlam. The ghost of Whitlam signifies how the present is haunted (as it were) by the future, as well as how it is haunted by the past.
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Adelaide keeps on expanding at its northern and southern ends. There is no sense of an urban boundary at all. The new outer suburbs have poor services -- they are all car dependent.