Coverley — Hauntology
Merlin Coverley, Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past (Oldcastle Books, 2020)
The Argument
Hauntology — a term coined by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993) as a pun on “ontology” — is the condition of being haunted by futures that never arrived. Coverley traces the concept from Derrida through its development by Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds, and others into a broader cultural theory about lost possibilities.
Derrida’s original argument: after the fall of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history” — liberal capitalism had won, no alternatives remained. Derrida countered that Marx’s ghost had not been laid to rest. The promises of emancipation, justice, and collective life that the communist project carried — however badly it realized them — persist as specters. They haunt the present precisely because they were never fulfilled. History does not end. It leaves ghosts.
Fisher extended hauntology into cultural criticism: the persistent sense that the futures imagined in the mid-20th century (social democracy, space exploration, collective ownership, public luxury) were foreclosed rather than outcompeted. We live in their absence. The present feels like a cancellation of the future rather than its arrival. This isn’t nostalgia — nostalgia mourns a past that existed. Hauntology mourns a future that should have existed but was prevented.
The Lost Futures
The specific futures that haunt the present include:
- The social-democratic settlement — public housing, universal healthcare, collective provision, the welfare state as the floor of dignified life. Dismantled by neoliberal policy, not by its own failure.
- The commons — shared land, shared resources, shared governance. Enclosed by primitive accumulation (Federici) and never reconstituted.
- Cooperative and mutualist economics — worker ownership, cooperative housing, credit unions, mutual aid societies. Marginalized by corporate capitalism, demutualized, absorbed.
- The public realm — public parks, libraries, squares, infrastructure built for collective use rather than private profit. Privatized, defunded, enclosed.
These are not fantasies. They existed, or were in the process of being built, and were destroyed. The hauntological sensibility insists on remembering that they were possible — that the present arrangement is not the only one that could have emerged from the past.
Relevance to the Project
The Worn Path is a hauntological project in the most literal sense. It is trying to give a body to a ghost — the ghost of the commons, the ghost of cooperative housing, the ghost of the village that modernity destroyed.
The CLT ground lease reconstitutes the enclosed commons. The cooperative governance revives mutual self-determination. The library economy rebuilds the shared infrastructure of pre-enclosure communal life. The irreducible minimum restores the floor that the welfare state provided and neoliberalism removed.
This is not nostalgia. The project is not trying to recreate the past. It’s trying to realize a future that was foreclosed — to take the unrealized possibilities and build them with contemporary tools (legal structures, cooperative finance, community land trusts) in a contemporary context (Durham, NC, 2020s).
The hauntological frame also provides the answer to “why is this so hard?” The project is building against the grain of a history that systematically destroyed the very things it’s trying to create. Every obstacle — zoning designed for car-dependent sprawl, financing designed for speculative housing, cultural assumptions about homeownership as wealth-building — is the residue of that destruction. The ghosts explain the obstacles.
Fisher’s version is the most useful for the manifesto’s voice: the sense that the present is a narrowing of possibility, not an expansion. That the “freedom” of the market is actually a reduction of options — you can choose between products but you can’t choose outside the market. The project offers a genuine choice: a different way to organize shelter and community. That’s what makes it politically significant, not just practically useful.