Permutation do both- a Pessimistic and Hauntological approach can meaningfully rupture current histories and narratives of progress.

The loss of the future is a fundamentally hauntological concern. Since Jacques Derrida coined the concept in the early 1990s as a response to Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the post-communist “end of history”, hauntology has been appropriated in the context of cultural, literary and media studies as a critical attempt at “presenting new ways of thinking about the past, present and future, rather than just the ‘end’ of history and of the twentieth century”.Footnote32 Hauntology is a way to utilise spectres and hauntings as figures that represent the paradoxical and destabilised experience of time and space.Footnote33 For Mark Fisher, who popularised hauntology in the twenty-first century, “[t]he future is always experienced as a haunting: a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production”.Footnote34 Hauntological artworks and media engage with the haunting of the future in an act of mourning. For instance, hauntological electronic music mourns both the failure of the future to materialise “as actuality” and its disappearance of its “effective virtuality”.Footnote35 Hauntology, through the figure of the spectre, deconstructs the “fixity of the temporal” by confronting and infusing the present with “the possibility of alternative pasts and futures”.Footnote36 This is what hauntology and pessimism share. Pessimism, as a philosophy, is an intervention into dominant notions of temporality.Footnote37 Pessimism negates the notion of unchallenged continuous human progress and “attacks the roots of modern political orders by denying their sense of time”.Footnote38 Its negational stance is often considered unconstructive, counterproductive and obstructive. And yet, pessimism’s reflections on time can be an ethical and even political project—it cannot, as Joshua Foa Dienstag has argued, be fully divorced from the notion of progress. Rather, both have emerged as specifically modern ideas. Pessimism is thus the “hidden twin” of progress.Footnote39 In that, pessimism shares sensibilities with the concept of hauntology which considers the present to be disrupted by hauntings from the political and cultural past and potential futures. In hauntology the figure of the spectre becomes a vehicle to think of this temporal disjuncture. Likewise, pessimism haunts contemporary culture as the spectral “doppelgänger” of progress and fundamentally unsettles linear temporalities. While it questions the dominant sense of time, pessimism’s relationship to temporality goes even further in that it is itself always untimely. “No one has time for pessimism”,Footnote40 its complaining and disruptive voice always raised at an inopportune moment. Like untimely critique voiced in times of crisis, pessimism points to the “rupture of temporal continuity”.Footnote41 In its cosmic variant, it also invites views of futures in which humans will be merely ghosts, a spectral memory. But pessimism goes one step further than hauntology in that it always confronts the present with the worst possible alternative future. It is not just that pessimism suggests that the future may be uncertain. It also asserts that whatever the future might bring, it will definitely be the worst possible one—“[f]or pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility”.Footnote42 From a pessimist perspective, the future is already effective in the present, at least as a potentiality that is evoked in feelings towards the future as well as in modes of anticipation such as predictions, whether they are scientific, political, economic, religious or personal, and fears and desires for the future that shape the present.Footnote43 This becomes even more problematic when considering the current crisis of the future. For Mark Fisher, hauntology was the expression of the loss of the future described by Franco Berardi and others—the lack of a utopian vision or even an alternative to the current state of affairs that Fisher called “capitalist realism”.Footnote44 The current cultural logic of the worst is a continuation of this tendency. This, as Amy J. Elias has argued, also has a dramatic effect on the present. “We post-moderns”, she observes, “have lost this sense of progress, but we also lose the present as it disappears not into the future, but into an uneasy mixture of pre- and post-Enlightenment thinking about the relation between past and future time”.Footnote45 Elias’ description of the crisis of the tools of prognosis resonates with the anxious pessimism of Gen Z and Millennials in that it likewise renders humanity as being “dragged forward into a future that seems already in place”.Footnote46 Elias’ assessment of the post-modern attitude towards temporality echoes both hauntological and pessimist concerns. The future, then, is not only something that already takes effect in the present—through pre-emptive or anticipatory action. Rather, the future happens to us. A pessimist perspective is deeply suspicious of the ability to predict or anticipate the future in order to master time or humanity’s existence in time. From a eudaemonic perspective, pessimist thought questions the possibility of happiness as the point of human life. However, pessimism can at least name the sources of human unhappiness, among which the “ontological misalignment between human beings and the world they inhabit”Footnote47 is probably the most central one. In other words, pessimism establishes that the world is not there to please the human beings inhabiting it. Pessimism identifies the “ontological misalignment” in the anthropocentric misconception of a “world-for-us”.Footnote48 The notion of “ontological misalignment” is another aspect that pessimism shares with hauntology. Derrida coined the term as a phonetic play on the homophonous French words “ontologie” and “hantologie”.Footnote49 A hauntological perspective focuses on ontological ruptures in the human experience of history and temporality.