The Future Is Late, and the Past Won’t Leave
Pieter Lam
Groeningen & Groningen (NL), 2025
It is 2025. The future lingers like a promise no one intends to keep. It waits in some distant warehouse, gathering dust with the unclaimed parcels of time. Meanwhile, culture circles the drain in a kind of quiet hysteria. TikTok exhumes R&B hooks from the 90s, polishing their bones until they shine like fool’s gold. Fashion folds in on itself, seasons collapsing into the memory of seasons. AI plays the part of a conjurer, calling forth ghosts that never had the breath of life in them. We are not remembering. We are recycling. The past has been rendered automatic, packaged, and distributed on the feed of the hour.
Mark Fisher gave this feeling a name: hauntology.
A future deferred, a yesterday that refuses burial. What returns is not memory, nor revival, but a figure warped and flickering, like a corrupted tape trying to sing. It is the hum of an engine that stalls but insists on its
own possibility.
This writing is a search for exits, or perhaps only for fissures. A practice after hauntology. A way of shaping time without mourning lost futures or worshipping dead ones. It imagines time as clay, not clockwork. And in the hands of artists, clay can be broken, remade, spun into
another form.
Begin with the diagnosis. Byung-Chul Han names it hypertemporality. Past, present, and future compressed into a single, trembling now. Algorithms reward only what they know will be clicked. Spotify feeds you yourself. TikTok profits from déjà vu. Kyle Chayka calls it the nostalgia doom loop: the system prefers the familiar because the strange cannot be monetized fast enough. This is not just culture. It is the architecture of time collapsing. A crisis in narrative. Baudrillard’s simulacra step forward as singers, crooning songs that never existed but sound like they always had. Memory itself is outsourced, put on autoplay.
Still, there are cracks. There are always cracks.
Consider those who refuse to repeat the loop. Moor Mother drags the weight of slavery and systemic violence into sonic landscapes that collapse memory into noise, where history refuses to be smoothed into narrative. Tzusing welds industrial grind to East Asian ritual, creating music that feels both ancient and alien, resisting rest. Kode9 speaks of sonic fiction, of building worlds that insist on coherence even if they never existed. These works deny resolution not as emptiness but as opening. Fisher once called it the slow suddenness of the dialectic: the rupture where something uninvited appears. The promise of climax withheld, the silence thick with possibility.
Derrida lingers here. In Specters of Marx he told us that ghosts never leave, that they remain as debts unsettled. Hauntology is not just mood but interruption. And Benjamin’s Angel of History faces backward, staring at wreckage, even as the storm of progress drags him on. Yet Fisher showed us the storm has stilled. The Angel no longer moves. The wreckage piles up, and the air goes stagnant.
But hauntology is not universal. It belongs to those who once trusted in futures promised but not delivered. For many, the past is not a romantic refuge but a wound that still bleeds. Achille Mbembe reminds us that slavery, colonialism, erasure are not styles or atmospheres but the hard architecture of violence. There is no golden age to revive. No retro comfort to settle into.
What emerges instead is not nostalgia, but ignition. In Kampala, collectives like Nyege Nyege set tradition ablaze, metabolizing it into new digital forms that defy both origin and inheritance. The rhythms of Slikback or Otim Alpha are not fusions but mutations, fractal in their forward drive. South Africa’s gqom and amapiano do something similar: their loops are not prisons but engines, propulsive communal time machines that turn repetition into survival. In Bogotá, Mexico City, São Paulo, cumbia and reggaetón stretch themselves into strange electronic architectures, not erasing their roots but bending them until the boundary between past and future collapses. In Karachi and Kolkata, ragas already tied to seasons and hours meet machines, producing clocks that run sideways, spirals of sound that refuse the Western calendar. And across Indigenous traditions, time itself resists linearity: ritual and story do not mark nostalgia but presence, return, continuation. Here, the West’s crisis of futurity makes little sense. For these traditions, time was always plural, relational, alive.
Glissant called this creolization: not mixture, not synthesis, but unpredictable relation. A convergence that disobeys inheritance. Culture without anchor, arriving always from elsewhere, carrying the shimmer of possibility rather than the weight of repetition.
Shanghai’s SVBKVLT complicates this further. Artists like 33EMYBW build with AI, field recordings, and Nüshu, the women’s script, not to preserve but to scramble, displace, unravel. Tradition and futurity collapse until neither can be told apart. Here, Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics clarifies the ground: technology is not neutral, not universal. It is soil born, shaped by cosmology. Different soils yield
different futures.
We might look also to cinema. Apichatpong Weerasethakul stretches time into dreams where ghosts sit beside the living as if nothing were strange. Pedro Costa slows Lisbon into a wound, where the dead never leave but hang in the atmosphere. Both refuse closure. Both deny catharsis. Their films open time instead of ending it.
Theatre tells us something similar. Brecht refused catharsis so the audience would think, not weep. Artaud stripped away comfort, insisting theatre should wound. Boal turned performance into rehearsal for revolution, collapsing the divide between stage and spectator. Each refigured time as confrontation. Each refused resolution as spectacle.
Even fashion has its untimely figures. Rei Kawakubo and Rick Owens refuse both nostalgia and futurism. Their garments are not consolation but disruption, bodies folded into impossible silhouettes, clothes that arrive just off the rhythm of the present. They live outside the churn, untimely enough to remind us that time is not a single beat.
So what does it mean to create beyond hauntology?
It means stepping outside repetition’s comfort. Refusing recognition as currency. Choosing the unresolved over the familiar. It means letting rupture stand in place of reference, letting uncertainty linger in place of closure. The knife cut instead of the chorus. The dialectics of resolution and its refusal, where climax itself is revealed as commodity, the neat closure designed for the algorithm.
Refusal is not lack. Refusal is power.
And to refuse fully, we must abandon the fetish of surface. Nostalgia thrives on surfaces, on images repeated until they pass for truth. But surfaces are traps. Entire industries profit on this. Fashion, influencer culture, architecture, each selling mood without history, image without structure. They dress the ghost but never tell its story. They offer revolt as style, but never as risk. To escape, the altar of aesthetic must fall. Stop polishing the corpse. Stop dressing the mannequin. Build instead from structure, from rhythm, from form. The future will not be found in a moodboard.
Post-hauntological work is not novelty for its own sake. It is timekeeping. Clocks set askew. Confusion before clarity, if clarity comes at all. Time treated as raw material, not schedule.
This could be stories that never resolve, sounds that dodge familiar pattern, clothes that resist seduction. It could be works that never trend, never flatten themselves into ease. In a culture allergic to risk, this refusal
becomes necessity.
The ghosts remain. They always do. They haunt not because they demand remembrance but because they demand resolution. Yet resolution is the trap. The courage lies in withholding it, letting tension breathe, letting silence last. If we stop trying to exorcise them, the ghosts may fall quiet on their own. And in that quiet, something else can begin.
The curtain falls. The lights dim.
The stage is not empty, but waiting.