nawr 003 autumn 2020

ISSUE NO 3 | AUTUMN 2020

n awr what’s recurring?

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CONTENTS 4

PHILOSOPHY

‘SOME FACTS JOHNNY DEPP SHOULD KNOW BEFORE MOVING TO WALES’ Bernard Pearson

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SELECTED PAINTINGS Joanne Smith

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‘IN THE HANDS OF ATROPOS’ Poppy Jennings

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‘LATHER, RINSE, REPEAT’ Martha O’Brien

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SELECTED FILM STILLS Radha Patel

PHOTOGRAPHY/ART

‘THE VEIL’ Bernard Pearson

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POETRY

SELECTED IMAGES 16 Alex Stevens BETH SY’N DIGWYDD?: 20 Millie Bethel

SELECTED ARTWORK 22 Rachel Hughes

‘DIGITAL DEATH’ 28 Rosie Couch

‘RECAPITULATION’ 30 Chloe Erin

‘THE RELICS’ 31 Molly Harcombe

‘A SPECTRAL 32 UNIVERSALITY’ Jamie Davies

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EDITOR’S LETTER Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time.

- Jacques Derrida

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ere we are again – a new issue, a new theme! We can hardly believe that we have already reached our third release of nawr. Considering that the months of August to October are a time of transition for many of us, we have been so thrilled with the variety and quality of submissions we have received, and that by issue three we are still going strong.

The theme for this issue came from the feeling that we’ve been here before (if ‘here’ is a place that we can identify as a singularity, anyway). If these times are unique and exceptional, why does it all feel very familiar? Protests for civil rights; anger at government and welfare systems; disregard for the lives of asylum seekers. And at the same time as these moments of history appear to be repeating themselves, we, on a micro level, are repeating ourselves every day. We experience these ‘unprecedented’ circumstances as mundane, cyclical patterns of living. We come back to the same routines, the same meals, the same people, the same conversations, the same headlines. It may be that our awareness of our living through history so acutely attunes us to history’s repetitions; but as Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, focused on repeats, returns, and revenants shows us, recurrence is also about learning to live with ‘ghosts’. Thinking about repetition means thinking about things, people and feelings that are both here and not here, past and present, not yet and no longer, known and unknown.

It is with these ideas in mind that our co-editor Jamie Davies has interviewed Dr. Peter Sedgwick about Eternal Recurrence, history, and how we can concepualise the past and the present. Peter is a Reader at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. He specialises in Critical Theory, Visual Culture, and Modern European Philosophy. They discuss how it is important to understand history as a constant flux, and that out of this flux emerges our sense of time. For this issue, the interview will be released as a separate insert in the near future.

The submissions in this issue address both the ‘first-time-ness’ and the ‘seen-again-ness’ of repetition.

Bernard Pearson’s poems ‘The Veil’ and ‘Some Facts Johnny Depp Should Know Before Moving to Wales’ brilliantly capture a sense of inheritance and myth, exploring liminal spaces between past and present, and memory and forgetfulness. Rosie Couch’s ‘Digital Death’ explores how we can live beyond death - and how what we hold on to after death enables death to return again, and again. The visual art in this issue, too, explores the theme in allegorical and artistic fashion. The cover of this issue by Rachel Hughes (see more on Rachel’s work on p.28), who has repurposed old images to make new ones, speaks so richly to how repetitions can accumulate meaning. We hope that readers of nawr find the submissions in this issue as vibrant and thought-provoking as we have.

We would also like to take this opportunity to properly introduce the newest permanent member of our team, Millie Bethel, who has come on board as a permanent part of the nawr team as the magazine’s ‘Culture Writer’. Find Millie’s piece on the spectrality of Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James’s photography series, It’s Called Ffasiwn. As ever, thank you to Anja Quinn for her excellent and tireless work with nawr’s design.

Finally, in these difficult times, nawr remains committed not just to showcasing and providing a space for Welsh and Wales-based creatives, but also to combatting through art the blatant disregard that our current government displays towards the marginalised, the dispossessed and the creative sector.

Cariad,

Anna, Jamie, Martha and Puck Team nawr x

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The Veil In Wales one is never far from The thin place, translucent with Love and pain, that beaded curtain Between an entwined couple And the tattooist ’s parlour.

Oh they talk about The mountains and the singing, And the old preacher castigating Everyone, including God. But no, the thin place is The membrane between Memory and forgetfulness, A place where we all sleep, With our eyes closed and our Hearts open.

Bernard Pearson

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Willy Wonka was based on a certain Curly Whirly Watkins Who sold secrets from The back of a van in New Tredegar when It was just a baby.

Don Juan was in fact, a little dap of a man On a reserved Occupation During our fathers war Keeping the home Fires burning while The boys were in France.

He kept a stuffed ferret In a Victorian specimen Bell jar and washed his smalls in Drift, so after the war, no one would guess what he’d been Getting down to.

Edward Scissorhands was in truth A lad from Tregarron Renowned for in particular, the occasional spear tackle who would have played fly half For Wales save for The fact that he had two left feet.

Some Facts Johnny Depp Should Know Before Moving To Wales

Finally it is a little known fact That a certain Public Enemy modelled himself on The Reverend Caleb Prosser Williams The most dangerous man in Gorseinon, So Johnny Bach. you should feel right At home.

Bernard Pearson

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JOANNE SMITH Selected Paintings Joanne Smith’s work emanates from her emotional connection with flowers but specifically focuses on the exploration between femininity and human affection. Flowers are often viewed collectively, when they are viewed as a singular, they emulate character and become vulnerable, this unveiled quality is captured in her work.

“The flowers I paint are focused on the individual or the relationship between two individuals. Through engagement with the materials I connect with the twists and turns of petals to describe connections and feminine beauty. Memories and life experiences are described in my work through the use of composition and the application of paint. Drips of paint suspended in time work in harmony with watery ink and blocks of vibrant oil paint to communicate the layers of emotions I have navigated through to reach hope. Like many men and women, I have overcome the affliction of domestic abuse. This experience is evident in recent works through the language of mixed media. Domestic abuse is a vexing experience; however, I wish to describe my experience as a celebration of how I have overcome hardship to become a confident woman and mother.”

Joanne enforces the message of positive femininity through her vibrant works. Joanne studied BA (Hons) Fine Art at the Cardiff School of Art and Design where she received the UWIC Purchase Prize in 2006. In 2012 she completed her PGCE at the University of South Wales and now enjoys her position as Art Lecturer at Merthyr Tydfil College.

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I See You Mixed Media

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We All Bleed The Same Mixed Media

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Please Don’t Leave Me Mixed Media

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In The Hands Of Atropos

my soul is balanced between the blades between the fingers between the sisters whose hands peck like ravens ’ beaks that pluck the spoils of fallen threads to catch the souls that fall between the blades between the fingers between the hands of three sisters that measure the worth of we poor souls whose lives exist in lengths of ribbon or thread or string that catch on the broken nails on shaking fingers on reckless hands of wrinkled wrists that roll with the criss-cross of cat’s cradle to twine our trembling souls between the blades between the knuckles between the crooks of fingers on hands on wrists entangled by the fragile souls that exist in strands of thread dyed red by souls snipped between the blades between hands of the careless crones who control our hearts and lungs and minds like a game of Jacob’s Ladder pulled tight—too tight—between the chipped nails of crooked fingers of jerked hands and tangled wrists holding the trembling blades—slipping blades— that knick the red thread of that one soul caught between the reckless hands between

Poppy Jennings, 23, Cardiff

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Lather, Rinse, Repeat

so it ’s strange that my brain decides to speak louder a second time, a third and a fourth, like one-time-two-time pain’s not enough

(lather, rinse, repeat) Having forgotten my speaker in the bathroom, I take to reading the back of shampoo bottles, with their instruction to

lather, rinse, repeat If it was my job to write messages on the backs of bottles, I think I would write something that sounds a bit better than

lather, rinse, repeat especially since, when I think of all the times I ’ ve washed my hair in the morning, I ’ m not sure I ’ ve ever felt compelled to

lather, rinse, repeat because, mostly, once is enough, for me.

I once tried a chilli, to see what it was like, had a throat on fire and hot red

(lather, rinse, repeat) cheeks, and I said, just once will be alright,

There are certain signals, maybe a chill in the air, rain in puddles on orange-glow nights, and I ’ m right back there, even as I

lather, rinse, repeat if those memories were flavours I ’d spit them out and say, once was enough, for me, though it seems, quite like shampoo, I ’ m bound to

lather rinse repeat and work them in, let the suds rush over my nerves as I try to make sense of things senseless still, try to undo feeling, to

lather rinse repeat but some bumps in the road, it seems, are made to be driven over twice. I put my feelings to one side, lean back, and decide to

lather rinse repeat

and one time was fine for pickled egg, which I spat into a napkin immediately

Martha O’Brien, 22 , Cardiff (lather, rinse, repeat)

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RADHA PATEL Short Film Stills Radha Patel is a Cardiff based / Wales born writer, reviewer and artist whose work intersects across colonialism, nature, religion and the future. She enjoys writing as a way to challenge historical perceptions of right / wrong / this happened / that happened and has been published in several journals and anthologies including Where I’m Coming From, The Soap Box Press, 3am Magazine, Amber Flora Zine, The Cardiff Review (and many more!) and has also exhibited work at g39 and Shift Gallery.

There is a small town on the Planet Lionel’s Star, whose name loosely translates to ‘friends, life is literally sacred’. When the war broke out, many neighbouring villages were destroyed.

But this one– according to local legends – not only survived the violence but surpassed it by taking apart their buildings, and burying each piece in the embrace of the brave, brave soil.

Then they set off to fight.

Every year, the town performs a ritual to mark their victory by taking apart their town, resting it in the soil and then building it back up again.

The ceremony’s name loosely translates to: ‘I remember you. You are alive by rehearsal’

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You can view Radha’s short film in full on our YouTube channel: Nawr Magazine.

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ALEX STEVENS Selected Artwork Alex Stevens is a mixed media artist living in Cardiff. His work lurks at the crossroads of science and magic; combining and recontextualizing anatomical, zoological and mystical imagery as a positive act of re-enchantment.

He can be found on twitter @AbjectObjects

Moths

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Shells

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Bodies

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Rocks

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BETH SY’N DIGWYDD?: I’ll be there now... in a minute Millie Bethel, nawr Culture Writer, 22, Tredegar can remember the hype and excitement when Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James began releasing their It’s Called Ffasiwn series. Based in various locations around the Welsh coalfield Valleys, It’s Called Ffasiwn portrays local youth club girls in their handpicked costumes against the backdrop of these post-industrial communities.

Combining documentary, landscape and fashion photography, these were images that dared you to take a closer look. They were different than anything I’d ever seen before; challenging my expectations and sparking my curiosity.

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The media gave It’s Called Ffasiwn a lot of attention, too. Suddenly the places I had always known were being featured in the likes of Vogue and i-D magazine. Lots of terms were being attached to these pictures – ‘bleak fabulous’, ‘scattered towns’ and ‘teeming with promise’, to name a few. And mostly, I agree, the photos do give connotations of all these things. But I think when you’re from a place, it’s always going to be a bit more complex than just saying we’re bleak and fabulous.

Take the Valentines Disco Party photo, for example.

The Gurnos Social Club is made cinematic as its red leather seats and felt-topped stools are given some unlikely companions: three young girls dressed in red – ruffles, leather, satin, bouffant hair and high-heeled boots; the full works. To their left a regular sits. His hands are clasped across his chest and he looks onwards with a glazed expression that doesn’t quite reach you. The girls, though, look out at you markedly and their gaze is loaded with interrogation. They seem to say ‘well, what now then?’, asking you to question your own role as you look onto this common scene of

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the Welsh working-men’s club. The answer is of course unknown and unattainable – and its pause lingers in the air beside the displaced subjects in the photo.

It’s this idea of the unattainable that gives It’s Called Ffasiwn that extra edge – something that I can connect to on a personal level; beyond whatever Vogue might have to say about where I live. The girls in Schneidermann and James’s images illustrate this point perfectly because they are completely unreachable as figures. They are at once present, and past, and maybe even a little futuristic. They are spectres in the composition; existing somewhere between the clock hands that give us structure. Just like the much loved Welsh expression ‘I’ll be there now in a minute”, they are caught in a conundrum of tenses.

Schneidermann and James’s mixing of styles further adds to this tension. The bright, colourful, and elaborate costumes in each photo purposely clash with the pebble dash, roaring hills, grey skies

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they are at once present, and past, and maybe even a little futuristic. they are spectres in the composition; existing somewhere between the clock hands that give us structure.

and boarded up houses. We are given two different versions of the Wales: one of landscape and one of glamour. Think of combining How Green Was My Valley with Shirley Bassey’s Diamonds are forever or Cerys Matthews’ full satin power suit in the Road Rage music video. A bit weird right? It’s Called Ffasiwn’s combination of landscape and glamour is of course far more subtle. We are presented with echoes of fashion from bygone eras alongside the elements of editorial, performance and documentary photography. These fine-drawn contradictions capture the landscape and its figures in a way that is difficult to read and analyse. We are still presented with two interpretations of Wales but the delicacy with which they are portrayed only adds to the restlessness within the photos. As each composition bends the rules; zig-zagging styles, times, tenses, ideas and eras, we are left suspended between two layers – held in the exact place where something just doesn’t sit quite right. After all, that’s what photography does I suppose. Stops time, captures a moment.

And maybe that’s why these images can’t offer the full promise of change and hope that they begin to glimpse at for our ‘bleak fabulous’ area.

Our moment is not clear cut because as valleys towns we are full of contradictions. We fight against whilst simultaneously clinging to the structures that have kept us going. Across many of our communities, old ways of life are not yet past and new ones are not yet present because we rely on what is comfortable and known to us. So maybe Schneidermann and James are out to make us feel a bit uneasy. Their photographs sum up perfectly our equidistant steps forward and standing still; our ability to be two things at once: to overlap, contradict, stay comfy and comply. Each image confronts us with our own uncertainty. Our inability to flow freely from past cycles and the spectres this history can form. Maybe best of all, they prove that we should stop to consider our present moment… even if it is a little hard to read.

Frills

Slinky Shine

Dragon

California Ebbw

Trees and Rhinestones

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RACHEL HUGHES Selected Artwork Rachel Hughes is a paper and digital collage artist who explores the images we see as a part of the everyday, harmonising the familiar with the surreal while constructing immersive worlds in living spaces and serine landscapes. She is fascinated by how collage can be used as a tool to understand our own reality in the age of over saturation and primarily use contemporary and vintage magazines. By repurposing these, she keeps the original images while stretching their function and narrative, playing with their rich colours, textures and manipulating scale and perspective.

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Room With A View

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Moving In

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Moving To A New World

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Reaching New Heights

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Getaway Trip

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Digital Death

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here’s a saying, and it goes something along the lines of ‘you die twice: first when you stop breathing, and second when somebody says your name for the last time’.

I’ve tried to see who said these words first. And I wasn’t expecting to have to refer to Macklemore or Banksy in a piece of writing about my dead mother, but there we are.

Their exact words are variations on the theme, but the crux is the same: death is figured as not just the end of the animate body, but the end of voice, of memory. Naturally, I was able to find out who said what, and when, by tapping a few keys and pressing a button, the internet throwing up results from a storage of information too vast to wrap my head around. Twenty-first century death has another step, I think. Maybe you die again when your Facebook account is deactivated, or your text message threads are pushed to the bottom of inboxes, or when new phones are bought and old numbers aren’t transferred.

On the evening of the day that I was told that my mum was going to die, returning from the clammy hospital weary and struck numb, I created a new email address and Dropbox account. An odd reaction, perhaps, but borne from an anxious and necessary desire to protect the glimpses of her held within the fragile confines of my iPhone. The hilarious (and surprisingly many) pictures of her when she tinted her eyebrows a shade too dark; a video from the Christmas before where she leans in, drunk, about to ask me a question; text messages describing a man in a cagoule and a half-overheard conversation. Looking through her handbag for reading glasses to take to the hospice, I found scraps of handwritten notes, and wanted to keep them, too. Their scrawled content was nothing to do with me, but as an act it was akin to the gathering of images and text and videos. The need to save every trace, like a grief-stricken magpie. I realised when I came back to Cardiff that I have no physical photographs of my mum. She was such a constant before, always a phone call away, so I didn’t need any tangible reminders. Now I have objects – jewellery, a nightdress she wore when I was a child, a book or two – but the fragility of their existence worries

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me more than the potential unexpected wiping of my digital memory. Is it safer to hold your love in that which can be broken, taken, and lost, or that which floats in the ether, precarious and insubstantial?

Recently, talking to my brother, I remembered how, as teenagers, he and I used to record silly songs to make each other laugh. They were uploaded to a website, he reminded me. I couldn’t find the specific songs that we remembered, but, listening to the close of one bizarre file, something found me. Her. The recording picked up the sound of my mum, walking into the room, calling my name. Her voice, my name. The file was just over seven years old, held within a half-forgotten memory, a forgotten account, a forgotten website. All that time, clawing for traces, signs, and then this: an unceremonious return, as I stood in my kitchen thinking about cooking dinner. Delight and despair feel so separate, look so differently when imagined in colour, light, sound. But they can also be impossibly close, their edges kissing, overlapping. I’ve listened to the recording a couple of times now. Sometimes, I wonder about what she said next, and the past is suspended ahead of me. What happens to you when your mum says your name for the last time? Are you still her daughter? Or something else? When she was alive, I could picture what she might be doing, according to the time of day. She might be making a call for work, or cleaning, or driving, or sitting in the garden with a glass of wine. Now, I can’t pin her down to a time or a place – a feeling exaggerated by the atemporality of the traces of her, persistent in their (re)emergence.

I don’t think that this inability to situate her is necessarily another loss. There’s a Mount Eerie song called ‘Seaweed’, from the album A Crow Looked at Me, written after and about the death of the artist Phil Elverum’s wife. In ‘Seaweed’, Elverum describes visiting the place where he and his wife were going to build a house, in order to spread her ashes.He asks: ‘I can’t remember, were you into Canada geese? Is it significant, these hundreds on the beach?’. We look for signs of presence everywhere; we can’t help ourselves. The song ends with an admittance: ‘I don’t think of that dust as you / You are the sunset’. When I first listened to this song, I found the final line to be too broad a stroke. Where are the particularities of the person that you’ve lost in such a sweeping summary? As days have passed, with time operating in all its peculiarity, the conclusion feels apposite. Details of my mum visit – whenever they choose to, it seems – but she is somehow more vivid, now that she isn’t fixed to the actuality of body, possessions, voice. All around, but also threaded through my thoughts, my gestures, actions. It would be impossible to disentangle myself from them; I wouldn’t want to. These threads can’t be broken, taken, lost.

Rosie Couch, 25, Cardiff

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recapitulation “ b ut haven’ t you seen that before like three times already? ” well actually, my love, I ’ ve watched it at least once a year since 2012 if we are being honest, if you must know, but why should i explain to you that change is fucking scary? and yeah we’ r e on about a TV show, but also how unsafe i feel when it ’s all unheimlich, wavy, not the same, and whether that ’s our plans for saturday, the drink i want at coffee shops, where i’ m sleeping, what i like to watch in my spare time, because i find it comforting to know just how it goes, what happens, why it happens, will it happen? will it happen? will it happen if i will it to? if time is an illusion then why are we so reluctant to waste it, to lose it, to use it how we please? one day we’ l l pay for seconds, i bet, so don’ t fret yourself on how i choose to spend mine, focus on your own pastimes, futures, hours, fuck it, just have a massive glass of wine

Chloe Erin / Cardiff

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THE RELICS Molly Harcombe The man spends his time building a giant slingshot. An asteroid is coming within close distance of the Earth. The asteroid is loved by the people because it brings with it strange relics. The people love the relics, they use them to learn about their past. With careful timing and precision, the man flings himself up onto the asteroid as it shoots past.

The impact of the man as he collides with the asteroid knocks it off-course. It will never return to Earth again. The man, unaware, lives out his life on the asteroid.

He studies the relics, he knows them better than anyone. He looks forward to returning to his country as a great man. As he examines the relics, he notices inconsistencies. Some look old, but are in fact new. Some look new, but are ancient.

Some are censored and some are destroyed. One is made of rock, one is made of plastic. He doesn’t know what is real and what is fake. He doesn’t understand. He is paralysed.

What’s Left Behind? (2020) Plaster, 19 x 25 x 4 cm

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A A Spectral Spectral

Universality Universality

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lways already inscribed in the logic of the Universal is the Particular. The Universal, or Universality, is an all-encompassing meta-narrative. It is that which seeks to explain itself without recourse to a single aspect of itself. The Particular, in contrast, is the singular; it is the discrete and the individual. Particularity is almost always the disavowed foundation to all discourses and declarations pretending to Universality. In this sense, the Universal is only the Universal insofar as the Particular exists to uphold it. But equally, the Particular is only the Particular in virtue of the Universal. In other words, neither the Universal nor the Particular could exist without the other.

Therefore, any ideology or doctrine that claims Universality is necessarily always already haunted by the fact that it is simply one expression of a certain Particularity. This means that its contingency and its history can always be revealed to undermine its claims to true Universality. It also means, however, that any radical social critique or movement, by being a Particular, can strive and aspire for Universality.

It is precisely this logic, this conception of the Universal and the Particular, which I would argue grants any radical social critique or movement its emancipatory potential beyond its immediate spatial and temporal dimensions. In fact, attempts to collapse this distinction or to circumvent it by disavowing one aspect of the contradiction, lead on the one hand to potential tyranny, and on the other, isolation. There is thus a contradictory movement at work in both Universality and Particularity which must be preserved.

A key dimension and articulation of this contradictory process is History. History, a spatial and temporal assemblage, encapsulates this contradiction in its every movement; in its every repeated, recurring, and reiterated movement. History is a recurring assemblage that in its very movement generates temporality.

That is, temporality-as-flux emerges out of the movement of History which instantiates Time itself.

Furthermore, ‘History’ presupposes both the Universal category of ‘History’ as an object of study and experience, and the Particular moments that make it up to which it is irreducible.

History, therefore, is an essential contradiction. The generation of temporality out of recurrence, out of flux, means that the static linearity of traditional Universal discourses are inherently unstable. It also means that the very definitions and perimeters we set on temporality, our cartographical pointers of past, present, and future, are chaotic attempts to fix and localise a contradiction which always surpasses any encapsulation. The localised finitude of the term attests to the very way in which it will always fail to properly navigate Time and History.

The contradiction inherent, then, in the Universal and the Particular, is a repeated and diachronic contradiction, essential to the movement of History itself. When we discuss the temporal, therefore,

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we are discussing this contradiction. We are discussing the recurrent haunting upon which History and Universality are predicated, but also the as-yet untapped emancipatory potential of Universality, when properly understood as a fluctuating contradiction. This potential is the possibility for any Particularity to aspire to and achieve Universality, thus overcoming its own spatial and temporal dimensions.

History, in this sense, is always already haunted. It is haunted by Universality, and therefore by the Particular the Universal always tries to eradicate in order to hold itself up. Discussions of the Universal in recent years have, rightfully so, been wary of uncritically reclaiming the concept of Universality. This is because historically the concept of Universality has consistently been invoked to justify horror after horror in World History. From the 16th century onwards, North-western Europe specifically (and North America from the 17th and 18th centuries) used the disguise of Universality and a Civilising Mission to rationalise and validate their genocidal conquests.

But as the very concept of Universality has as its repeatedly disavowed origins the corollary notion of Particularity, and as this disavowal can be recycled in the name of a more ethical and inclusive Universality, then perhaps it is both possible and necessary to reclaim this concept from the hegemony of genocidal justification. An understanding of the Universal, which is essentially aware of the Particular always already haunting it, is the key idea which can tie together movements, link up struggles, and allow a truly radical emancipatory politics to transcend its spatial and temporal boundaries.

To fully reclaim Universality, then, we need a conceptual counterpart as powerful and relevant. This power is found in the concept of the ‘specter’. The specter, an idea theorised and popularised by Jacques Derrida, is that which has been forcibly left out of narratives, of histories, and of politics, but which always returns to haunt them precisely by founding them; it returns insofar as it never left.

The specter can also be repurposed as the particular that haunts the Universal. It is the specter which initiates what Derrida termed Hauntology. Hauntology is a study that seeks to understand the yearning for, and inherent within, ontology. What this means is that ontology (which is basically concerned with discovering the building blocks of existence; how does the world, and all in it, fit together) is simply a craving for order and structure, where there is none. We crave ontology so as to have order, and ontology has a fundamental craving within it as its own guiding principle. Hauntology, therefore, stresses that any ontology is always already haunted by the specter. If ontology is the discipline that seeks to locate the essential lack in human existence to fill that lack, hauntology locates the lack in order to bring it to the fore.

Hauntology matches perfectly with the revised concept of Universality and Particularity we have been discussing. This revised concept pays especial attention to the inherent contradiction between Universality and Particularity, the repetition involved in the concepts of haunting and the specter, and the emancipatory potential of this contradiction. In this way, it is a form of hauntology, because hauntology locates its starting point as the essential remainder, the irreducible trace of the Particular left in any Universal. Hauntology recognises the contradiction, and rather than collapse either side, pushes that contradiction, bending it to breaking point. In doing so, neither the Universal nor the Particular escape unscathed from their encounter.

They become inextricable with the advent of Hauntology.

Philosophically, the chaos of temporality and history, and the necessary conceptual inability to ever properly theorise or understand temporality and history, finds its counterpart in the contradiction between Universality and Particularity. Furthermore, as a concept, the contradiction between Universality and Particularity opens up the repeated and recurring disavowal of the spectral, and the way that the spectral then essentially haunts dominant narratives. It is for this reason that it is essential to re-theorise and reclaim the efficacy of the concept, as without it neither the Particular nor the Universal have the political and theoretical efficacy they desperately need.

Jamie Davies, 22, Cardiff/Bristol

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Thank you so much to all our readers and contributers for supporting nawr and Welsh art throughout these past months. Whilst lockdown has been incredibly challenging, the community of language and creativity that everyone who engages with nawr has developed is incredibly inspiring.

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Thanks for reading!

Cariad, Team nawr x

In our forthcoming interview co-editor Jamie Davies speaks to Dr. Peter Sedgwick about Friedrich Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, Sigmund Freud’s Return of the Repressed and the efficacy of these concepts as frameworks for understanding both the past and the present. They ask, primarily, is the present:

Recurrence of the Same or Return of the Repressed?

Coming Soon...

Rachel Hughes Edited by Anna Bland, Jamie Davies, Martha O’Brien and Puck Stagg. Designed by Anja Quinn.

All work is copyrighted to the author or artist. Š nawr mag 2020 www.nawrmag.wordpress.com | @nawrmag