Jacques Derrida coined the term hauntology in his book Specters of Marx. The term was birthed in a discussion of the notion that the fall of the Soviet Union meant the death of communism. Derrida posited however, that, “if communism has always been spectral, what does it mean to say that it is now dead?” Derrida’s case was that the post-marxist, capitalist world would forever be haunted by Marx’s wraith.
His point was that it is irrelevant whether capitalism “won” with the fall of the Soviet Union, because we as human beings can no longer exist without knowing the possibilities of Marxism. This idea can be abstracted into a more general case, expressed as “always-already”. Always-already encompasses the phenomenon wherein one cannot “unknow” a concept, that the knowing of such a concept demarcates a diametrical before and after which will never exist contemporaneously. It’s a punctuation in existence. Think of a favorite book which you compare all books to: Going back to a time before you read this book is impossible, you even compare books you read before this one to this book. It becomes a scale on which you measure every literary encounter and is heretofore deeply entangled in your existence–there’s no going back.
Over the course of the last year, I’ve dipped my toes in the Haskell pool while simultaneously exploring its algebraic roots in type and category theory. It was the latest stop in my what I thought was an interminable mission of curiosity. This trek’s penultimate stop was an interest in compilers, which undoubtably paved the way to this mathematical interest. I met with a compiler team at work and expressed an interest in their work, and mentioned my studies: I’d been given a book which was touted as the canonical text in learning about compilers, which, of course, they told me was utterly irrelevant. But the truth was and is, that “working on compilers” is not what I was looking for; it was instead a misguided foray into something much more general.
Fast-forward to a few months later, I’m sitting in an interview and
having an impassioned discussion about a futile attempt to formalize
something at work using Haskell’s Arrow
typeclass, and how, frankly, hard it
was to even get its requisites in order, namely,
Category.
During the interview, my interviewer said to me (a paraphrasing), “I was like you. That’s how I ended up here: I was on a constant search for rigor.”
My head spun. He’d cut down to the brass tacks of my own milieu and had a line of sight to a destination which hadn’t yet come into my view. I’ve been haunted by the specter of rigor without knowing its name.