Remembering the Future

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is a freelance writer based in London. He has a diverse range of interests and concerns, but his long reads can be found in “The Independent” while his poetry has appeared in “3AM Magazine”. He holds an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge.

It is ironic that a zeitgeist can only be properly apprehended after its time. But has the spirit of the contemporary age been exorcized? Though modernity has presented us with countless innovations and technologies, it seems increasingly difficult for us to look forward and imagine what the future will look like. We are haunted by the ghosts of these lost futures. The irony of the failure of the future is that we now experience nostalgia for utopias which never even happened. Things come back to haunt us.

“They are always there, spectres, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet.” The ludic portmanteau of hauntology was coined by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 text Spectres of Marx; his near-homonymous wordplay on ‘ontology’ gestures towards a concept concerned with disturbing the study of being and forms of existence. Hauntology, then, supersedes being and presence by prioritizing the metaphorical ghost: that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.

The figure of the ghost in Derrida represents absent presences: atemporal ideologies, concepts, ideas, which disrupt an ontological

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Enis Yucekoralp:

is a freelance writer based in London. He has a diverse range of interests and concerns, but his long reads can be found in “The Independent” while his poetry has appeared in “3AM Magazine”. He holds an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge.

Publish date: 14.04.2021

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Enis Yucekoralp:

is a freelance writer based in London. He has a diverse range of interests and concerns, but his long reads can be found in “The Independent” while his poetry has appeared in “3AM Magazine”. He holds an M.Phil. in English from the University of Cambridge.

Today, the atavistic art of woodworking continues to capture the hearts and souls of hobbyists as well as professional joiners, carpenters and furniture makers the world over. What draws them to this centuries-old craft?

Humans have always been bound to wood. Woodworking is an activity that spans hundreds and thousands of years: from Neanderthal tools and Bronze Age wood carvings, to the ancient carpentry techniques and machinery of ancient Egypt, Rome and China. Modernity may have shaped and sanded the dimensions of woodworking considerably – bringing with it a power-tooled evolution – but an essential part of it still stays close to the grain.

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The Saw/Sand Redemption

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