The Haunting Presence of Lost Futures in The Third Reel by S.J. Naudé

Abstract

SummaryIn Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life he describes various small-scale utopian projects dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, including brutalist architecture, squats, industrial music and experimental film. According to Fisher, contemporary popular culture is mainly concerned with reworking these decades (instead of conceiving new utopian or formally experimental projects), partly because the 21st century is still haunted by these trajectories for the future that never realised. Fisher argues that the haunting of these lost utopian projects can be considered as fissures indicating alternatives to the accepting of contemporary capitalism as the only viable social structure. S.J. Naudé’s novel, The Third Reel, which is set in 1986-1990, references the utopian projects mentioned above. In this article, Fisher’s writing is used to read The Third Reel as a cultural product haunted by these lost visions of the future and their radical potential. Fisher’s theorisation of countercultural utopian projects during the 1980s is also supplemented by a discussion of the potentially radical queer practices of that decade, as represented in The Third Reel. The influence of the past on the present is explicitly thematised in the novel through references to Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus and characters’ attempts to recover their family histories. These attempts often prove to be complex and serve to vitiate any attempt to interpret the implications of history for the present in simple terms. This article thus speaks to Louise Viljoen’s in this issue and although it focuses mainly on Naude, overlaps in Koos Prinsloo’s oeuvre will be signalled.