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Paper short abstract

Juxtaposing Lana Del Rey’s hauntological aesthetics with recent architectural design research, the paper shows how the past can be mobilized to respond to futurelessness.

Paper long abstract

While Mark Fisher argued that contemporary culture is haunted by lost futures, STS scholars have called for empirical investigations into how such temporal conditions are experienced in everyday life. This paper responds to this call through two empirical sites: the nostalgic atmosphere surrounding Lana Del Rey’s music, which offers insight into the affective experience of futurelessness in pop culture, and architect Brandon Clifford’s The Cannibal’s Cookbook (2022), which experiments with past building practices as resources for future-making.

First, I conceptualize longing after nostalgic atmospheres (LANA): a cultural mood-world shaped by socio-technical assemblages surrounding the popular cultural phenomenon Lana Del Rey. Drawing on qualitative analysis of lyrics, visual aesthetics, and their circulation and discussion in digital media, I argue that Del Rey’s hauntological musical universe makes the affective condition of futurelessness empirically observable in contemporary culture.

Second, I juxtapose this analysis with perspectives from architectural design research and literature on future-making to show how fragments from the past – whether Lana Del Rey’s temporal collages of vintage American glamour or Clifford’s speculative design experiments with the construction principles of Inca masonry – can exceed nostalgia and become resources for responding to lost futures.

Clifford’s design research demonstrates how the past can be mobilized materially through a “projective archaeology” to reopen possibilities for future-making. Applying this projective archaeological lens to Del Rey’s nostalgic atmospheres, the paper argues that hauntological cultural forms can likewise function as reservoirs of fragments that listeners recombine into new imaginaries of the future.