As a notion Déjà vu is inherently oxymoronic, it is simultaneously familiar and entirely alien to us, this inbuilt sense of discomfort is what places it within the realm of the eerie. Perhaps what triggered writing on this subject is the current state we find UK politics; non-violent protests violently crushed by the police, activist groups infiltrated, violence coerced by the state (not to negate legitimate violence targeted at a violent state). It just feels like we’ve been here before, doomed to repeat the process, doomed to be beaten into submission, the state standing on the neck of those with views anything to the left of Blair. It’s evident the future is for the old. It’s evident the future is for the wealthy. It’s evident the future is for those with a vested interest, in maintaining the status quo.
The initial seed that grew into this essay came to me during a semi-out of body experience I had whilst giving blood in January. As I sat with the needle in my arm, I couldn’t shake the overwhelming experience that I’d been there before. I’ve given blood many times, with many of the same nurses present, though this time it was at a different building, in the next town over, and though I had never been to this place, though I’d never experience being here, I felt eerily that I had. In the past when I’ve experienced this weird sense of Déjà vu I feel almost obliged to try and outsmart myself, the intuition I feel leads me to think I know what is about to happen, and with this in mind I try and prevent it, or subvert it and do something else, go somewhere else, this time however I was stationary, laying on a plastic chair with blood draining from my arm. I can’t remember anything noteworthy happening, I just remember THAT feeling.
Fisher’s description of the eerie is that it is ‘something present where there should be nothing, or is there nothing present when there should be something’[i], both these descriptions can be assigned to Déjà vu, the thing that is present that ought not to be is our consciousness of the experience, and the thing that is not present in the moment is our lack of awareness at what is happening, the person experiencing this Déjà vu has a sense of not belonging,and it detaches detaching them from reality, much like the hypnosis sequence in Jordan Peele’s Get Out[ii] or a scene from Spike Jonze’ Being John Malkovich[iii] it dissociates ones physical faculties from ones visual faculties and one simply observes the happenstance, in my home we refer to experiences of dissociation generally as Ketty, in reference to the psychedelic elements of the ketamine experience, I have written in previous essays, both posted publicly and unfinished, on the basis behind this “K-theory”, predominantly in terms of a cinematic deconstruction, however this can be extended into the metaphysical and assigned to the experience of Déjà vu, it places the experiencer subject A in a position in which A is not experiencing the same reality as subject B, A is simply observing the combined A+B experience, A is disassociated from what is happening.
(djv)K = (A+B)-A+(A)
(‘A’ being the disassociation of ‘A’)
Perhaps it’s down to my growing up consuming science fiction but a memorable cinematic portrayal of Déjà vu that I find myself re-examining is the scene in the Wachowski sibling’s The Matrix[iv] in which Neo sees a black cat on the landing of a block of flats, walking up to the next floor he sees the same black cat, upon stating what he’s seen he’s told that witnessing a Déjà vu is evidence that the matrix (the simulation) is bugging out as something has been changed. The experience in reality is no different, the eerie feeling that you’ve already experienced a moment before centralises the sensation of not belonging, it both roots you in the moment, and pushes you into the sunken place, where you simply sit idly by and watch as what happens around you happens.
The Anthropocene, or at the very least neoliberal societal anthropocentrism is at its base level a continuation of repetition, same job, same friends, same experiences, even the welcome breaks from this; holidays, cinema, drug use, aren’t anything new or truly individual, we still return to the eeriness of reality and repetition, we still perform the same rituals, and have the same thoughts day in day out, they may differ when new people objects are introduced but life re-centres and a new Déjà vu becomes reality. Claire Cronin states that she has ‘never seen spirits, except on screens, but I’ve felt many things: strong somatic and emotional reactions to places that essentially were haunted’[v], haunting by its relationship to the eerie, and by proxy its relationship to disassociation is an inherently Ketty experience and can be likened Déjà vu in that the individual experiencing the Déjà vu is both the haunter, and the haunted, the relationship to horror as a cinematic spectacle and as a part of life is explored earlier in the same book where Claire states that ‘more than any other genre, horror gives it’s fans the gratifying daze of repetition’[vi] is it truly shocking that a genre as popular as horror can relate to the human condition in such an unusual way? That a viewer can be charmed by horrors daze of repetition is akin to Sisyphus growing to love the boulder[vii].
Like Novatore[viii] I believe that we are all creative nothings. Entirely unique, and with no desire other than that we impose on ourselves. This exercise in considering coerced repetition is at best depressing. Inside each of us is a mind moulded and created by structures that we have very little pull over. Neoliberalism, and really any form of hierarchical society, imprints a rigid set of rules forcing each and every one of us to police our thoughts, and to maintain the endless repetitive series of vignettes.
This essay has been a means of dropping in and out, much like Déjà vu itself. As things in regard to Covid begin to finally calm somewhat, as things return to normal, this return to equilibrium feels droning, alien, acquiescent. Key workers have never stopped, have been forced to work harder to allow things to continue as near to normal. The human condition, or rather the society driven human condition, is quintessentially Déjà vu in its purest form. We are destined like Sisyphus to replay the most mundane aspects of our lives, occasionally splintered by our disassociation upon remembering the unique creatures we are, but always returning to monotony, until everything simply fades to black.
All images sourced from http://www.imdb.com
[i] Weird and the Eerie (Fisher, 2016 p. 61)
[ii] Get out (Peele, 2017)
[iii] Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999)
[iv] The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999)
[v] Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God (Cronin, 2020 p. 71)
[vi] Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God (Cronin, 2020 p. 44)
[vii] The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus, 1942)
[viii] Novatore: The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore (Novatore, 2012)
Harrying of the North 