Popular Ghosts

The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture

Esther Peeren, Maria del Pilar Blanco

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781441164018
• eBook ISBN: 9781441149770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

Haunting has long been a compelling element in popular culture, and has become an influential category in academic engagements with politics, economics, and aesthetics. While recent scholarship has used psychoanalysis and the Gothic as frameworks with which to study haunting, this volume seeks to situate ghosts in the cultural imagination. The chapters in Popular Ghosts are united by the impulse to theorize the cultural work that ghosts do within the trans-historical contexts that comprise our understanding of everyday life. These authors study the theoretical and aesthetic genealogies of the spectral, while also commenting on the multiple everyday spaces that this category occupies. Rather than looking to a single tradition or medium, the essays in Popular Ghosts explore film, novels, photography, television, music, social practices, and political structures from different cultures to reopen the questions that surround our haunted sense of the everyday.

Part One

Genealogies of the Ghost

Chapter 1

Ghosts: Of Ourselves or,
Drifting with Hardy, Heidegger,
James, and Woolf

Julian Wolfreys

… ’tis not to married couples but to single sleepers that a ghost shows himself
when ’a do come. One has been seen lately, too. A very strange one.¹

I thought you were the ghost of yourself.²

We shall go away, a very long distance, hundreds of miles from these parts,
and such as this can never happen again, and no ghost of the past reach there.³

I

As my three epigraphs indicate, the idea of the ghost has a certain frequency, if not a currency, for Thomas Hardy. I shall come back to Hardy as “ghost-writer” of modernity shortly, but it is necessary to recognize Hardy’s significance regarding the idea of the ghost. He is our first example because he remains the writer of spectrality par excellence, whose writing more than any other shifts, or makes possible, the reorientation of thought apropos haunting, the phantom or phantasm, the apparition, the revenant, and the ghost in relation to questions of subjectivity and historicity, as well as to the relation between writing and the past. This can be read in a consideration of the epigraphs. A briefly adumbrated reading of the spectral trope in these citations opens for us a mobile, provisional epistemology of haunting as it is received in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In retrospect, and perhaps more significantly, it might also be said that Hardy reveals that which could not have been anticipated in the thinking of haunting.

The first epigraph admits a spectral convention framed folklorically as a narrative of received, shared wisdom. The second resonates differently, suggesting the experience of the uncanny, an apprehension – a frisson, the touch of which announces the countersignature of phenomenological reception – of the self as other, the self received as the doppelgänger, the living as dead. The ghost thus arrives before it arrives, it “returns” unexpectedly as the anticipation of a future, from that future, as that which is to come. The last epigraph’s “ghost,” mere metaphor as it seems, admits to a number of modern conceits: on the one hand, it appears to suggest psychological burden, that which is written on subjectivity and the subject’s psyche. On the other hand, it bespeaks a certain historical psychic weight, wherein memory and history, the personal and broader cultural or material events, might coincide. It remarks a desire for a different place for the subject, as if place itself were – perhaps fetishistically – haunted. It also intimates that a ghost cannot leave its given place, whilst, perhaps naively, expressing the hope that if a ghost is a thing of the past, it also remains outside memory and conscience, not really inscribed within the subject. And of course, finally, for now, this last epigraph, in its phrasing – ghost of the past – determines haunting as a matter of structural figuration, whilst signaling that, in the words of Jacques Derrida, the “age already in the past is in fact constituted in every respect as a text … [as] such the age conserves the values of legibility and the efficacy of a model and thus disturbs the time (tense) of the line or the line of time.”⁴

This is not to deny the past, of course. Only the most perverse misreading or avoidance of reading would assume such a thing. Instead, it is to acknowledge that the past as such can never be present in the present, and that to acknowledge this is to acknowledge also that what we name the past exceeds any mere present moment by virtue of its being legible, by leaving legible traces and inscriptions, the very persistence and revenance of which disturb both structure and history, as Derrida’s chiasmus gives us to comprehend. That chiasmus places the absolute separation of text and context, word and world, under erasure. In this crossing through, an unsuturable fissure opens, and the ghost of modernity appears. Its apparition causes us to comprehend how being is written. More than this, however, being, in being apprehended as what Derrida terms “l’être écrit” (31), the being written/the written being, is written as being haunted: subject to the traces of historicity, and to those disquieting eruptions that remain all too legible, one’s being – if it can be expressed thus – is never on time with itself, its presence and its present always already disturbed by the ghost of itself, and also the ghosts of all its others. Any ontology of being is therefore always already ruined from the start. The house of being is a haunted locus, and Tess’s naïve desire to escape the ghost of the past fails in its tragic comprehension to appreciate the extent to which the ghost remains with us, as that which we cannot admit determines who we are. Tess’s desire cannot comprehend how, if the past is a ghost, then so too is that which is to come, and that the future, irreducible to a program by which we can anticipate our “future anterior,” is the apparition of “ce monde à venir et… ce qui en lui aura fait trembler …” – “that world to come … and that which will have made [or caused it to] shake” (14; translation my own).

II

The question of the unexpected arrival that catches one unawares, so that one’s response cannot be calculated or anticipated, is central to the thought of the other’s haunting of the subject, whether that other arrives from the past or a certain future. In this scenario, the subject’s unpreparedness defines the modern condition. Apropos the subject’s awaiting the other, it is arguable that “ambiguity and incompletion are indeed written into the very fabric of our collective existence rather than just the works of intellectuals.”⁵ The ghost is thus not only, no longer, a thing of the past; it is no longer containable, on the one hand, to a realm of investigation and research, or on the other, to popular narratives and genres, communities of oral transmission, or folkloric traditions – if it ever was. What we name “ghost” acknowledges no boundaries, other than to mark their porosity, as is well known.

If Hardy – of whom there is more to be said – signals the modernity of the apparition, he is not the only writer to do so. In an appreciation of the modernity of Henry James’s writing, Virginia Woolf observes, in a well-known and frequently quoted passage on what might be registered as the epochal shift from the Gothic to the psychoanalytic, that

Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts – the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange.⁶

Marked as it is with a tacit, and almost imperceptible, admission of the uncanny, Woolf’s reading of James has the effect of dating – if such a thing is possible – the interiorization or incorporation of the ghostly and spectral. Consigning the “origin” (finding, or at the very least, inventing, the return of a phantasm always already at work, but hitherto unavailable to apprehension of such disquieting forces) to an otherwise inexpressible significance “within us,” Woolf acknowledges James as a writer whose work moves across, or through, a boundary, on one side of which lie narratives about the ghostly, and on the other, manifestations of “ghostly narrative,” to borrow a fine and significant distinction drawn by Nicholas Royle.⁷ What Woolf admits into the discourse and experience of the ghostly is, most obviously, a psychological dimension, one which, in writers of the nineteenth century, was, if not “explained,” then at least narrated through tales of mediumship, uncanny foresight, visions, and so forth. What marks James’s writing, or, perhaps better said, the difference by which James’s text remarks itself as being haunted, is that explanation is inevitably found wanting, as James’s ghostly narratives do not so much close as remain open to the undecidable, the possibility of the impossible, and the experience of the other.

This is entirely appropriate to any hauntological event, for, to recall the words of Derrida, “[g]hosts always pass quickly, with the infinite speed of a furtive apparition, in an instant without duration, presence without present of a present, which, coming back, only haunts.”⁸ What Derrida’s appreciation of the spectral – as the phenomenal flickering of the trace of the other – shares with Woolf, after a certain fashion, and differently, with James, is the apprehension of the unexpected related, on the one hand, to eruption or overflow and, on the other hand, to duration or frequency. Derrida continues:

The ghost, le re-venant, the survivor, appears only by means of figure or fiction, but its appearance is not nothing, nor is it mere semblance. And this “synthesis of the phantom” enables us to recognize in the figure of the phantom the working of … the transcendental imagination … whose temporalizing schemes … are indeed “fantastic” – are, in Kant’s phrase, those of an art hidden in the depths of the soul … the art of memory and … the memory of art. (64)

Irreducible to mere representation, that which is approximated as a quasi-ontological quasi-being, the ghost, is nevertheless only possible through a tropic, fictional comingto-pass. Inasmuch as it can be said to take its passage, its significance is only ever perceived, if at all, belatedly, as Woolf’s affirmation of “the significant” that overflows. What comes to overflow only becomes available as “the significant” after the event of its having come to pass, and having retreated in its becoming, leaving behind the trait that one attempts to read as the signature of “significant.” This phenomenon, that which discloses itself in coming to light and so shedding light in those places where we have no direct expression for the experience, is both the art of memory and the memory of art, to reiterate Derrida’s words. To conjure the ghost of Hegel, art, it has to be said, therefore, “is a thing of the past” (64).

If that which survives beyond any mere existence returns through a phantasmic and phantastic revenant temporal scheme, whether through the memory of art or the art of memory, then this is to admit, in the most ghostly terms, that memory and art stage the phantoms of history in a performative projection of the trace of historicity. Yet, it is just this opening to historicity’s ghostly remnant, its rem(a)inder, which is not acknowledged in Woolf’s psychoanalytic and phenomenological appreciation of Jamesian modernity. The ghostly trace of historicity must then be acknowledged as the supplement to that which is already supplementary, the haunting opening of modernity’s narratives. To become modern one must open oneself to those manifestations of what Derrida describes as “a past which has never been present and will never allow itself to be reanimated in the interiority of consciousness” (65). This admission takes place, if it occurs at all, “through writing, the sign, tekhne, with that thinking memory, that memory without memory” (65), which narrative has the possibility of enabling. Thinking this, we are opening the thinking of narrative as a form of tekhnē, a mnemotechnic to be precise, “whose movement” and operation as an exteriorized, archived, and prosthetic survival of memory without memory, marks it as a phantom machine – both a ghostly mechanism constructed out of nothing other than writing, the sign, and so forth, and also a machinic medium the purpose of which is to conjure and project its singular-collective of phantasmagorical traces – “whose movement carries an essential affirmation, a kind of engagement beyond negativity … which is mourning itself” (65).

Arguably – and this is to make a claim that I cannot hope to support here – such mourning does not concern James; or, at least, it cannot, is not to be admitted. Similarly with Woolf’s reading. So “modern” is the Jamesian interiorization of the specter in those characters that Woolf takes to be figures of analogy with “us,” whose powers of expression have momentarily failed, allowing the upsurge of the phantom, that it is, in effect and in fact, dated, past its sell-by date. James’s is an old-fashioned, even a quaintly anachronistic modernity, a modernity in which is written the anticipation of a modernism, the very coming of which would always already have dated it with the trace of an historical moment, the tragedy of which is that it is without the fortune to have become anachronistic, or to have been countersigned by a necessary affirmative anachrony making it other than its times. James’s “modern” ghostly narrative becomes dated precisely because it gives no access to what Derrida calls “the immemorial or unrememberable, with an archive that no interiorizing memory can take into itself” (67), by which a text might announce an “affirmative … an amnesic fidelity” with the “dead being that will never itself return, never again be there, present to answer to or to share” (66), what amounts to a faith, keeping faith with a past that can never be present. To open in a proper fashion to that which memory cannot take into itself, and so risk everything on the invention of a historicity at once more and less modern, we have to turn back to Thomas Hardy.

III

Hardy’s interest in haunting addresses a concern for which we have to take account: what it means to have a world. As Derrida reminds us, apropos Heidegger, the human has a world, while, problematically, seemingly paradoxically, and admitting to a “logical contradiction,” the animal “does and does not have a world.”⁹ As Derrida is quick to point out, the fault, or let us call it limit, to thought and to be thought is not with the ontology of the animal, animality, and so forth; it is with the thinking of “world,” specifically the concept of world rather than its material ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One Genealogies of the Ghost
• Part Two Spectral Politics of the Contemporary
• Part Three Chasing Ghosts In(to) the Twenty-first Century
• Part Four Other Ghostly Spheres
• Part Five Ambient Ghosts: Spectral Images, Sounds, and Bodies
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• eCopyright