Ghostly Matters: Reading Notes 001

Below are some direct quotes from Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination By Avery F. Gordon.

Haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed, although it usually involves these experiences or is produced by them.

Commentary: Haunting happens after violence has been done. Keeping in mind that violence involves a violation, haunting happens after (as a result of?) violation.

What’s distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes is very directly, sometimes obliquely. I use the therm haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with bones alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view.

Commentary: When there has been a violation people either make sense of it or they don’t. If they don’t make sense of the violation then the violation needs to be covered up (i.e. repressed). When haunting happens these coverups fail, there is a “return of the repressed.”

Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble the represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view.

Commentary: A ghost/specter represents a violation, the ghost/specter is the proof that the violation happened. As stated above, we try to coverup the violations, but haunting happens when we can’t continue to keep the ghosts/specters covered up any more. The ghosts/specters slip (as in the Freudian slip) into our speech, our bungled actions, our dreams. Haunting is an insistence to repeat, remember, and work through the violations we’ve effectively covered up for so long.

The ghost, as I understand it, is not the invisible or some ineffable excess. The whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, your attention.

Commentary: We don’t pay attention to a violation, and the violation becomes a ghost/specter. The ghost/specter is determined that the debt we incurred due to the violation be paid. The ghost/specter demands that we “pay attention” to what has been covered up.

Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way, I tried to suggest we are notified that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us.

Commentary: We are haunted because, sen though we think we are done with the past violation, the past violation is not done with us.

Haunting is a frightening experience. It always registers the harm inflicted or the los sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present. But haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done. Indeed, it seemed to me that haunting was precisely the main of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done.

Commentary: Above I said that haunting demands that we “pay attention” to something we have not paid attention to, that we pay attention in a new and different way than we had prior. It also demands that we repeat, remember, and work through the violation that created the ghost/specter. In a sense the haunting is the insistence of the repressed, the insistence that “You need to do something about this, something other than cover it over like you’ve been doing.”