“What/
What is this (revealing)/
Who are you what (concealing)/
Is this who (digesting)/
Are you what is (What is it you’re disturbing)/
This who are (occurring)/You what is this (recording)/
Who are you (disguising)/What is is this?” [1]
– Matthew Herbert
“Ghosts…seem to be events rather than things or
creatures.” [2]
– Robert Graves
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The immediate dilemma, and seemingly unavoidable paradox, of sketching the visual culture of ghosts is that apparitions and phantasmatic occurrences trouble analytic discourse by randomly slipping in and out of visual and sensorial perception. They are hard to locate. As the historically most common means of trying to capture and therefore study ghosts, the photographic record has, at best, a contested relationship to these phenomena. On the one hand, a ghostly presence captured on film stalking through any of the hundreds of haunted houses on record should be proof positive of an occurrence, that what we see in the photograph is a ‘this-has-been,’ “…it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred.” [3] Being held onto the paper we are to also to assume that the ghost, if for only the most miniscule of durations, has been captured (therefore removed from the event) by passing in front of both a camera lens and a photographer’s eye. This situates a witness at a certain place and time but also certifies their seeing the referent. But, on the other hand, photography also has a more passive role to play. There are many instances of photographers claiming to have unintentionally photographed ghosts that have chosen to appear (surrounding living relatives, lovers, or complete strangers) or were indirectly captured on film negatives. These presences (emanations of an emanation?) are revealed only when the image is developed, at the moment these ‘ghosts’ are literally written onto the paper. “So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page.” [4]
In each of these cases, a phantasm has been brought into the living realm of the photo, that it is here and present, that we believe it had an existence (if not at the same moment we see the photo, then at some time previously). Additionally, it’s not just that a ghost has been photographed but what we see is a presence of a life already lived. Ghosts are almost always recognized. As a device whose machinations and process were previously believed to be capable of capturing the ‘real,’ we find an historical phenomenon that interrupts that claim. We are bound to be doubly dubious, if not outright disparaging, of any photographed, recorded, or written representation of ghosts as a manipulated or post-produced entity instead of an irrefutable documentation of an ethereal return of the long dead relative or anonymous person one might hope to convince us it to be.
Shall we begin by outlining a strategy or discursive device that would mark, label, suspend, freeze, and frame ghosts? I prefer not to. The present gambit does not originate with the/a catalog of ghostly encounters in which numerous occurrences have been recorded and from which a carefully researched and distilled ontology might be extracted; i.e. repressed traumas or concealed crimes that have been indexed by the occurrence of a haunting: what has been. Instead, I’d rather conjure a coterie of (im)materials to help navigate through just how hauntings trouble the archival grasp and domesticated space that are buttressed, respectively, by documentation and policed territories.
“When do you think he will come? Don’t you think that we ought to write?” [5] My departure is to foreground a sort of contrivance of hauntings so that it might be possible to extrapolate on the ghostly events that I continually fail to incorporate. To be honest, there have been so many it would be impossible to recall just a fraction of them without exceeding the space that I have been allotted here. Unfortunately, and this is the way that it usually goes with this sort of thing, there is no one else to corroborate my stories and confirm the details of my intuitions. As long as that’s clear and you are willing to accept this up front, we won’t be too disappointed if this experiment and my position fall apart before our very eyes.
“Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and this of the object-in-general, must return to the ‘there is’ which precedes it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and humanly modified world such as it is in our lives and for our bodies – not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but this actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts. Further, associated bodies must be revived along with my body – ‘others,’ not merely as my congeners, as the zoologist says, but others who haunt me and whom I haunt; ‘others’ along with whom I haunt a single, present, and actual Being as no animal ever haunted those of his own species, territory, or habitat. In this primordial historicity, science’s agile and improvisatory thought will learn to ground itself upon things themselves and upon itself, and will once more become philosophy….” [6]
My reason for including this contraption in sum is to help begin the working through of an institutional procedure, compulsion and cultural habit, to archive that is prevalent at all personal and public registers. But more than this, and here is where the violence of the action lies, this performance of consignation is a cooperation of distinctive and resistant components towards a formal and structured (built) coherency. I remember reading, somewhere, an interesting bit by Derrida. Let’s listen to him for a moment,
“By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs. […] Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociate, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate, or partition, in an absolute manner.” [7]
Traditionally, the archive produces a structured, categorized, and systematized (housed) present book-ended between a responsibility to a past and a resource maintained for a future. Within that house, the pieces that have been placed into the archive, have also been physically suspended and held in place; the same holds (are) true for their readings as well, all the way down to the written words on the page. Working underneath this institutional grasp and suspension, there is the additional presumption that this will allow the beholder of the document to grasp and transfer its meaning as well, where “The attempt to master meaning, which ought to lead to its unification, to the elimination of its contradictions and its ‘splits,’ can reach its goal only at the cost, through the infliction of a new wound…” [8] To this, I would add the equally costly expenses of another chain, another set of shackles; whereby the document suffers physical and unconscious cleavages and imposed associations from which it cannot escape. There is an oppressively pervasive immobility that anchors signifiers to a ground where, without a centralized and fixed location, signs and meanings might float about errantly unattached. The document does not contain the event per se, but is only a remnant, a reminder to jog/open up memory, “…an encouragement of memory to become present.” [9] Performance is a singular event that can be recorded but does so under the auspices that it will be different from its previous manifestation, at the very best only the attempt to recollect with all the ensuing failures that are suddenly complicit with it. Ghosts are just this kind of ruin, just this kind of deferred supplement in the form of an ephemerality, that index recent and ancient traumas, events, phenomena. Yet the ghost and the event are no longer only proofs or evidences to an event that may or may not have occurred but are also something else: a remnant that will draw recollection inward, through a centripetal force, into the present for the privileged witness to an event, allowing them the ability (permission?) to perform a recollection of it.
It’s not (am I repeating myself?) a matter of locating and diagramming the cultural lineages or the traumatic archaeology from which hauntings may arise, that they index, remind us of, and recall to us. “Dishonoured and tragic, she was all before me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away.” [10] That bloody wound will never heal; I don’t want to relieve a melancholic search for a long lost other. Ghosts, in residing at the boundaries of vision and perception, upset an archival logic (could we even say hegemony?) that attempts to consign signs where they can be structured into a catalogued and referenced system, ordered to be accurately recalled by innumerable successive readings. Meanings, now isolated, can also be located and extracted: explained. Secreted and built into this system is an archival anxiety. This anxiety is both one of preserving a collection of information but also of creating a purview for that collection, marking a boundary that demarcates its realm of power.
Ghosts define the space in which they haunt; through their immobility and in their stasis, they perform against the bounds of the institution in such a way as to reveal the underlying cultural constrictions wrapped around these haunting constituents. “The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally.” [11] In the film The Others (If I remember it correctly), Grace maintains a rigid system of locks and curtains through out an enormous house that protects her children from the effects of a dangerous allergy to sunlight. Consequentially, they, and the house, are ‘protected’ from an exposure to and view of the outside through the numerous full-length windows; and the children are further consigned into smaller internal zones of spatial protection. This protection, dare I say institutionalization, is further exacerbated through the mother’s insistence of maintaining a rigid domestic mythology taught through religious texts and lessons. And to ensure that they focus more intently on their studies when need be, Grace locks her children into separate rooms at opposite ends of the house. As the one who controls the keys and locks that open and shut the doors within the house, it would be presumed that she would have the power to move most freely through out the home while using those keys and her privilege as matriarch to police that space as well. But that discipline and surveillance is prevented from being put to its fullest potential through the striations that she has put in place; the lock system not only prevents her children from moving out of the spaces in which she has consigned them but also reduces the speed by which she can navigate, patrol, and reinforce the space. Once she becomes increasingly suspicious of the noises and movements in the house that go unexplained, the violence that is inseparable from maintaining the domestic and spatial cohesion becomes very clear. The threat of violence must be used in order to maintain the limits of her home (therefore her power over the possible) and the systematic micro-striations put in place to ensure protection and security from the outside, while also suppressing the potential for movement. Yet, the haunting apparitions are a force that operates as a domestic counter-geography through, over, and irrespective of her striated spaces, transforming it from a fortification into a quagmire. The continued frequencies with which the outlaw occurrences continue happening gradually erode Grace’s grasp of the space and her ability to consign occurrences to people, and vice versa. [12]
In parceling space, the sovereign reacts to an outside threat by insulating itself behind successive zones and protections. This reaction is meant to multiply its limits of power and control in order to trouble and interrupt a nomadic trajectory so that it might be more easily contained. In maintaining their cover and invisibility, emanations can resist and pass through the State’s striations, and even the hostile smooth space. “…it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival.” [13] Hauntings interrupt empirical concepts of spatial coherency and navigation via a nomadic and smooth trajectory through space that ignores enforced striations and guarded localizations. They are non-specifications, un-locatabilities, and flickerings of visibility that interrupt bordered and framed spaces that seek to restrict movement and trajectories. In maintaining the element of surprise of appearing at any point at any time, phantoms have the potential to wield an ambient threat so as to suspend a space, to keep it on edge, in a state of alert that draws a terribly immobilizing attention to itself and the systems of the sovereign in which the appearance materializes.
We discover that the house and grounds is the extent to which Grace has the ability to navigate through and subdivide space. “In the end, it is the law of the house itself that is neither inside nor outside the space of the house. What is really indigestible is the law itself. Which is to say that spacing, in the end, is the law. The spatial logic of the house is not in itself spatial. No inside is ever simply severed from an outside. Space is but an elaborate effect of the spacing that appears to haunt it.” [14] (As I remember it, only at this very moment) Grace decides to leave the house to call on the local priest and loses her way in a dense fog. Walking deeper and deeper into the haziness she is unable to select, choose, or collect her spatial perceptions, she is lost. On her face, with hands in pockets, we can see a building anxiety as she goes further into this non-referential space, without road or perspective, made unfamiliar, left unframed, and ungrounded. [15] But not for long. From within the fog she sees her wandering and battle fatigued husband Charles, whom she has been waiting to return from fighting for the English in World War Two, materialize. They embrace. She forgets her previous trip and reroutes herself and husband back to the house where she can finally bring her family back together, united and re-centered under, at the very least, a spatial proximity of individual parts. Through the seemingly random, yet nonetheless exceedingly fortunate, crossing of paths, Grace can finally start the rebuilding of the family unit that she has so desperately been longing for. And she is relieved of having to conjure up memories of Charles in response to her children’s questions; a relation is (re)established between the family and their long lost other. In the reunion between Grace and Charles, their family corpus has been healed and the individual components are brought back into the previous working order. Therefore, what we would be seeing is a becoming-relation where movement is the connective tissue; not necessarily in the shape of a new form but in a yearned for reunion. It is a very limited form of relationality bound to the family and relatives. We might be encouraged to think that the end result of all relations is an illustration or unification, and with that, a certain kind of relief to ensue. [16] Yet, is there any reason to anticipate, or even hope, that a relation would be (re)established in an un-determined and undistinguished topography? In reconnecting this relation, is an inherent psychoanalytic anxiety relieved? Often, what has been written on ghosts, and how it has been written, has worked through a citational logic, an indexical circuit between an historical event and document where the past is located in order to explain the present. But can’t the fog of indistinction elicit, just as fortuitously, unexpected recoveries and unforeseen remedies? Is there another way to think that would not foresee a concrete example, aesthetic or inter-personal, that is on a continual threshold of becoming between inclusion and exclusion?
Catching a whiff of Derrida’s trait as we continue walking, we could learn to embrace the feeling of being lost and that our search continues (consciously or otherwise) without ever catching or capturing, much less tracking, what it is we seek. Deleuze and Guattari have also picked up the scent of Derrida’s trait, further removing it from the realm of the symbolic by reiterating that the trait is not a coherent entity, a specific subjectivity that can be placed, seen, found, and identified, therefore diagnosed into a normative framework. “It is a very special kind of distribution, one without division into share, in a space without border or enclosure. […] nomad space is smooth, marked only by ‘traits’ that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory.” [17] As the traces of a physical human existence, hauntings are, sometimes, only the faintest outline of a figure that returns from their separation and passage into an atemporal place where we cannot follow. As haunting paths and trajectories amble through space, they confront space as already parceled into larger and smaller regions, therefore map-able, and readable in terms of centers of power and coherency that restricts writing a free flow of movement across a landscape that is unhindered by enforced borders, limits, skins: a counter-territorialization. “The nomadic trajectory […] distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating.” [18] Obviously communication occurs within this space but, through enumerable relations of subjective and territorial space. Communication is no longer an empirical form that occurs through locatable parties on a shared platform. Not that it is mute but, instead, it cannot be mapped or diagrammed; it is continually refusing to being systematized within an economy of communication between differentiated nodes and agencies.
I have been hunting out my prey. The hounds have raced ahead in front of me, trying to chase it up a tree. Their barks have become less frequent and more scattered. Stalking the ghost through the woods and the haunted house, I’ve only had the shortest glimpse from around a tree or through a cracked window pane. It fragments itself at the same moment I raise my rifle. The trait is falling apart before my very eyes; I desperately tried to catch up but always lost the path again. (Which way did it go?). It moves too quickly and slips away even faster. “I bounded straight out of the door again, reached that of the house, got in an instant upon the drive and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned a corner and came in full sight. But it was in sight of nothing now – my visitor had vanished.” [19] My potential to grasp it gradually diminishes as well, leaving me lost. Now that I’ve been pulled so far into the woods, so far from where I began, why do I carry on chasing after this thing that shifts and changes in constant presents? As a mark written onto a space, the trait appears as that which escapes visibility at the moment that it is drawn. The traits, of which the drawn and written sketches are made, are so many marks upon a ground, articulations of beautiful ruin. But here, I’ve found myself wrapped up in a circuit between myself and an untraceable emanation. After continuing on like this, there might be enough fragments for me to put it all together but I’ve dropped my rifle. “…the self-eclipsing trait cannot even be spoken about, cannot even say itself in the present, since it is not gathered, since it does not gather itself, into any present…” [20] Stopping for a while and looking away to catch my thoughts, the trail only becomes embedded with an entirely new set of subjective mnemonic traits: the pursuit becomes no less arduous, only more enclosed. Picking up the pursuit of the trait again, it becomes clear that the hunted haunts me as well. It’s the thrill of continuous trans-direction and path breaking that draws each of us into an encounter with and transformation through a trait: of disappearing within a becoming-ghost. It’s not a matter of closing my grip on a swatch of its cloth in order to to hold on and bring it closer. Walking blindly through the fog with arms and hands extended is a conscious gesture of disorientation. But in closing our eyes and looking with our fingers, we are still allowing ourselves be pulled along by a collection of sensations. We can push this blindness and disorientation even further: let’s turn our palms up and continue walking. In a performative posture of offering and supplication our bodies would be even more open to affects that might pass over our hands and into us. We’d no longer be looking or feeling for the trait. It would choose us and pull us along its trajectory.
ENDNOTES
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[1] Matthew Herbert, ‘Foreign Bodies [feat. Dani Siciliano],’ Bodily Functions (Accidental Records), 2001: song length, 5:37.
[2] Quoted in Peter Haining. Ghosts: The Illustrated History. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd., 1974: 126.
[3] Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Verso, 2000 [1981]: 77.
[4] Henry James, et al. The Turn of the Screw: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Edited by Peter G. Beidler. Boston, MA: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995: 39.
[5] Ibid, 79.
[6] Galen A. Johnson, ed. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996: 123.
[7] Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995: 3.
[8] Shoshana Felman, in Henry James, et al. The Turn of the Screw: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Edited by Peter G. Beidler. Boston, MA: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995: 203.
[9] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993: 146.
James, 85.
[10] James, 85.
[11] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated with an introduction by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum Press, 2002 [1987]: 360 (authors’ italics). Unless otherwise noted, all italics in citations are the authors’ own.
[12] Besides the system of movement control that she has been enforcing, the larger, culturally woven, and irrefutable striation that unravels as the story continues is the one between the living and the dead.
[13] Deleuze and Guattari, 353.
[14] Mark Wigley. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998: 172.
[15] In using the word ‘ungrounded,’ I don’t mean to imply that she is literally floating, feet above the ground, or there isn’t some sort of physical surface she is walking upon. Instead, ‘ungrounded’ refers to her inability to perceive physical objects and position herself in relation to them. We might also be able to speculate that she might feel a sense of being watched and under surveillance.
[16] See Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002 [1998].
[17] Deleuze and Guattari, 380-381.
[18] Deleuze and Guattari, 380.
[19] James, 43.
[20] Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990: 54.