The Spectral Metaphor

Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility

E. Peeren

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137375858
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What does it mean to live as a ghost? Exploring spectrality as a metaphor in the contemporary British and American cultural imagination, Peeren proposes that certain subjects – migrants, servants, mediums and missing persons – are perceived as living ghosts and examines how this figuration can signify both dispossession and empowerment or agency.

1

Forms of Invisibility: Undocumented Migrant Workers as Living Ghosts in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things and Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts

The undocumented migrant workers at the center of the two British films analyzed in this chapter, Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts (2006), are physically present and visible, yet remain unseen. They may thus be said to appear as living ghosts, with the comparison grounded primarily in the aspect of transitional invisibility, the way ghosts are not fully or consistently apprehensible. In this case, however, the lack of full visibility translates not into the desirable ability to see without being seen of Derrida’s visor effect, but into an extreme form of vulnerability. What is at stake is the disempowerment of being considered insignificant and expendable, and therefore overlooked. My analysis of the films focuses on the precise forms of invisibility this disempowerment evokes, its effects, and on the question of whether it can yield possibilities for agency, and if so, how this comes about. Is the solution to somehow assert one’s concrete presence and materiality or can one’s remaining unseen also be tactically employed to turn a disappearing, dispossessed ghost into an active haunting force, a site of spectral agency? In addition to discussing the diegetic representation of living ghosts, I consider the way the films themselves, as visual narratives participating in the genre of social realism, appeal to a rhetoric of revelation in their attempt to address the absenting of undocumented workers from British society.

My primary aim is to explore the use of the ghost as a figure of exploitation, singled out by Negri, in his response to Specters of Marx, as ‘a word that rarely appears in Derrida’s book’ (10). Exploitation, in contrast, is central to the work of the Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe, which focuses on the way autocratic postcolonial regimes in Africa produce death-worlds full of living-dead subjects explicitly designated as ghostly. Even though Britain constitutes a markedly different political and cultural context, Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics and his notion of the wandering subject will be shown to resonate strongly with the portrayal of undocumented migrant workers in Frears’s and Broomfield’s films.

Secondly, the chapter concentrates on spectral agency by tracing the opportunities even the living dead have for acting up and beginning to haunt. These opportunities are never straightforward and are occasionally perverse: far from radically transforming what Mbembe calls necropower, the most common outcome is mere survival, the ability to avoid one’s always looming death. Nonetheless, for subjects as dispossessed as the undocumented migrants in Dirty Pretty Things and Ghosts, surviving in itself can constitute a challenge to their social construction as ‘nothing’. Since Mbembe’s work draws heavily on Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of bare life, I conclude with a discussion of the latter’s politics of the refugee, an instance of metaphoring that takes the experiences of a concrete category of people as the basis for a new, generalized politics. Dirty Pretty Things and Ghosts are taken as skeptical responses to this form of human figuration, which is also questioned in terms of its focalization.

Forms of invisibility

At the end of Dirty Pretty Things, an illegally harvested kidney in a Styrofoam container unceremoniously changes hands in a hotel parking garage. The buyer checks the kidney and places it carefully on the backseat of his car, covering it with a blanket. As he hands over a stack of cash, he inquires: ‘How come I haven’t seen you people before?’ This is an understandable question, since his normal contact, Señor Juan, is lying anaesthetized in a hotel room, having been tricked into donating a kidney rather than taking one. In the context of the film as a cinematic object, however, the question takes on a larger meaning in the way it characterizes the man’s three interlocutors – Okwe, the Nigerian night receptionist; Senay, the Turkish maid; and Juliette, a black prostitute – as ‘you people’. It is important to be specific in describing these characters: although linked by the illegality of their labor, they are not in the exact same situation: Juliette is a British citizen whose profession constitutes a crime and confers a social stigma; Senay is an asylum seeker allowed to reside in Britain but not permitted to work or receive rent while her case is under review; and Okwe is an undocumented migrant not entitled to be in the country or to work.¹ From the perspective of the organ trader, the three are simply strangers, as he knows nothing of their legal status or occupation and does not suspect that one of them, Senay, was supposed to be the kidney donor. His remark, though, as one of the only lines in the film spoken by a white non-migrant character, positions them, in a more radical manner, as distinctly ‘other’ to an implied ‘we’. As such, his contemptuous look may be taken as representative of the larger cultural gaze of white British society.² It is this cultural gaze and its refusal to acknowledge or ‘light up’ certain lives that is addressed and challenged by the alternative ‘we’ construed in Okwe’s defiant response: ‘We are the people that you don’t see. We are the ones that drive your cabs, we clean your rooms and suck your cocks.’³

Although here Okwe speaks back, in most of the film, as ‘people that you don’t see’, the three characters take on the status of what I have called living ghosts. In this case, the quality that dominantly motivates the figuration is a specific form of absent presence or invisibility. In The Gift of Death, Derrida distinguishes between two orders of the invisible: first, there is the visible in-visible, ‘an invisible of the order of the visible that I can keep in secret by keeping it out of sight’ (90). The visible in-visible is something that would be visible if it were out in the open, but that remains unseen because it is physically concealed. Derrida names the internal organs as part of this order, since they can be brought to the surface through an operation or accident.⁴ Notably, he describes the visible in-visible as something hidden and potentially exposed by an ‘I’, a subject able to choose what (not) to reveal. The visible in-visible itself, on the other hand, is objectified and does not seem to possess any agency of its own. Second, there is absolute invisibility, which ‘falls outside the register of sight’ (90). This order of the non-visual comprises the musical, the tactile, desire, but also the ‘seeing in secret’ of the paternal or divine gaze that prefigures the specter’s visor effect: ‘God sees me, he looks at me in secret, but I don’t see him, I don’t see him looking at me, even though he looks at me while facing me’ (91). Here, invisibility is either surmounted because the phenomenon can be apprehended through other senses or it becomes an asset to be exploited, a site of domination. The two forms of invisibility come together in Specters of Marx, where Derrida describes the transitional invisibility of the specter as ‘a supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality, the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible, or an invisibility of a visible X’ (7). The specter’s – apparently voluntary – oscillation between visibility and invisibility (between remaining hidden and appearing) renders it indeterminate, capable of confounding and escaping knowledge, and associates it, like the absolute invisible, with the power to look without being seen.

Akira Lippit’s Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) adds the ‘specific mode of impossible, unimaginable visuality’ that is the avisual:

Presented to vision, there to be seen, the avisual image remains, in a profoundly irreducible manner, unseen. Or rather, it determines an experience of seeing, a sense of the visual, without ever offering an image. A visuality without images, an unimaginable visuality, and images without visuality, avisuality. All signs lead to a view, but at its destination, nothing is seen. What is seen is this absence, the materiality of an avisual form or body. (32)

The avisual is associated with a ‘phantom temporality’, a vanishing scene that continues to haunt but that can never achieve full visibility (82).⁵ Lippit invokes Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible Man as revealing ‘the paradox of avisuality’: what causes the avisual to be disavowed is its excessive visibility, an overwhelming or threatening materiality that the eyes cannot or do not want to take in, a blinding sight. In Ellison, it is the conspicuousness of the black man that causes those around him to unsee his form: ‘the invisible man is constituted visually as invisible; he lives in the visual world as invisible’ (Lippit 98). Such living in the visual world as invisible has, in the social sciences, also been designated as social invisibility and pertains to subjects who are materially present and can be physiologically perceived but nevertheless remain unacknowledged.⁶

In one respect, the main characters of Dirty Pretty Things are visible in-visible, since they have to remain hidden from the authorities and are subject to a constant threat of unwanted exposure. At the same time, however, they are avisual, because most of the time they are in plain sight, yet not apprehended. This is particularly the case when they work, as Okwe’s above-cited statement indicates. Manifestly there driving the taxi, cleaning the hotel rooms or having sex, they are nevertheless un-imaged, un-imagined and considered un-imagining. Their avisuality, moreover, prevents them from participating in the absolute invisible because they are not considered to have a dimension that exceeds the visible, the material; their desires are considered irrelevant, their secrets uninteresting, their looks unpenetrating. Bodies are all they are: bodies to either be set to work or cut open to uncover the more valuable visible in-visible parts inside.⁷

Like Ellison’s invisible man, Okwe and Senay are reduced to the material to the extent that they become hypervisible. What can be most straightforwardly seen of them is all there is thought to be and, simultaneously, all there ought to be, for when their bodies do materialize outside their labor, they are seen to be demanding that which does not belong to them: housing, benefits, medical care. This hypervisibility translates into, on the one hand, a continual danger of capture and, on the other, utter indifference, since that which is fully exposed to the eye readily comes to be seen as lacking an interior dimension and therefore as banal, uninteresting. Thus, when the cleaners working for the Baltic Hotel present their faces to the surveillance camera for identification upon arrival, they are not recognized as individuals, but only counted as generic working bodies. As avisual phantoms, rather than wielding a visor effect, they are obsessively surveilled. And even when they do see what others want to keep hidden, their visions do not pose a threat because they are unable to expose them for fear of drawing attention to themselves.

The undocumented workers’ ghostliness thus arises from their legal precariousness, which excludes them from society and prevents them from showing themselves, and from their participation in globally undervalued forms of labor, which causes them to be ignored even when physically present. Sarah Gibson aptly calls undocumented migrant workers ‘the ghosts of Britain and its economy’ (‘Border’ 700) and Rebecca Saunders uses the term ‘global foreigners’ to refer to migrant workers who appear as ‘spectral presences that haunt the circumstances and discourses customarily gathered beneath the name of globalization’ (88, emphasis in text). Like Freud’s uncanny, the global foreigner functions as a sign of the unconscious that harbors everything that is home to globalization but that it does not want to recognize as such. Truly seeing these ghosts or specters and allowing them to haunt would mean having to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about the role of clandestine labor in sustaining the British economy and the exploitative treatment of undocumented migrants, who are here asked to literally dismember themselves in pursuit of a (forged) passport. Okwe, Senay and Juliette may be seen to embody the ethical imperative to welcome without posing conditions that Derrida sees proceeding from the specter, yet in the film this imperative is not heeded. Instead, as figures of alterity (racially, nationally, linguistically or religiously other to the normative British self) they are disavowed and persecuted, in line with the panic, fear and xenophobia that governs the immigration debate in Britain and other Western European countries.

The term ‘ghost’ itself is only used once in Dirty Pretty Things –by Okwe’s friend Guo Yi, a hospital porter who allows Okwe to stay in the hospital morgue and who tells him to come there after five o’clock when there are ‘only ghosts left’. This half-joking reference to the literal ghosts of the dead metonymically includes Okwe, since he ends up sharing their space. Okwe’s fondness for spending time in a churchyard contemplating his dead wife confirms his representational status as closer to the dead than the living. Visually, his association with a ghostly translucency is evoked in his almost imperceptible presence as the Baltic Hotel’s night receptionist, where his uniform makes him fade into the lobby’s red décor. The film’s opening credits reinforce the association with ghostly dispossession. White letters with red shadowing materialize on a black screen in a distinctly spectral manner, first gradually becoming clearer and then fading away again. The letters themselves are never stable on the screen and instead of being fully formed they feature small cracks or tears, suggesting fragmentation, brittleness and vulnerability (Figure 1.1). The addition of red shadowing prefigures the scene in which Okwe recovers a human heart – a remnant of a botched organ extraction – from a toilet in one of the hotel rooms, the clear water gradually staining with blood.

In Dirty Pretty Things, the ghost is evoked not only as invisible or translucent, but also in terms of what Derrida calls its ‘paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit’ (Specters 6, emphasis added). Carnality is central to the narrative, in which living ghosts are not ethereal beings but bodies constantly at work – either laboring or providing spare body parts for others. This materiality does not, however, ensure notice, let alone recognition. Derrida’s remark that ‘it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away in the apparition’ finds new application here: the immigrant workers’ manifestation in the form of blood, sweat and tears leaves no lasting trace as theirs, but vanishes immediately both because of the repetitive nature of the work they undertake and because this work is taken for granted. With these living ghosts, therefore, it is not so much that ‘one does not know if precisely [the specter] is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence’, but rather that one knows that the immigrant worker is, but chooses not to know and has no interest in finding out whether he or she possesses a name or essence (Derrida, Specters 6). The fascination and curiosity usually associated with the ghost are elided.

Figure 1.1 Stephen Frears, Dirty Pretty Things (2002), screenshot (cropped)

The living ghosts of Dirty Pretty Things do, however, possess some narrative agency, as manifested in the organ hand-over scene. Okwe’s statement that ‘we are the people that you don’t see’ is directed at the camera and therefore at the film’s viewers. It positions the audience as a ‘you’ shamed as unperceptive and exploitative by a normally excluded and occluded ‘we’ that now stakes a claim to community as well as access to visibility and acknowledgement. Crucially, the undocumented migrant workers are seen to act themselves rather than having someone act on their behalf: it is through their combined efforts that Senay does not lose her kidney (although she is raped) and it is Okwe who holds the audience accountable for their everyday practices of social exclusion. The film, as Emily S. Davis writes, is notable for ‘shifting the narrative perspective from that of Westerners anxious about Western bodies being invaded by globalization’s Others to that of migrant laborers themselves’ (48). With the action consistently shown through the eyes of the ghosted characters, the haunted ‘we’ that forms the center of attention in Derrida’s text is excluded from the action until Okwe’s address conjures them, crucially, as the answerable other, the ‘you’ rather than the ‘I’.

But how far does this re-focalization of the ghost go and what does it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor
• 1. Forms of Invisibility: Undocumented Migrant Workers as Living Ghosts in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things and Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts
• 2. Spectral Servants and Haunting Hospitalities: Upstairs, Downstairs, Gosford Park and Babel
• 3. Spooky Mediums and the Redistribution of the Sensible: Sarah Waters’s Affinity and Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black
• 4. Ghosts of the Missing: Multidirectional Haunting and Self-Spectralization in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time and Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park
• Afterword: How to Survive as a Living Ghost?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index