The Spectralities Reader

Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory

Maria del Pilar Blanco, Esther Peeren

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441136893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Spectralities Reader is the first volume to collect the rich scholarship produced in the wake of the "spectral turn" of the early 1990s, which saw ghosts and haunting conjured as compelling analytical and methodological tools across the humanities and social sciences. Surveying the past twenty years from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, the Reader displays the wide range of concerns spectrality, in its diverse elaborations, has been called upon to elucidate. The disjunctions produced by globalization, the ungraspable quality of modern media, the convolutions of subject formation (in terms of gender, race, and sexuality), the elusiveness of spaces and places, and the lingering presences and absences of memory and history have all been reconceived by way of the spectral. A primer for the wide readership engaged with cultural interpretations of ghosts and haunting that go beyond the confines of the fictional and supernatural, The Spectralities Reader includes twenty-five groundbreaking texts by prominent contemporary thinkers, from Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak to Avery Gordon and Arjun Appadurai, as well as a general introduction and six section introductions by the editors.

PART ONE

The Spectral Turn

1

The Spectral Turn / Introduction

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren

What does it mean to think scholarly research, especially regarding ghosts and haunting, in terms of various “turns”? What does this metaphor imply? A turn can be a move towards or away from something (even both at the same time), a tightening or a loosening, a new departure or a revisiting. In academia, naming and claiming a “turn” tends to indicate a foregrounding of an aspect hitherto ignored or under-illuminated: the role of language in the linguistic turn, that of culture in the cultural turn, that of materiality in the material turn, etc. Yet the potentially expansive effect is tempered by an implication of exclusivity: instead of also looking at the highlighted aspect, it becomes (or is taken as) a looking only at this aspect, necessitating another turn to address newly emerged blind spots. In addition, the rhetoric of the turn suggests a decisive change of direction accompanied by a distancing from the starting point; after all, a “turn in place” is not really a turn at all. Real turns follow on each other and are therefore conceptualized as reactions or ordered in terms of cause and effect; they cannot be thought in concert with each other. Thus, while in The Affect Theory Reader, Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg try to move away from the turn as a single decisive moment—“No one ‘moment’ or key ‘theorist’ inaugurated ‘a’ ‘turn’ ‘to’ affect; like others, we have been caught and enamored of affect in turns, in conjunction with new quotidian realities”¹—their temporalizing pluralization reinforces rather than overcomes the ultimate singularity of the turn: only one can be taken at a time.

The ghost, as a figure of multiplicity that has turned (from being alive to living-dead) and, as a haunting force, keeps turning up, turning into, and returning in unpredictable and not always easily demarcated ways, could inaugurate an alternative logic of the turn as something not necessarily definitive or revolutionary in the sense of radically new. Instead of demanding a distancing, the twists and turns of haunting manifest as a layering, a palimpsestic thinking together, simultaneously, rather than a thinking against or after (as in the plethora of counters and posts each scholarly turn tends to precipitate). The spectral turn, then, may be read not only as a turn to the spectral, but also as the spectralization of the turn—its unmooring from defined points of departure, notions of linear progress, and fixed destinations.

Rather curiously, the spectral turn has not been as prominently or enthusiastically adopted as a site of academic affiliation as other critical reorientations. In fact, in a perhaps strangely fitting anachronism, a full two years before Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s affirmative use of the term to title his introduction to the edited volume Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (2004), it featured in Roger Luckhurst’s critical article “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn’” (2002). This article, while apparently the first to name it, already marks the spectral turn—emphatically placed between quotation marks—as having outlived its use. Since then, an ambiguous attitude towards the notion of a spectral turn has persisted: the continued and spreading interest in matters ghostly is either not specifically referred to in these terms, or a certain prevarication is indicated by retaining Luckhurst’s quotation marks or preceding it with a “so-called.”² While such evasions and expressions of skepticism do not invalidate the idea of a surge in scholarly attention for ghosts and haunting, they do indicate a degree of self-reflexivity with respect to the established, non-spectralized logic of the turn. Accordingly, this first part of The Spectralities Reader shows the existence, survival, scope, uses, and effects of what appears as “the spectral turn” to be up for debate.

The opening gambit, ardently proclaiming spectrality’s wide-ranging conceptual potential, almost unavoidably involves Jacques Derrida. “Spectrographies” is part of a transcribed “improvised interview” with Derrida conducted by Bernard Stiegler. Filmed in 1993 by Jean-Christophe Rosé for the INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel), it was published in Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews.³ Only slightly trailing the French publication of Specters of Marx, which, as we noted in our general introduction, is generally considered the main catalyst for the late-twentieth-century surge in explorations of ghosts and haunting, “Spectrographies” condenses the most vital aspects of the theorization of spectrality and hauntology delineated in the longer, less accessible work. It also installs a useful distance between Derrida’s thinking of spectrality and his much-contested reading of Marx (without, however, completely excluding it).

The interview starts from a discussion of Derrida’s statement “The future belongs to ghosts,” made in Ken McMullen’s 1983 experimental film Ghost Dance, which invokes an intricate discourse of ghosts and haunting predicated on technological advancement (by way of references to cargo cults), the living on of the past in the present, and psychic dissolution.⁴ It proceeds to conjure a complex configuration of spectral meditations pertaining to death and mourning, technology and technics, (in)visibility, inheritance, justice and respect, messianicity, history, and Heidegger. Holding this ostensibly far-flung constellation together is the notion of the specter as that which, in its paradoxical invisible visibility—“it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood”—proposes “a deconstructive logic” that, by insisting on “heteronomy,” undoes established binaries and challenges foundational, presentist, and teleological modes of thinking.⁵ The specter is always already before us, confronting us with what precedes and exceeds our sense of autonomy, seeing us without being seen, and demanding a certain responsibility and answerability, making Derrida’s theory, besides an alternative ontology, also an ethics: “There is no respect and, therefore, no justice possible without this relation of fidelity or of promise, as it were, to what is no longer living or living yet, to what is not simply present.”⁶ What is at stake, ultimately, is the specter as a figure of absolute alterity (existing both outside and within us) that should, as emphasized in Specters of Marx, not be assimilated or negated (exorcized), but lived with, in an open, welcoming relationality.

Derrida’s penchant for thinking (through) ghosts—which inhabited his work from long before Specters of Marx up to his death in 2004⁷—has received much comment, from the mostly critical responses focusing on Derrida’s interaction with Marx gathered in Sprinker’s Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1995) and the special issue of Parallax on the New International (2001) to works that specifically seek to take up and elaborate on his engagement with the specter, including Nicholas Royle’s “Phantom Review” (1997), Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (2003), and David Appelbaum’s Jacques Derrida’s Ghost: A Conjuration (2009).⁸ Since this part of the Reader is dedicated to exploring the spectral turn as a heterogeneous formation—as itself, in a way, spectralized: “more than one/no more one [le plus d’un]”⁹—we have chosen to follow Derrida’s text with Colin Davis’s “État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” In this lucid essay, of which an extended version is included in Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (2007), Davis bifurcates the spectral turn by arguing that the current fascination with ghosts and haunting is traceable to two models.¹⁰ Rather than being conflated, these models—the deconstructive, Derridean thinking of the ghost and its prior psychoanalytical elaboration by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok—should be carefully distinguished on the basis of contrasting attitudes towards the secret it embodies. For Derrida, this secret should remain at least partially inscrutable to ensure respect for otherness and to be of value for discovering what it means to learn to live; Abraham and Torok, on the other hand, conceive of their phantom as a lying intruder to be exposed and expelled through psychotherapy. In pointing to this contrast, Davis does not seek to identify either model as superior, but suggests that, when transposed to literary studies, each has value in facilitating a particular type of textual analysis.

Whereas neither Derrida nor Davis speaks in so many words of a spectral turn, this part would be incomplete without an excerpt from Weinstock’s aforementioned introduction, which takes the term for its title and charts its progression through popular culture (from the 1980s resurgence in cinema ghosts to the apparitions crowding 1990s fiction, television, and theater) and, subsequently, academia. Noting the ghost’s affinity—as a figure of undecidability as well as one that persistently demands attention—with poststructuralism and revisionist tendencies in history, Weinstock effectuates a necessary historical and cultural specification of spectrality by inquiring after the reason for the renewed prevalence of ghosts and haunting in late-twentieth-century American culture. Narrowing the focus to “America’s Spectral Turn” suggests other possible ghostly turns elsewhere, provoked by different preoccupations than a “postmodern suspicion of meta-narratives accentuated by millennial anxiety” and a unique national history of ethnic diversity and cultural amnesia.¹¹ It also challenges the generalizing tendency of Derrida’s account, which leaves unacknowledged its reliance on a western, Judeo-Christian conception of haunting.¹²

Following Weinstock’s specification of the spectral turn—replicable for other nations or areas, as well as periods, media, genres, etc.—is Julian Wolfreys’s “Preface: On Textual Haunting,” from Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (2002). Wolfreys, who conceives of literature in general as a haunting structure, has been accused of moving in the direction of broadening spectrality’s reach to the point where everything becomes ghostly. It is worth pointing out, though, that while the preface indeed posits that all literature and storytelling is marked by the power of the text, its author/speaker, and characters to be reanimated again and again in a way that blurs or suspends “categories such as the real or the imaginary,” subsequent chapters carefully trace the ways in which individual Victorian writers (Dickens, Tennyson, Eliot, and Hardy) mobilize specific forms of haunting—in the divergent modes of the gothic, the uncanny, and the spectral.¹³ Wolfreys’s book, therefore, shows how spectrality may operate, simultaneously, at different levels, without the making of a general point precluding more precise uses.

Closing the first part is an excerpt from Roger Luckhurst’s critical contemplation of the limits of the spectral turn—the very turn this article, ironically, seems to have been the first to proclaim. In response to Martin Jay’s question of why the uncanny has begun to function as a “master trope,” Luckhurst critiques “the generalized economy of haunting” he feels inhabits the work of Derrida and Wolfreys, while arguing for a renewed focus on the “generative loci” that prompt specific Gothic apparitions, in this case in tales set in contemporary London.¹⁴ Certain accounts of spectrality may indeed be faulted for ignoring historical, cultural, and geographical specificities—the way ghosts and haunting do not function the same, or elicit the same affective responses, in all contexts—as well as eliding significant differences between concepts like the uncanny, the Gothic, and the spectral. Yet at the same time the construction of a “meta-Gothic discourse” or the contemplation of the “ghostly disruption” of historicity itself are not without merit, as they enable us to think about the structuring role of forms of repetition and return in our contemporary postcolonial, globalizing, and increasingly re- and pre-mediated world.¹⁵

As subsequent parts of this Reader wi...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities
• Part One The Spectral Turn
• Part Two Spectropolitics: Ghosts of the Global Contemporary
• Part Three The Ghost in the Machine: Spectral Media
• Part Four Spectral Subjectivities: Gender, Sexuality, Race
• Part Five Possessions: Spectral Places
• Part Six Haunted Historiographies
• Index