“The Spectral Lives of 9/11” – Banita

Introducing her essay in Popular Ghosts, Georgina Banita writes: “This essay draws on Jacques Derrida’s concept of the hauntology of terror to point out the spectrality of the images we associate with terrorism and with 9/11 in particular by focusing on such popular culture staples as the portrait of Osama bin Laden, the terrorist as invisible ghost – “the enemy within” – and other spectral conceptions of evil and criminality. In doing this I hope to challenge received notions of haunting in relation to spatiality and futurity in the context of a particular form of hauntology related to a specific locale – here the Twin Towers in Manhattan – which, however, becomes diluted through its infinite mechanical reproduction in the media. My interest is divided among several layers of popular attention to post 9/11 “apparitions.” First, I look at the haunting presence of the WTC victims in the popular imagination, victims whose bodies were never recovered and whose photographs were [-p.96] scattered in a traumatized city that learned to associate presence with image rather than with concrete corporeality. Second, I consider the proliferating metaphors linking terrorism to ghost-like invisibility and tenacious haunting. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden has often been likened to a specter that resists “capture” – both in the sense of retrieval and visual representation. Third, I investigate several explicitly post 9/11 mainstream films that not only mention the attacks but offer an unsubtle reification of the events. While Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008) points to the attacks as its unstated backdrop, as the reality that always inhabits a portion of the viewer’s mind but does not receive any explicit mention in the film itself, other productions such as Reign over Me and 25th Hour (Lee, 2002) contend with 9/11 trauma as a hidden tumor written into the fabric of the film’s narrative and artistic strategies. I conclude that the imbricated layers of media representation itself have performed a kind of spectral haunting by reiterating images that have become ingrained in the popular perception of an event which still seems to derive its potency from hauntic repetition, involuntary memory, and a subtle process of postmortemization. The attacks, I argue, have not claimed a position in popular memory as an event, but rather as a post-event – less as the happening of one September morning and more as the era it ushered in through its abrupt disruption of everyday life and normality.” (pp.95-96)

Banita continues:

“In a brief comment entitled “Where Are the Ghosts of 9/11?” published shortly before the 2008 presidential elections in the U.S., David Simpson – author of 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration – writes: “Seven years after 9/11 one of the strangest things is that there are no ghosts. There never were.” To some extent this failure of the attacks to haunt and harass those they did not kill can be traced back to the rapid responses of the authorities and of the media toward a patriotic eulogization of heroism and a dismissal of the more troubling consequences of the attacks. “The photographs that appeared day after day in the New York Times,” Simpson continues, seemed [‘]… flagrantly dishonorable in their very effort to commemorate. They left little to be haunted by as they reconstructed the lives of the dead as Disneyfied icons of optimistic upward mobility, dreams achieved, selfless happiness, and civic virtue amidst an energetic and responsive democracy. No one was cruel, unhappy, or disappointed, no one unappeased.[‘] Simpson astutely argues that by preventing the work of mourning implicit in the act of being haunted, post 9/11 political games manufactured a pervasive fear of the exterior “other” while paying too little attention to the otherness within – the confrontation with uncanny remnants and specters of the attacks: “Except for the immediately bereaved who have hardly been allowed to speak but are constantly spoken for, we have continued to be kept (do we keep ourselves?) from our own hauntings, our own Godzillas or jungles of screaming souls.”” (p.96)

“Defining terrorism as a form of visual warfare, Mitchell suggests that the war on terror is “a war on a projected specter or phantasm, a war against an elusive, invisible, unlocatable enemy, a war that continually misses its target, striking out blindly with conventional means and waging massive destruction on innocent [-100] people in the process” (185). Resembling shadow-boxing more than an act of selfdefense carried out with moral scrupulousness and precision, the war on terror can be seen as the struggle of a possessed person to ban the spirit that they are possessed by – a struggle that damages the self more than it banishes the parasitic spirit. Perhaps the most symptomatic embodiment of the terrorist as poltergeist is the symbolic head of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, whose frequent video appearances, coupled with the impossibility of tracking him down, have bestowed upon him the aura of a demon, a supremely evil figure who appears and disappears at will.” (pp.99-100)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold, mine) Georgina Banita Shadow of the Colossus: The Spectral Lives of 9/11, pp.94-105 in Esther Peeren, and María del Pilar Blanco (Eds.). Popular Ghosts : The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2010.

Haunted spaces and Gothic emotion

Bruno Lessard explains:

“Gothic space differs from ancient Greek space, again according to Worringer, on the basis of the former’s wresting from space “a vitality of expression” (158) that facilitates the coming to life of the sensuous pathos of Gothic that is to be desired in the first place. As Worringer describes it, Gothic architectural space relies on a visual spectacle and embodied impact that force us to reconsider the legacy of Gothic through the ages in order to investigate the transformations it has incurred in other artistic phenomena and media environments. When Worringer mentions that, upon entering a Gothic cathedral, one “encounters an intoxication of the senses … a mystical intoxication of the senses which is not of this world” (159), we can rest assured that affect, sensation, and emotion have become as primordial in the construction of the cathedral as they are in art historical discourse. The sensuous and affective dimensions of Gothic can only take form in the context of a critical practice that will be attuned to these aesthetic and corporeal dimensions, which equally rely on their hypostasized presence in the work. The overwhelming nature and often violent enrapture of Gothic space, as “sensuous-super-sensuousness” (176) or “Sinnlich-Übersinnlich” and affect-value, would undergo a crucial transformation in what is known in literary studies as the “Gothic revival.” A primordial characteristic of Gothic, as noted by a number of scholars, is its reliance on visuality and spectacle. Insofar as this can be relayed through the written word, Gothic writers’ descriptions of emotional states often went beyond their medium of expression in a way that sought to question the boundaries of expressive forms: “Though [Gothic writers] always insist on the powers of feeling and imagination, they tend to concentrate on external details of emotional display while leaving readers to deduce for themselves complex inner psychological movements.” The rise of Gothic cannot be separated from a dual emphasis: the heightened display of emotion and the visual characterization of emotion to the detriment of inner motivation and psychology. The creation of Gothic emotion has to be linked to exterior stimulation, a point that has led to the critique of Gothic as a mode that relies too heavily on sensation, melodrama, and theatrical display. Therefore, the intermedial ambiguities at the heart of Gothic seem as disturbing as the plots of the novels themselves, and the fact that these novels provoke pictorial effects, or ekphrasis, appears equally problematic in terms of defining what Gothic affect is.” (p.218)

“…commentators on Gothic and horror film have noted a first difference [between literary and film Gothic] that would lie in the production of emotion and affect. On the one hand, literary Gothic would rely on an invisible presence that incites a plurality of interpretations; meaning thus becomes overdetermined in the field of suggestion. On the other hand, cinematic Gothic would tend to show the threatening agent, thereby reducing the number of possibilities. Therefore, the production of affect and emotion would always be accompanied by the production of subjectivities in a dichotomous scheme that leaves little room for the contradiction and hybridity that has always fueled Gothic.

“A film such as Wise’s The Haunting already problematizes the aforementioned distinction between literary and cinematic Gothic. The problem may arise when, as in Wise’s film, Gothic does away with the immediate visible presence of the threatening agent; the house replaces the monster. Instead of a physical presence haunting space, we have physical space h(a)unting the characters. Characters and spectators hear pounding and thumping noises and see doors bend. It is therefore appropriate to speak, as Misha Kavka does, of the cinematic Gothic’s use of the “plasticity of space” to convey emotion and affect, thereby disclosing “an underlying link between fear and the manipulation of space around a human body.”” (p.219)

Kavka argues that in Gothic “something … remains shadowed or off-screen,” while the horror film would present “something terrifying placed before our very eyes but from which we want to avert our gaze” (227). Kavka goes on to refine the dialectic between seeing and not seeing by adding that in the horror film there is something to see that we try not to see. In the case of Gothic, she maintains, the dialectic is different in the sense that it is “part of the structure of visualization itself” (227). Indeed, she suggests that it is not that we do not want to see, but that we cannot see: “Rather than the horror film’s challenge to the audience to open their eyes and see, the feared object of Gothic cinema is both held out and withheld through its codes of visual representation” (227).” (p.220) [NB Lessard goes on to complicate this distinction through consideration of Wise’s The Haunting]

“…perhaps it is Worringer who stated it best about haunting, life, and the use of CGI in contemporary Gothic films when he said that “[b]ehind the visible appearance of a thing lurks its caricature, behind the lifelessness of a thing an uncanny, ghostly life, and so all actual things become grotesque” (82).” (p.222)

Ref: Bruno Lessard Gothic Affects: Digitally Haunted Houses and the Production of Affect-Value, pp.213-224 in Esther Peeren, and María del Pilar Blanco (Eds.). Popular Ghosts : The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2010.

Reference is to: Misha Kavka ‘The Gothic on Screen’ in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E Hogle (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University press, 2002)

Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic, trans. Herbert Read (New York: Schocken, 1957)

Ghosts and time in the Gothic

According to Arno Meteling:

“Gothic literature, film, or television series with ghosts as popular stock characters usually ponder the rules of communication between the living and the dead. In most cases there is an asymmetry between them, for although the ghosts admittedly inhabit the world of the living, they have no natural place in it. Moreover, ghosts, like images or characters on a photograph or in a film, are usually not able to change or develop. Like the psyche’s reaction to trauma, ghosts are often forced to repeat the same thing over and over again or at least to stay in the same place forever. As a consequence, ghosts tend to establish a timeless zone of inertia in the flow of the narrative, creating a cyclical ahistoric or posthistoric state, or, as Jacques Derrida puts it, the “end of history.” Despite Derrida’s reference to Hamlet as a central context for his hauntology, ghosts in literature, film, or television series are usually not responsible for time being completely out of joint. Instead, ghosts seem to be specific figures of anachronism, or more precisely, of asynchronicity, representing a static moment of the past haunting the present. As literary or filmic devices, ghosts therefore often operate as erratic monuments or hieroglyphs that signify a disturbing incident that happened in the past, a secret that has to be deciphered in order to understand the repercussions for the present.” (p.187)

Meteling continues: “One of the chief literary precursors of the modern ghost novel is the Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century, a literary genre that, besides dealing with ghosts, family curses, damsels in distress, and evil villains, evokes fear not only by describing horrific events, but by creating a certain mood of terror or horror derived from its setting. The Gothic novel is always about spatial arrangements, most obviously about architectural spaces like haunted houses, castles, dungeons, cemeteries, attics, [-p.188] or crypts. Significantly, Horace Walpole not only names the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), after its setting but emphasizes its realism in the preface of the first edition[ in which the setting is described in detail].” (pp.187-188)

“Considering that the novel is a fantastic one,” Meteling notes, “with supernatural effects that border on the comical and the grotesque (including a giant helmet that falls from the sky and kills the villain’s son), the emphasis on the spatial authenticity of the castle is conspicuous and proves the importance of setting for the Gothic novel. Since its reformulation in the nineteenth century, the dark and brooding atmosphere of haunted houses and castles also increasingly reflects the inner conflicts of the characters. …Most modern ghost novels adopt this Gothic correspondence between characters and building, sometimes transforming the house itself into a storehouse of repressed memories and thereby anthropomorphizing it….” (p.188)

Ref: Arno Meteling Genius Loci: Memory, Media, and the Neo-Gothic in Georg Klein and Elfriede Jelinek, pp.187-199 in Esther Peeren, and María del Pilar Blanco (Eds.). Popular Ghosts : The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2010.

Ghosts are never just ghosts

“Andrew Smith describes ghosts as “historical beings because they are messengers about the preoccupations of a particular age.… Ghosts are never just ghosts; they provide us with an insight into what haunts our culture.”” (p.282)

Ref: Isabella van Elferen Haunted by a Melody: Ghosts, Transgression, and Music in Twin Peaks, pp.282-295 in Esther Peeren, and María del Pilar Blanco (Eds.). Popular Ghosts : The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2010.

Reference is to: Andrew Smith, ‘Hauntings,’ in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2007), 153

Psychogeography and song

According to Anthony Hutchison: “Country music is a genre defined by a sense of place. From its inception, however, the ethnomusicology and academic treatment of ‘roots’ music was more informed by temporal than spatial ideas.” (p.268) Describing the spatial aspect of John and Alan Lomax’s seminal work in the field, Hutchison observes that “There were, nevertheless, a number of tentative spatial dimensions to [Alan] Lomax’s analyses and theorizations that ran alongside the more historically oriented elements. In ‘America Sings the Saga of America,’ […] for instance, Lomax details what he describes as a number of ‘dangerous potentialities’ that folklore movements must reckon with. Among these are the processes of industrialization and urbanization that have radically altered much of the spatial context for American folk music: [-p.269]
[‘]Rural folklore can be, falsely, opposed to city folklore, thus creating or widening the split between city and country populations. We are coming to find, however, that oral literature exists in the factories and slums, as another aspect of the rural folklore.[‘]
As well as noting the significance of the city as a site of American folklore, Lomax is also alert here to heterogeneous spatial elements at a national level that might account for regional patterns in the origins and geographical spread of the various forms of roots music. This extends to questions of taste and preference as well as others of genre and style as ways in which the relationship between musical forms and specific cities, states, or regions might be determined. These were issues that were undoubtedly pressing given the new technologies of recording reproduction and dissemination that drove the ‘nationalization’ of roots music in the postwar period. The fact that such forms had once been largely confined, in terms of both their production and reception, to relatively circumscribed geographical zones of origin undoubtedly gave this music much of what was regarded as its cultural integrity; it also nonetheless ensured an immense degree of variation across regions. This variation, however, could only be widely recognized once the technologies became available to bring it to wider attention. As Lomax notes in his introduction to Folk Songs of North America, ‘the map’ sings.” (pp.268-269)

“[By the 1970s, i]t was time, according to the cultural geographers, for American folk music to be subjected to “a locational analysis [that seeks] to understand why various phenomena are where they are.” The first edition of The Sounds of People and Places, a landmark work in this field edited by George O. Carney, appeared in 1978, and was the culmination of an enormously fruitful first wave of scholarship. Despite a subsequent slowdown, by 1993 a network of more than fifty of those interested in the sub-discipline had been established and, in 2003, Sounds itself moved into a fourth edition. In recounting the various experiences he acquired in a career given over to this topic, Carney has also usefully tabulated a number of “conceptual subdivisions” that have helped him to organize Sounds, such as “spatial variation” and “culture hearth” (which denote musical taste preferences and origins as they relate to region or locale). Yet just as Lomax identified possible concerns that would later be taken up by more spatially [-p.270] oriented musicologists and folklorists, so too has Carney pinpointed potential areas of study for those who might wish to permeate the boundaries of his own geomusicological research. It is the subdivision of “psychological and symbolic elements” more commonly negotiated by cultural critics that perhaps offers the most potential among the possible new fields identified by Carney. Such psychological and symbolic factors inherent within musical forms, Carney believes, can effectively reconstruct the spatial environment out of which they emerge; that is, they can enrich or perhaps even reconceptualize what we take to be the actual “character of a place.” The example he invokes for illustrative purposes is that of “surfin’ rock” as a crucial cultural component in shaping perceptions of Southern California (16).” (pp.269-270)

“The term “psychogeography” first appears in Guy Debord’s 1955 essay “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” where it is defined as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” For Debord, the need for a form of critical inquiry premised on the relationship between geography and human consciousness arises out of the novel conditions of postwar urban existence. Crucial to this postwar transformation of urban life is the rise of the automobile and the refashioning of cities such as Paris in response to what Debord describes as the demand for “the smooth circulation of [automobiles’] rapidly increasing quantity” (5).” (p.270)

Ref: (italics in original, emphases in bold blue, mine) Anthony Hutchison ‘Following the Ghost’: The Psychogeography of Alternative Country, pp.268-281 in Esther Peeren, and María del Pilar Blanco (Eds.). Popular Ghosts : The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2010.

Reference is to: George Carney, The Sounds of people and places: a geography of American Folk and Popular Music (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 2

Guy  Debord ‘Introduction to a critique of urban Geography’ reprinted in ken Knabb, ed. Situationist International Anthology (Berkely: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 5

ghosts, 9/11 and the spectrality of everyday life

Introducing their book, Popular Ghosts, Esther Peeren and María del Pilar Blanco begin to explore the connections between ‘the ghost’ and the everyday. They explain that they are interested in “the changed relationship between the ghost and the everyday” (p.xii) and assert that: “Ghosts are no longer just perceived as mysterious, otherworldly manifestations that need be put to rest elsewhere to restore order, but are seen to reveal something of the enigma of everyday life….” (p.xiii)

“The everyday is like a ghost – secretive, ungraspable, yet with an acutely felt presence – and is itself beset by ghosts. Michel de Certeau famously posited that “haunted spaces are the only ones people can live in” and the “Ghosts in the City” chapter in the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life draws attention to the way the modern city is haunted by its pasts; taking the form of old buildings, trees, furniture, photographs, and other “wild objects,” a population of spirits “spreads out its ramifications, penetrating the entire network of our everyday life … this population traverses time, survives the wearing away of human existences, and articulates a space.” A different connection between the everyday and the ghost is established when, in his introduction to The Everyday Life Reader, Ben Highmore writes: “everyday life is haunted by implicit ‘others,’ who supposedly live outside the ordinary, the everyday” (1). Whether the everyday is haunted by what is outside it or by what used to be part of it, it is insistently represented as a haunted/haunting structure, where what you see is never quite what you get.” (p.xiii)

“…the ghost has become an increasingly appropriate metaphor for the way marginal populations – like the Dominicans seeking access to the U.S. – haunt the everyday, living on the edge of visibility and inspiring a curious mix of fear and indifference; and the everyday exhibits an ever-growing reliance on spectral technologies like the Internet, mobile telephony, and digitalized media. In addition, the inherent spectrality of money, central to Marx’s theory of capital, has reemerged with startling visibility in the exploitative structures of global capitalism and its creation of “spectral labor,” as well as in the current global economic crisis (which, incidentally, is seeing the return of the ghost town as an everyday phenomenon). And since 9/11, the everyday has been haunted by the specter of the “War on Terror,” which itself features an unprecedented degree of spectrality, waged as it is against mysterious, unlocalizable, and endlessly mediated enemies, in an indeterminate space (everywhere yet nowhere), and within an infinite timeframe (the threat never abates but promises eternal regenerations).” (p.xiv)

“…it is necessary to take stock of the theorization of the ghost to date. Located in the ambivalent realm between life and death, ghosts have always inspired cultural fascination as well as theoretical, philosophical, and theological consideration, but until recently such consideration was either focused on the ontological question of whether they exist or it used the ghost as a metaphor to address another, more important quandary (as in Gilbert Ryle’s critique of the Cartesian mind– body split in terms of the ghost in the machine). The ghost has also often been used within established disciplines or fields to elucidate a particular concept or problem. Thus, in psychoanalysis, the ghost, in some form or another, has been crucial to Freud’s uncanny, Lacan’s discussion of desire, and Abraham and Torok’s theory of intergenerational trauma. In literary studies, it is integral to the Gothic, as a primary genre characteristic. It was, however, with Derrida’s Specters of Marx that the ghost not only acquired a deconstructive dimension, but emerged as a methodology in and of itself. Derrida’s extrapolation of the disjointing function of the ghost in Hamlet to ontology, history, and the wider social realm, as well as his association of the specter with absolute alterity, notions of inheritance, hospitality, and the messianic, have proved immensely popular and productive. However, whereas Derrida’s hauntology ultimately plays upon much the same aspects of deferred meaning and absence-presence as other, earlier figures of deconstruction like the trace and the hymen, thus subsuming it to a wider theoretical framework, this volume aims to put the ghost center stage.” (p.xv)

“The increasing normalcy of the ghost also manifests in the way many ghosts in current fiction, film, and television are portrayed in an exceedingly mundane manner, as part of the everyday and as having everyday concerns. Whereas it used to be common to find ghosts trying to drag the living out of the everyday into a world of horrors on “the other side,” what contemporary ghosts want more than anything, it seems, is to be normal. Consequently, one of the prevailing fears in relation to the contemporary ghost is not that it might terrify us, but that we might not notice or recognize it at all.” (p.xiv)

“Each speaking for different ghostly realms, the essays in Popular Ghosts produce an eclectic map of the ways in which the global everyday continues to incorporate haunting into its operative functions and creative representations. Taking the popular to mean that which attempts to encompass the varied tastes, movements, and fascinations of subjects in the various societies here represented, each chapter reflects on the importance of incorporating, questioning, and renewing the languages of haunting in(to) the world of the living to explore the historicity of being and location, the nature of community, and the ways in which we can continue existing with ghosts.” (pxxii)

Ref: (italics in original, emphases in blue bold, mine) Esther Peeren and María del Pilar Blanco ‘Introduction’ pp.ix-xxiv in Esther Peeren, and María del Pilar Blanco (Eds.). Popular Ghosts : The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2010.

Ghosts are back

“It seems that ghosts are everywhere these days. Whether in rock songs, Internet news feeds, or museum exhibits, we appear to have entered an era that has reintroduced the vocabulary of ghosts and haunting into everyday life.” (p.ix)

“If ghosts are old, they are certainly not tired. While Ghost Voices [a British magazine] features articles on what we could call “good, old-fashioned haunting” (haunted houses, mediums, and so on), we can also speak of new etymologies and epistemologies of haunting that are endemic to our global times.” (p.ix) Citing an example of organised identity theft (from Puerto Rican school children) for the purposes of offering US citizenship(s) to Dominicans, Peeren and Blanco explain: “Identity theft is our contemporary crime of “ghosting” others to unblock global passages that would otherwise remain unsurpassable. The idea that one person from a specific nationality can become the operative “ghost” of another (in this case a Puerto Rican child) in order to gain access to a new way of life independent [-p.x] of the “real” identity holder, offers a fascinating prospect of a fluctuating world map where haunting can become a thing of, and for, the living.” (pp.ix-x)

“As the ways of becoming a ghost have become so varied, the first thing we must establish is what we understand by that term. What are ghosts? For “ghost,” the Oxford English Dictionary lists a plethora of definitions, the most common of which – the ghost as “the soul of a deceased person, spoken of as appearing in a visible form, or otherwise manifesting its presence, to the living” – dates back to Chaucer. This definition has become prevalent as the non-figurative sense of the word, which in this case does not entail a statement about the ontological status of such beings (for a consideration of their cultural function, it is largely immaterial whether ghosts do or do not exist). In a figurative capacity, “ghost” has acquired many technical meanings as well: in optics, biology, metallurgy, mathematics, theater, and, most prominently, in visual media like cinema, photography, and television, where it refers to the appearance (through various causes) of an unintended, secondary image. Generally, the ghostly can be said to refer to that which is present yet insubstantial (the spirit rather than the body), secondary rather than primary (a faint copy, a trace, a ghost writer), and potentially unreal or deceptive (a spurious radar signal). The axiological quality of the ghost varies: while etymologically the word can be traced to the pre-Teutonic ghoizdo, meaning “fury, anger,” the OED lists both “a good spirit, an angel” and “an evil spirit” as obsolete meanings and its description of the ghost as the return of the dead refrains from assigning a particular purpose or emotion either to the apparition or to the one who witnesses it.

In this collection, we discuss both non-figurative ghosts – those manifestations, in some form or another, of the returning dead, and other ghostly beings or images emanating from realms beyond what is considered the “real” – and figurative ghosts, including marginalized citizens, invisible terror threats, the illusionary presences of computer-generated imagery (CGI), and the intangible, spectral nature of modern media, ostensibly unmoored from distinct locations in time and space. We believe these two types of ghosts do not represent totally distinct cultural phenomena, but constantly feed into each other, so that the increasing ghostliness of new media influences the representation of ghosts in media – think of the use of the video-tape in Hideo Nakata’s film The Ring (1998) – and vice versa, as when, for example, the metaphorical ghostliness of media is negotiated by materializing it in supernatural sightings, like the early 1960s phenomenon of the TV ghost. Similarly, the recent use of the ghost or specter as a designation for social outcasts (illegal immigrants, desaparecidos, the homeless, prisoners) can be seen to impact on the current portrayal of many non-figurative ghosts as impotent and ineffectual victims rather than powerful aggressors. This tendency governs the filmic portrayals of haunting in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), where the ghosts remain unaware of their own deceased status, and in television series like Medium and Ghost Whisperer, where the dead can only resolve their problems with the help of the living. Such moments of cross-fertilization indicate that non-figurative and figurative ghosts haunt each other, and should therefore be considered in tandem, in this case through a conceptual approach to the ghost.” (p.x)

“Jacques Derrida, whose Specters of Marx (1994) perhaps makes him the most indelible recent theorist of haunting, has argued that each age has its own ghosts. Upon describing the (limited) possibility of demarcating the historical, philosophical, and social “singularity” of haunting, however, he pushes for a near immediate reinsertion of such explorations into what he calls a “much larger spectrological sequence.” This is in part due to Derrida’s insistence on haunting as a temporal, rather than spatial, phenomenon, where the ghost is not tied down to an idea of physical location. Popular Ghosts seeks to redress the balance by situating ghostly appearances in time and space, in line with Roger Luckhurst’s critique of the spectral turn in cultural criticism as “symptomatically blind to its generative loci.”” (p.xi)

“We are interested in seeing what the different ghosts of our era look, sound, and feel like, as well as what functions they have in our cultural imagination, without losing sight of the ongoing revisions and revitalizations of previous spectral turns.” (p.xi)

Ref: (italics in original, emphases in blue bold, mine) Esther Peeren and María del Pilar Blanco ‘Introduction’ pp.ix-xxiv in Esther Peeren, and María del Pilar Blanco (Eds.). Popular Ghosts : The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2010.

Popular ghosts

I hope I’m not overquoting, but … in his review of María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds. Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010, Rikk Mulligan writes that:

“The editors seek to free the ghost of its earlier theoretical chains of Gothic interpellation and psychoanalysis embodied in Freud’s uncanny or Lacan’s desire, and to move it beyond the temporal focus of Derrida’s “hauntology.” The goal is to give “new territories to the ghost” beyond the public and domestic spheres, to the “more phantasmatic transnational structures like globalized capitalism and terrorism” (xvii). Far from its origins in the traditional haunted house or Gothic castle, the editors considers ghosts as disturbances in both space and time, and as disruptions [-p.366] further propagated by the very concepts and technologies used to define, quantify, pursue, investigate and commodify them.” (pp.365-366)

“The essays in “Spectral Politics of the Contemporary,” the second section, explore how the ghost can be used to view the changing spaces created by globalization, transnationalism, and postcolonialism. Caroline Herbert, Georgiana Banita, Esher Peeren, Michael Cuntz, and Benjamin D’Harlingue move from the abstract and use the ghost to question the place of the “marginalized citizen” in post-partition India, under the shadows of 9/11 and the ongoing War on Terror, in post-colonial Africa, and within the prisons of the United States. Given the current media moment, Georgiana Banita’s essay, “Shadow of the Colossus,” draws particular attention in its analysis of the ghost of 9/11 on the discourse of terrorism, as media continues to recycle and remediate not only the images of the attacks, but the public appearances of survivors or the families of those who [-p.367]   died. Banita discusses the spectrality of 9/11 images, especially in films like Cloverfield (2008) and The 25th Hour (2002), indexing them with the biopictures of Kevin Clarke, artifacts that may serve to help diminish the emotional scars of the attacks.

In the three essays of the third section, “Chasing Ghosts In(to) the Twenty-first Century,” Karen Williams, Alissa Burger, and Catherine Spooner concentrate on televised hauntings. Taking these three essays as a unit, the editors’ suggest that, while the Victorians sought to prove the existence of ghosts and to contact spirits, the ghost chase has now become the pursuit of how we define “reality, authenticity, and knowledge” in an era of spectacular entertainment and the simulacra of digital media.” (pp.366-367)

“Pamela Thurschwell’s reading of the Ghost World (1997) graphic novel suggests that adolescents exist in a “ghost state” that both haunts and bridges childhood and adulthood. Christine Wilson’s “Haunted Habitability” in particular offers an intriguing discussion of how the representation of space in various haunted house narratives can be read in relation to ecocriticism and nature writing. She highlights the wild, unruly, and resistant aspect of haunted houses and their threatening spaces in the examples of Stephen King’s Rose Red (2002) and the film version of Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1976)—examples of a threatening wilderness, not of “place attachment” as many ecocritics depict “wild spaces” in opposition to the normalizing and destructive experience of [-p.368] urbanization. In the context of “home” and domestic space, Wilson suggests that these haunted house narratives help expose “place attachment” as a means of obscuring history and imperialism. If considered in relation to Richard Slotkin’s work on the American frontier, the houses are sites of resistance to the “regeneration through violence” where Western rationality is challenged.” (pp.367-368)

“Peeren considers ghosts as ancestral guides and spirits in the African literature of Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, and Achille Mbembe, making the significant argument that in non-Western literature, the ghost is not only part of everyday life, but is often a harmonious part of the family and home. Peeren makes the point that, unlike Western ghosts, it is the actions of these spirits that are disturbing, not their appearance or presence itself, further emphasizing the need to “reconfigure the relation between the ghostly and the everyday,” especially in the West (115).” (p.368)

“For critics of the fantastic, Popular Ghosts incorporates work on a number of cultures across space and time. Sometimes, however, it becomes difficult to discern what is being haunted and what does the haunting. Some contributions are far more theoretical or technical than might be expected of “popular ghosts.”” (p.369) [NB I think the editors cover this point in their introduction where they define ‘the popular’ more broadly than this, explaining: ”

do not align ourselves with certain strands of cultural studies that view popular culture as exclusively “the culture of working people, the labouring classes and the poor,” 13 or as inherently subversive. 14 Rather, the popular, precisely by virtue of concerning that which is appreciated by many (often across gender, class, ethnic, race, and even national borders), is considered as a dynamic realm of contestation between various cultural forces in which hegemony and resistance, conformity and subversion, may be produced. The popular realm includes both so-called “high” and “low” culture, since we believe that this distinction has become untenable now that both forms are seen to constantly inflect – or should we say “haunt” – each other: high art museums, for example, relentlessly popularize and proliferate their priceless, unique artworks by putting them on anything from postcards and posters to mugs, pencils, and fridge magnets, while graffiti moves effortlessly from street corners to swish galleries. Significantly, the ghost itself points to a collapse of the “high” culture/“low” culture distinction, since its ongoing association with superstition, folklore, and the genre of the Gothic marks it as a distinctly low-brow figure even when it appears in the work of established, high-brow authors such as Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Beckett, or Elfriede Jelinek.” (p.xii, Esther Peeren and María del Pilar Blanco ‘Introduction’ pp.ix-xxiv in Esther Peeren, and María del Pilar Blanco (Eds.). Popular Ghosts : The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2010.)]

Ref: Rikk Mulligan (2011) Review: María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds. Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. Extrapolation Fall 2011 (52:3); pp.365-369