This text asks us to ask who is participating and engaging, including those who may not be here anymore but still their ghosts haunt and ask us to negate dispossessions and dehumanizations. It suggests that we take on collective responsibility for transforming the "shadow of a life into an undiminished life whose shadows touch softly in the spirit of a peaceful reconciliation" (208). There needs to be meaning and depth that unites collaborators, embedded in a purpose that strives to acknowledge subjugated knowledge. It also encourages that we acknolwedge the complexities of personhood within ourselves, the people we collaborate with, and the people we write about.
How can experimental and installation ethnography tell stories? How might experimental and installation ethnography aid us in interpreting anew the signs of particular events so as to grasp them and present them, particularly to get to the "ghost story," the likes of which may be embedded in the flickering of a moment? How might we get at the "profane illumination," the kind of conjuring that "iniatiates" because it tells us "something important that we had not known; because it is leading us somewhere, or elsewhere?" (205) How might such in turn engage the sensuous knowledge of spectators, and encourage them to see place and toxicity differently? How might it get them to engage in a double-take, questioning their ways of knowing and seeing the world?
How can we examine the toxicities that are not visible to the eye, or those that are so hypervisible that we do not notice their existence? How do we begin to read the signs that might point to the toxic? How do we take note of the toxics that imbue the everyday interactions people have with one another and the places they reside and work? How might visualizations of toxics and toxic places help us to see that which we have doubted but still suspected?
The text calls on us to reconize the "ghosts" that characteristically attach themselves to the ethnographic places that produced them in the first place as "haunting reminders of lingering trouble" (xix). According to Gordon, there are "place[s] where things stand gaping" within ethnographic fieldsites, and these might bring us to question the limits of representation and how we present the world. While the ghost represents loss and paths not taken, they also speak to the future possibility and hope of a place. Gordon asserts that social scientists are responsible for considering how we grapple with the history of places when dealing with the present circumstances, asking questions such as the following: How are certain aspects of a place (such as social memory) silenced and absented? How do we capture the fundamental sociality of haunting in a particular place and time?
Gordon calls on social scientists to consider a different way of seeing that is less mechanical and that negotiates the unsettled relationship between what we see and what we know. As she asserts, "The blind field and its fundamental imbrication in the visible field is what we are aiming to comrpehend. The blind field is what the ghost's arrival signals" (107). It calls on us to see both what is hypervisible and what is missing in visualizations, whether photographs or other materials that emphasize the visual sense. How might get at a knowledge that also acknowledges? That is what the text is asking that we get at. Such is particularly important in places with heavy power dynamics and histories of dispossession. It calls on us to recognize the manners in which those in power utilize the visual to make oppression less visible. And for us to work on avoiding the deployment of such power for our own gains, in our own projects. Introducing the examples of Valenzuela and Morrison's works, Gordon suggests that they have a way of seeing that "does not just disclose the evidence of things not seen, neglected and banished: it illuminates profanely" (203). What do visualizations obscure even as they attempt to show? How might we alter our ways of seeing to visualize the haunted?
"A woman was supposed to be someplace, but she never arrived" (34).
"Complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society's problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward...Complex personhood means that even those who haunt our dominant institutions and their systems of value are haunted too by things they sometimes have names for and sometimes do not" (4-5).
"In a 1981 introduction to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison wrote: 'despite the bland assertions of sociologists, [the] 'high visibility' [of the African-American man] actually rendered one un-visible' (xii). Hypervisibility is a persistent alibi for the mechanisms that render one unvisible: 'His darkness ... glow[ing]... within the American conscience with such intensity that most whites feigned moral blindness toward his predicament.' The difficulty for us now, as it was for Ellison when he published Invisible Man in 1952, is the extent to which the mediums of public image making and visibility are inextricably wedded to the cojoined mechanisms that systematically render certain groups of people apparently privately poor, uneducated, ill, and disenfranchised.
"Ellison's Invisible Man gives double reference both to the unvisibility of the hypervisible African-American man and to the invisibility of 'the Man' who persistently needs an alibi for the blindness of his vision. As a strategy of analysis, Ellison's insight underscores the need to conceptualize visibility as a complex system of permission and prohibition, punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness. If Ellison's argument encourages us to interrogate the mechanisms by which the highly visible can actually be a type of invisibility, Toni Morrison's (1989) argument that 'invisible things are not necessarily not-there' encourages the complementary gesture of investigating how that which appears absent can indeed be a seething presence. Both these positions are about how to write ghost stories—about how to write about permissions and prohibitions, presence and absence, about apparitions and hysterical blindness. To write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories. To write ghost stories implies that ghosts are real, that is to say, that they produce material effects. To impute a kind of objectivity to ghosts implies that, from certain standpoints, the dialectics of visibility and invisibility involve a constant negotiation between what can be seen and what is in the shadows. Why would we want to write such stories? Because unlike DeLillo's indifference, in the end and in the beginning it does matter what they see or think they see. It matters because although the terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, they cannot decode the secret of every item, infallibly. Indeed, what is at stake here is the political status and function of systematic hauntings" (17-8).
"The photograph is involved in the ghostly matter of things and not surprisingly, since the wavering quality of haunting often hinges on what sign or image raises the ghost and what it means to our conscious visible attention. The photograph's relationship to haunting is never simple. When photographs appear in contexts of haunting, they become part of the contest between familiarity and strangeness, between hurting and healing, that the ghost is registering. The photograph is involved in the ghostly matter of state-sponsored disappearance" (102-3).
Gordon begins by tracing the haunting of Sabina Spielrein that is both personal to Gordon and to the institution of psychoanalysis. Spielrein transferred from one invisible field, madness, into another, psychoanalysis, yet still she was moved to the shadows, rejected by Freud and Jung despite her immense contributions to the field in thinking about repetition, death, and the decline of civilization. Gordon questions what psychoanalysis lost as a result, not only what it repressed or marginalized, and urges that out of a concern for justice that we reckon with haunting as a prerequisite for sensuous knowledge. She applies this concern for justice to a discussion of disappearance in Argentina and the involvement of psychoanalysis, utilizing Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography to provoke a different, “animated” recognition of the “violence of modernization” in the complicated neoimperialism that characterizes Latin America. Unlike the thousands of rationalistic human rights reports, Valenzuela’s novel captures the haunting elements of disappearing: she utilizes the examples of the punctum that brings to life the life external to photos, both when AZ views a photograph in the newspaper and when the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo display the desaparecideos. Gordon argues that in the portrayal of loved ones lost to the state in Argentina, disappearance was not torture, death, homicide, but a complex system of repression involving not only the authoritarian state authorizing torture and death but the complacency of the middle-class; disappearance was a present and lived thing in itself, a haunting. Unlike the bag of bones representing past death and the attempt of an authoritarian state to scare its population into submission, the ghost could not be completely managed by the state.
Gordon proceeds by documenting the continued presence of slavery (without a capital S) in the United States and the unfinished (failed) project of Reconstruction, utilizing Beloved as a sociological text to create the possibility of a becoming something else in the present and for the future. She contextualizes Morrison’s project in Beloved both through an examination of slave narratives constrained by the aims of the abolition movement, yet portrayed as the “real truth of slavery,” as well as Margaret Garner’s encounter with the half-sign of Levi Coffin’s hat and his obsession with his trivial property even as he purported to “represent” her. Gordon argues that Beloved recognizes what the slave narrative forgot, creating a palimpsest, detecting that which was not erased, and pushes forth a recognition that abolition is not emancipation. In addition, Beloved shows that the ghost can be just as haunted as the living, for it is a living force that has its own desires which figure the complicated sociality of a determining formation and is embedded in the social structure of history. Crucially, Beloved calls for accountability in a way that the slave narrative could not, arguing that we must recognize where we are in the story, even if we do not want to be there, accounting not only those who do not count but are counted.
Much as a reckoning with ghosts, Avery Gordon’s analysis of social science as a field and its knowledge production is at once painful, unsettling, and difficult; however, as she insists throughout, we need not be frightened of the ghosts we (social scientists) so painstakingly strive to discipline and in its worst forms, stifle. Her project is one that seeks out justice in a world that is not yet “post” modern, whether in psychoanalysis, Marxism, sociology, the U.S., or Argentina, areas where the focus on the “exceptional” and individualized trauma tend to cast social hauntings and complex personhood to the shadows. She pushes for haunting as a methodology—imputed with a kind of objectivity and sociality—that makes the fictional, theoretical, and factual speak to one another. She strives to fill in the gaps of knowledge production through an interdisciplinary approach that examines literature as sociological texts, incorporates historical and photographic evidence of ghosts, and utilizes Raymond Williams’ notion of the structure of feeling. Similarly to Cedric Robinson in his book An Anthropology of Marxism, Gordon critiques Marxism and psychoanalysis: while both provided important directions for analyzing unseen forces, they failed to account for the things and people who were primarily unseen and banished to the periphery of social graciousness, whether due to hypervisibility or silencing through exclusion. She introduces Luisa Valenzuela and Toni Morrison as exemplary writers who utilize haunting to recognize the need to deal with the State, Power, Slavery, Racism, Capitalism Science, and Patriarchy, as well as the necessity of reckoning with the structure of feeling of haunting, whether one feels it or not, whether one was on the receiving end of violence, the one dealing the blows, or a bystander.
This text was published in 1997 and a second edition was released in 2008 with a new introduction, both by the University of Minnesota. Its topical areas are listed as “postmodernism--social aspects," "sociology--philosophy," and "marginality, social." Gordon's text was published with assistance from the Margaret S. Harding Memorial Endowment honoring the first director of the University of Minnesota Press.
Avery Gordon is a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a visiting faculty fellow at the Centre for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She obtained her Ph.D. at Boston College. Her work focuses on radical thought in action over the last few years, and she has written on captivity, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them. She is also a Keeper of the Hawthorne Archives, which records the living history of the arrival and existence of a group of runaways, secessionists and in-differents who form autonomous zones and settlements, and have receded from living as obedient (and also resistant or resisting) subjects. She is the author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minnesota, 2008), Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knolwedge, Power and People (Paradigm Publishers 2004), and the co-editor of Mapping Multiculturalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Body Politics (Westview, 1994). Recent scholarly publications have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Race & Class, PMLA, and other collections. Since 1997, Gordon has co-hosted a weekly public affairs radio program, "No Alibis," on KCSB 91.9 FM Santa Barbara.