In terms of characterizing ethnographic places, and really space/place more generally, Gordon’s conceptualization of haunting actually shifts the way we think about temporality in a given space. Haunting, for Gordon, is simultaneously in the past, present, and future.. And isn’t linear, but is really repetitive. Gordon’s work thinks about repetitions and she talks about how ghosts tend to return to familiar places. I think shifting the way we think about time in relation to space could really open up possibilities for us to think about ethnographic sites. Thinking in relation with McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds, I also think this shift in temporality allows us to operate at various scales simultaneously.
“To write a history of the present requires stretching toward the horizon of what cannot be seen with ordinary clarity yet.. To imagine beyond the limits of what's already understandable is our best hope for retaining what ideology critique traditionally offers while transforming its limitations into what was called utopian possibility” (195)
Above is one of my favorite quotes from Gordon and I think this notion of stretching beyond the horizon to really theorize a present is a great way to think about our ethnographic sites. How do we think toward the future? How do we think beyond a give space and even time? How does haunting disrupt knowledge production generally and what does that disruption do for our thinking of place/space?
"that life is complicated may seem a banal expression to the obvious, but it is nonetheless, a profound theoretical statement—perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time” (3).
"a paradigmatic way in which life is more complicated than those of us who study it have usually granted. Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production" (7)
We must engage with ghosts, even when they aren’t our own (164).
For Gordon, reckoning with ghosts “is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the past, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had” (183).
“To write a history of the present requires stretching toward the horizon of what cannot be seen with ordinary clarity yet.. To imagine beyond the limits of what's already understandable is our best hope for retaining what ideology critique traditionally offers while transforming its limitations into what was called utopian possibility” (195)
First, she describes some of her own hauntings. She writes of her journey to a conference with an abstract in hand only to be distracted by a photograph. Rather, only to be haunted by a photograph. She traces her encounter with Sabina Spielrein, a key but often forgotten figure in the psychoanalytical movement. It’s Spielrein’s absence in a photo that leads Gordon on a detour to theorizing exclusions and absences. For Gordon, “a dead women was not at a conference she was supposed to attend—requires attention to what is not seen, but is nonetheless powerful real” (42). As a reader, our notions of real, imaginary, and fictional shift. We are on this journey with Gordon as she tells the story of her own shifting temporalities and notions of reality. The uncanniness of her haunting experiences are transferred (42) to us as she writes her story. Or rather as she poetically dispels her story with all of its repetitions. We feel her frustration with Freud when she looks back and sees how he once thought of the unconsciousness as being related to the social and not just a private thing, a “self-contained closed system” (47). As we read, we see the “markings of her detour” (60).
She leads us to two novels: Como en la Guerra and Beloved. Gordon prioritizes fiction, but not necessarily in a fictional sense. She focuses on their complexities and their complications. She pushes us to think of ghosts behind or in between or (beyond?) the pages: how are these absences real in the sense they have material consequences? These novels are avenues for us to understand larger social realities. They are means to counter Freud’s “self-contained” notion of unconsciousness. To understand the state terror and desparacedio of Argentina, we must wait and be open to experiencing hauntings. We must engage with ghosts, even when they aren’t our own ((164). We must recognize that our unconscious is actually accessible to “wordy consciousness” (47). We must awake to reality, much like the character in Valenzuela’s novel. And we must know that history is always a site of struggle with the living and the ghostly. Like we see in Morrison’s novel, the power of the past is always lingering (139) in the present.
To begin, Avery Gordon proclaims “that life is complicated may seems a banal expression to the obvious, but it is nonetheless, a profound theoretical statement—perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time” (3). It is these complications, especially those that are seemingly invisible, that Gordon explores in her book titled “Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.” These complications are, of course, met with contradictions. For Gordon, however, it is these very frictions and tensions that are cause for analytical importance. This book is not only about methodology, but perhaps more importantly, about epistemology: How do we know things? How do we render absences present? How do we listen for silence? How do we wait for ghosts? And most importantly, how do we make “the fictional, the theoretical, and the factual speak to one another” (26)? I’d even argue Gordon’s book prompts us to ask: what are some ways we may rethink the fictional, the theoretical, and the factual?
Of course, the title “Ghostly Matters,” refers to specters and hauntings. It may conjure imaginaries of horror, trauma, fright. Or it may conjure an imaginary of the immaterial. This, however, is precisely what Gordon is writing against. Haunting, for Gordon, is not immaterial. In fact, it is an entirely new form of materialism (69). Haunting gives us access to the present. For Gordon, reckoning with ghosts “is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the past, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had” (183). It gives us new possibilities—possibilities we never knew we had. Haunting gives us traces of the past. Traces of absence. It allows us to track history’s imperfect erasures (146).