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).
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.