A Ghost Story; or, Displacements of the Uncanny

28.10.09

Filed Under: Culture, Hauntologies, Theory and tagged , , , , with 1 Comment

Prior to the eighteenth-century, ghosts and specters were not simply beings believed in only by a few people. Rather, they were part of the material world, considered part of the supernatural realm and served a social function as upholders of morality; they could even be considered part of the law. Murderers and killers would fear the ghostly return of those they had killed and so often admitted their deeds. Being part of the supernatural realm meant that ghosts and specters occupied designated spaces (such as cemeteries, battle sites, etc) and designated times (such as the appropriately upcoming Halloween, when the fabric between the land of the dead and the land of the living became a more permeable boundary). We would call these spaces and times uncanny, although the word did not exist yet, and in many ways it would be incorrect, since the pre-Enlightenment world would not have thought the dead uncanny – they were part of the familiar world, not a strange encounter (even if it was frightening and unsettling).

With the encroachment of Enlightenment thought, it became necessary for the Age of Reason to explain away these supernatural beings in the world, since rational and scientific thought could not entertain entities that were inexplicable and irreproducible. A major paradigmatic shift took thus took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth century; ghosts and specters were suppressed and denied access to the rational, scientific universe which was constructed. Yet, ghosts always return since that is the constitutive part of being a ghost. Someone who dies is left in the past, but someone who dies and leaves a ghost will always come back in the future; that is the nature of ghosts. And so did the ghosts of pre-Enlightenment indeed come back to haunt the Age of Reason, in the most unwelcome form they could take – unreason.

The Gothic was (and is, but that is another story) a mode of writing which insisted that one might very well banish ghosts from dominant cultural discourse, but that this would never make them truly disappear. Instead, the past and all its transgressions, repressions and crimes would always come back to haunt those who tried to bury them.

Ghosts did indeed come back to haunt Enlightenment thought, apart from their manifestations in Gothic fiction; indeed, they came back in two separate fields. The most typical example is the field of psychology which developed especially during the nineteenth century alongside philosophy. Prior to the Age of Reason, there was no such thing as an immaterial mind; people’s moods and mental states were controlled by the four humors – substances inside the body: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood. For a healthy person, the humors would be in balance, while a melancholy person, for instance, was considered to have too much black bile in them. Enlightenment philosophy discarded the notion of the four humors and instead theorized the four temperaments. Slowly, the field of psychology grew to explain human behavior as an immaterial process in the minds of people.

Ghosts, then, found a new home in this immaterial house and were often considered to be projections of mentally unstable people, but even today the metaphors of ghosts exists in our vocabulary of our mind: we often speak of being haunted by a piece of music, or a distinctive memory.

However, this was not the only field in which ghosts took occupancy: the growth of new, especially visual, media such as magic lantern shows, phantasmagorias, kaleidoscopes, photography and the cinema were all used to project ghost and other horrifying images. Furthermore, it must be noted that these new technologies always lived a double life: on the one hand, their emergence always increased scientific authority, because these wondrous inventions were based on scientific and technological progress. In other words, they represented the epitome(s) of rationalism and so exuded scientific authority. Perhaps naturally, nineteenth century spiritualists immediately adopted these new technologies to prove contact with the spirit world. Simply consider all the spiritualist photography which exists – the scientific authority of these new technologies was thus meant to lend authority to the spiritualists.

It is also significant that when a new technological medium emerges, it has no real social history and people are unsure of its use; historically, however, new media have always attracted ghosts and ghosts are found in early photography, early cinema and today we still speak of the ghost in the machine regarding computers. New media always seem occult, because people never truly understand them, while we (think we) understand old media. Even new technologies, then, may be considered uncanny: the iPhone’s touchscreen with its slide activation and finger-activated zoom seems more like magic to me than any kind of technology I can truly explain. Arthur C. Clarke already saw this, of course, when he stated that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Yet, the dead are restless and never stay put in one place for long. While Freud was busy extending Jentsch’s thoughts on the uncanny in early twentieth century psychology, art was moving in its own uncanny ways and demanded that true art (what we might call the avant-garde) must be estranging, defamiliarizing and alienating in order to properly engage with a world which was increasingly alienating, strange and unfamiliar – in other words, uncanny. From Kafka to Brecht, Verfremdungseffekts have become part and parcel of avant-garde art and has certainly shown no signs of slowing down in postmodern art, even to the point of critics only having to offhandedly refer to a text’s ‘V-effects’ for others to nod sagely at the radical nature of said text. Art must be uncanny, must be haunted, because the world in which we live is uncanny and haunted; ghosts have now become an aesthetic effect and not simply as actual ghosts in ghost stories, but instead unsettling, boundary-crossing aesthetics (and consider the overlap in Henry James’ works).

As one last turn of the screw, for now, we may consider how ghosts (what we, after Freud, might also refer to as the uncanny) have entered the fields of philosophy and critical theory. Certainly Derrida’s deconstruction is a way of revealing the uncanny nature of the sign, with the ghostly trace existing between signifier and signified. And what is Baudrillard’s simulacrum, if not an uncanny double with no proper origin? Hauntology is therefore an attempt to draw all these different forms of the uncanny manifestations (medial, technological, artistic and critical) together and say that in order to live, we have to live with ghosts instead of trying to suppress them.

Today, the dead live.

Future fossils

02.10.09

Filed Under: Culture and tagged , , with 0 Comments

A fossil from a future that you knew might not even happen.

Over at Significant Objects, William Gibson just published a new story. Now, the Significant Objects project is really interesting and I’ll probably get back to blogging about that, eventually, but for now I’m interested in Gibson’s concept of ‘Dreamtime’, future fossils and glyphs.

It’s well-known that Gibson is extremely interested in how ideas become real and how the future makes its way into our present. This is not just because of him coining the word ‘cyberspace’ but rather an ongoing preoccupation of his, which has led to a connection with cool hunting; something Gibson terms node-spotting in his novel Idoru.

Gibson’s short story deals with an ashtray apparently once owned by his friend’s dad (Gibson’s complicated relation to his own dad has itself been the topic of an earlier work – “Agrippa”). This friend’s dad worked at the Pentagon and had access to the weapons being developed. These projects were, as Gibson terms it, liminal; not yet fully developed, yet they do exist in some people’s imagination and as drafts, outlines, etc.

These designs are what Gibson has referred to as ’semiotic ghosts’ before (in his short story “The Gernsback Continuum”); something that exists in a potential space – it is somehow suspended between being and non-being. While it doesn’t exactly exist, it also doesn’t exactly not-exist. This is the glyph of the ashtray depicting the Hawk missile system. The existence of the ashtray creates solidity to the Hawk missile system; if the ashtray exists, so must the missile system.

The ashtray is a material sign that something spectral will (perhaps) exist. We may read the glyph of something perhaps-to-be, but only as the perhaps-to-be but of a higher order than other projects. This is a perfect example of future hauntology; things that do not actually exist but might. In fact, the HAWK (Homing All the Way Killer) missile system was developed but Gibson’s thoughts hold true anyway, since he is simply pointing out that even wayward things have a potential and that these potentials impact our present.

“Future fossils”, then, are the objects that never turned out, that never materialized and left behind glyphs, ghosts and other specters.

Hauntologies

24.02.09

Filed Under: Papers & Talks and tagged , , with 9 Comments

The following is a brief presentation of the research project I’m embarking on. It falls into two halfs; the first is a theoretical overview, where I trace the origin of hauntology, its connection to other critical movements and terminologies. It focuses primarily on the spectral and is certainly only a very sketchy overview, as there are several areas that still need to be investigated closely, specifically media boundaries, the concept of presence and hauntology’s broader relationship to modernity.

Hauntology is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida in his work Specters of Marx. In it, he invokes not just the ghost of Marx and the opening of The Communist Manifesto but also the ghost of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Two passages from Shakespeare’s play are particularly significant for Derrida: “Time is out of joint” and “To be or not to be”.

“Time is out of joint” is for Derrida the cue to point out the tenuous connection between past, present and future. The past always haunts the present, of course, but equally important so does the future. Some refer to hauntology as “nostalgia for the future” (Ballardian) in an attempt to point out that the introduction of a ghost – in this case, the ghost of Hamlet’s father – creates a tear and a fold in history.
Derrida takes this point further with the quotation “To be or not to be,” which he expresses perhaps most clearly towards the end of his book, stating that

To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration. (161)

Derrida’s point is thus that the very concept of Being is always haunted – not in the sense of the past returning as a kind of return of the repressed, but rather in a more fundamental sense. The origin of anything – ontology itself – is always spectral, is always repetition’s first and last time. Being always carries the ghost within itself, in the sense of a “structural openness” as Colin Davis points out, and he continues to state that the “ghost pushes at the boundaries of language and thought.” (Davis 379)

Hauntology is thus Derrida’s differánce and trace, it is that which cannot be articulated but remains a part of everything in our culture. The presence of Derrida’s specter is a way to make “established certainties vacillate” (Davis 376) and so it is evidently a deconstructive term but it remains significant that he chooses the figure of the ghost and the term hauntology to describe this process which is particularly related to a challenge to linear history and a sense of nostalgia. As Wendy Haslem argues, “Haunting is the effect of modernity. Spectrality emerges from the reproduction and repetition of images…” (Haslem) which suggests that there is a distinctive resonance in the figure of specters, ghosts and haunts.
Indeed, several scholars have pointed out the rise of specters, ghosts, phantasms, haunts and similar forms of the ephemeral and have in different ways pointed to the significance of these figures and metaphors. One important point comes from Fred Botting when he states that “[s]pectrality instead describes ordinary operations of new technologies and their hallucinatory, virtual effects.” (Botting 200) This connects to Botting’s larger argument about the Gothic and the inherently Gothic nature of new technologies, but at the same time we surely also see a Baudrillardian specter of the simulacral effects of technology.

Surely of equal significance, is Jeffrey Sconce’s concept of “haunted media.” In his book Haunted Media, Sconce analyses what he refers to as “media metaphysics” and is particularly interested in the cultural history of electronic presence, a presence which is not an essential property, but a variable social construct which has changed across media history. (Sconce 7) For Sconce, as for Derrida, “haunt” becomes the key figure to question the stability of presence and to point out how technologies and media are caught up in the way we perceive and understand the world – in other words, how we relate to Being and Time. The ontology of media history, for Sconce, is thus clearly a hauntology of media history.

Marina Warner takes up Sconce’s argument and gives a survey of how ghosts, spirits and other ephemeral phenomena – phantasmagorias, to Warner – all crop up as metaphors when new technologies emerge. Her argument follows two concepts: Henri Focillion’s argument that aesthetic forms generate autonomous meanings in the interplay of historical, social, economic and personal circumstances, and Mallarmé’s “logic of the imaginary.” (Warner 11-12) In other words, technology and media generate new ways for the cultural imagination to refashion representations of specters, just as specters, ghosts, etc reconfigure emerging media in specific ways. Warner’s point is that we cannot ignore either side of the equation and that we need to examine the hauntings of media as closely as we examine media themselves.

Much of the same argument, but this time in relation to social life, can be found in Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, where she argues that “Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern 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.” (Gordon 7) Without specifically invoking Derrida, Gordon’s primary argument is that “that which appears absent can indeed be a seething presence” (Gordon 17) and that the ghost is the sign – the empirical evidence – that a haunting is taking place. For Gordon – and Derrida and me as a hauntologist – the ghost is not simply a dead person but a social figure; a social figure of a dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.

In other words, ghosts are significant because they produce material effects, and it is through the material effects that we may locate the presence of ghosts and analyze the effects of their hauntings. Gordon’s argument for the significance of ghosts is also tied to technology and media for as she states “in a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are led to believe not only that everything can be seen, but also that everything is available and accessible for our consumption.” For Gordon, hypervisibility is “a kind of obscenity of accuracy that abolishes the distinctions between ‘permission and prohibition, presence and absence.’ No shadows, no ghosts.” (Gordon 16)

I shall take it to be the task of the hauntologist to locate the ghosts that lurk in our culture of hypervisibility, to not just locate their absent presence or analyze their material effects – though these are all complementary tasks – but point out how the ghost as a social figure helps us understand the convergence of cultural forms, history and social life. We will do this by opening up the cultural forms we analyze, rather than attempt to catch the ghost. Paraphrasing Gordon, I will argue that cultural texts haunt that which assembles and binds. Hauntological analysis will be a method to interrupt the “presentness of the present” (Weinstock 5) and undermine the fixedness of binary oppositions and the linearity of history.

As is evident from the above, the figure of the ghost has been influential in many different areas, all of which can be considered hauntological efforts. Furthermore, Derrida’s concept has gained critical recognition in various places; most especially in the area of music studies where blogger K-Punk is particularly prominent. For K-Punk, hauntology has been a very suitable term for a distinctive brand of electronic music which relies heavily on sampling.

Indeed, we may now find references scattered across the web to specific albums and bands as ‘hauntological’ and in this way it may be considered almost a genre of music. The term hauntology was first applied to music in 1995 by Ian Penman in an issue of The Wire. The musical genre is a version of ambient and trip-hop, where there is an emphasis on dubbing, and the genre emerged by using samples particularly from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and library music. As a consequence, the sound becomes distinctive and a further relation to haunting is the interest in how the future was imagined in the past. One example of this type of music is Burial – Ghost Hardware

K-Punk refers, in connection to blues and Robert Johnson but I believe it holds true across all media, to the “layers of fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise” which is the spectral part of Robert Johnson’s music. (‘Phonograph blues’) I argue that hauntological analysis will always focus on these layers of fizz, crackle, hiss and white noise that haunts every text – the places where hegemony attempts to assemble and join, for as K-punk goes on these “specters are textural,” we can sense them in the texture of the text. Hauntological analysis is thus sensitivity to these layers of textures.

So, this sensitivity to layers of textures can be said to be the method of hauntology as an analytical tool, which points out that we need to be sensitive to all manners of different layers, not just textual, but also medial, historical, economic and so forth. It is tied to our historical moment, which Jo Collins and John Jervis refers to as “the uncanny grounding of modern selfhood and the social.” (Collins & Jervis 4)
As Jervis points out later, “the spectral can figure a state of ontological undecidability or tension, where there is an insistence, a presence of whatever resists us, recalcitrant to our understanding.” (Jervis 10) Although Jervis talks about the uncanny, it is evident that many of his points apply to hauntology as well, such as history being a stream of disappearing traces (11), the frission of the uncanny (31), the phantasm as the uncanny double of the image (39), but most significantly is his argument that the uncanny is an “unformed feeling” suggesting that our foundation of experience is grasped and figured in aesthetic terms. (Jervis 45) This returns us to both Warner and Gordon, who argue for the vacillation between the aesthetic and the social.

Hauntology is a portmanteau concept indicating that most texts are already portmanteaus themselves, and the task of the hauntologist is to reveal the layers and open up the text for various new meanings that were not clear before. So, let us turn to a number of cases in order to see how that might work in practice. In order to do that, I will present some cases that are papers from conferences I have attended or will attend in the near future.

David Bowie, 1. Outside (Uncanny Media, Utrecht, August 2008)

Despite being one of Bowie’s least-known albums, Outside has consistently had a strong underground following due to its unusual nature: it was made as a collaboration between Bowie and Brian Eno (the first since Bowie’s Berlin-trilogy) and consists of regular rock songs, interspersed with small, spoken-word pieces where Bowie’s voice is altered through the use of plug-ins. Conceived as a trilogy, this first album starts off an unusual murder story: the young girl Baby Grace has been killed in a horrible graphic way, but also in a way which the story’s detective refers to as “art-murder.”

The investigation is what takes up most of the album’s narrative, which is presented both in the form of the songs and the segues (the brief spoken-word interludes), as well as the booklet which accompanies the CD. We meet a variety of characters which Nathan Adler, the detective, interrogates and investigates. We even hear Baby Grace speak to us, despite the fact that she has been killed. This occurs in the segue “Baby Grace: A Horrid Cassette,” indicating how already here we encounter the voice of a ghost. All these characters are portrayed by David Bowie himself, both verbally – altered by the plug-ins readily available in ProTools – and visually in the booklet, where the alteration has taken place with digital imaging techniques.

Bowie haunts the entire album in a variety of forms: what we might call uncanny doubles, since we as Bowie fans can certainly recognize both his voice and his appearance in the various characters. That is not the only Gothic figure of the album as the story itself is narrated out of linear sequence. Not only do we hear Baby Grace after she has been killed but the song “Wishful Beginnings” is the 13th track rather than the first (and the same song is the one which has been left out of the 2nd version of Outside to make room for a Pet Shop Boys remix of the song “Space Boy.”) This winding, labyrinthine narrative suggests the figure of the arabesque which was prominent in Gothic architecture, but also useful as an aesthetic figure.

We are never provided with enough information to solve the puzzle, and the identity of the killer is never revealed. Partly, this is because the trilogy was never completed, but what is more significant is that the way the album is conceived, no matter who the killer actually is it will be David Bowie in one of the performances. Indeed, Bowie is both victim, investigator and perpetrator all at the same time. This conflation of identity is hardly coincidental but rather part of the album’s uncanny nature. It is also the album’s uncanniness which suggests a hauntological analysis.

Certainly, time is out of joint on this album. Not only does it take place on around New Year’s Eve 1999, on the threshold of the year 2000, but the narrative is also out of joint in its non-linear sequence. Furthermore, the opening segue tells us that Leon cuts a zero in time, “a zero in the fabric of time itself.” The figure ‘0’ both signifies nothingness (because it is zero, naught, nil) and thus the extermination of time, but it also suggests infinity because it is an unbroken circle with no beginning or end. In this way, it becomes fitting that the murder is never solved, since this means that the narrative folds in upon itself and we as listeners are left to wander around the arabesque labyrinth that the album creates.

Donnie Darko and The Butterfly Effect (ICFA, Orlando, March 2009)

Time is also the central concern of my next investigation, although here we are dealing with two films – time travel films, in fact. While there are differences between these two films – Donnie Darko and The Butterfly Effect – there are several significant similarities. They both emphasize traumatic experiences as the locus of the time travel episodes. Earlier periods are re-visited and altered in order to work through the traumatic episodes. In both films, the protagonists suffer from psychological traumas, which cause their perception of and relation to reality to be different. Thus, rather than presenting time in spatial terms, as is typical of time travel narratives, these two film insist as much on a psychological view of time; a space of mentality which needs to be confronted before time can be properly re-adjusted.

In Donnie Darko, Donnie’s sleepwalking results in him surviving a jet engine crashing int his room simply because Donnie is not there. His survival causes a number of problems for the people close to him, and Donnie needs to change time in order to save those he loves. Similarly in The Butterfly Effect, Evan is traumatized as a child as are his childhood friends, and only be traveling back in time to change these traumatic experiences, can time be set right.

Both films thus articulate the paradox between free will and determinism which time travel narratives so often oscillate between. I suggest that only be reading these two films as trauma texts can we properly understand read their wounds of time out of joint. The repeated scenes of earlier events take on uncanny intensification in the way they are changed into new and better events. As both films end with the death of the time traveling protagonist (although, only in the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect does this literally happen), we see how man can conquer time, but not in a technological sense of inventing time machines. Instead, the time traveling is traumatic and can only be stopped by the sacrifice of the time traveler. No longer is history a process of becoming, but a process of unbecoming, of ceasing to be.

So, in the way that the past haunts the present life of the protagonist, forcing the protagonist to go back in time in order to fix the mistakes evidently made, so in the same way can the protagonist be said to be a specter of history; the traumatic event should have properly killed the protagonist but failed to do so. Consequently, the protagonist lives on and time is out of joint.

These two time travel films thus explicate that while trauma is typically seen as a destructive repetition, to use Cathy Caruth’s phrase, there is also the potential for positive transformation. The device of time travel is used in these films to break free of “the formation of history as the endless repetition of previous violence.” (Caruth, 63) The repetition of previous violence can thus be broken by re-visiting the episode of original trauma, so in this way the time travel can be seen as a way of recovering from history.

The narrative sequence of the both films are thus broken down and re-arranged; history is challenged and revised in ways that are considered as healing. Symbolically, the time travel becomes a way to set things right again, to recover from the trauma that haunts not just the protagonist, but all the characters involved, even though they never realize it.

Don DeLillo, Falling Man (CEA, Pittsburgh, March 2009)

Continuing on the topic of hauntology and trauma, I turn to Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, where although war does not explicitly feature in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, it haunts the entire narrative as the specter which sets actions in motion. 9/11 is the traumatic event which slowly falls apart as access to it becomes impossible.  The lives of the novel’s characters fall apart, and the event haunts them as they fail to to reintegrate the memory of 9/11. As Cathy Caruth argues, drawing on the works of Paul de Man, the loss of connection to traumatic experience results in a referential loss, free of the weight of reference. The figure of the falling man literally revisits them in the performance artist who falls from buildings as a ghost from the past. His literal falling is meant to be a lifting of the trauma experienced by the onlookers, a way for them to grasp their own survival, to read the wound, as it were, of the unknowability of survival.

A synthesis of trauma theory and hauntology will allow us to explain the destructive repetition of the history of violence set in motion by traumatic events. We can thus begin to explain how the traumatic event is in itself already shot through with this destructive repetition – that trauma is a haunt/ing: an origin and a recurrence. DeLillo’s novel explicates the experience of trauma in the way the fall of the towers and the people falling from them spread into the lives of the survivors and become the guiding metaphor for the way they live on. The conflict of event and memory of the event which stands central for DeLillo’s novel reveals how the metaphors of war permeate and haunt the traumatic origin, how these metaphors inevitably fail our search for an external referent to make sense of the traumatic origin. In the end, direct reference is lost but reintroduced in the figure of falling: the falling man, the falling lives of the characters and the fall of meaning into entropy, DeLillo’s guiding metaphor.

DeLillo’s entropy creeps in through the uncanny presence of Falling Man; the meaning of the event is slowly emptied as it is repeated over and over again. Yet this is also specifically the haunting which Falling Man reveals. So, the event is ripped from its “proper” context and we see how the trauma becomes constitutive of the lives of the surviving characters. Hauntology reveals this constitutive fact of the trauma and how repetition works for the characters, emptying meaning from their lives.

Tom Waits, Bone Machine (IGA, Lancaster July 2009)

Tom Waits’ album Bone Machine sounds like an apocalyptic vision, the clattering of percussion sounds like a dance of skeletons, while Waits’ gravely voice sounds like a necromancer conjuring ghosts of both past and future in a dance macabre of images that haunt America. The album is itself a bone machine, a thing stitched together with all the scars showing and so the monstrosity of Wait’s album articulates the specters that surround an imminent apocalypse. Bone Machine starts with the Earth dying, then moves across a Gothic landscape of barns, empty highways to the allure of the west coast and ends with a plea to never grow up in this terrible world.

I see this album as a hauntological and spectral album where Gothic media images are conjured up to provide a spectral America, and to show how much haunts, specters and ghosts have always been part of American national imagination, as Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock argues in the collection Spectral America. As a media monster, the album disrupts the its own present time of being (as it is being heard) with scrambling, clanking sounds that do not seem to fit, yet is part of the album’s spectral sound. As a narrative monstrosity, it shambles along an apocalyptic path tearing at the foundations of America to reveal traces that are often covered up, the parts of America so rarely mentioned but which has been part of Tom Waits’ career.

By figuring the American mythology as a specter, Waits reveals that “there’s a world going on – underground” (Waits, “Underground”) and Waits himself can be said to be in the position of the mediator or perhaps phrased better as the shaman – Waits’ increasing popularity is indicative of the fact that he brings certain things to light in mainstream culture. From one perspective, it is precisely the spectral nature of the “rain dogs” that wander urban streets at night, but it is also a challenge to mainstream musical production.

Waits’ love for the “fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise” of sound production is well-known and his voice bears the same texture as a well-scratched record, worn with use. These haunting sounds of the production are emphasized rather than smoothed over. The assembling and joining is thus revealed, in the same way that Waits points to the flip side of American mythology.

Conclusions

As is evident from the above, hauntology is mostly useful for texts that are reflexively aware of their own ontological instability. This is hardly surprising, seeing as how hauntological research is interested in the places where texts are assembled and joined. In other words, hauntology is best suited in the case of texts that are at least partially transgressive and subversive. We should not assume that this only applies to ideological texts, even though Derrida connects hauntology to hegemony, but instead keep in mind that it applies to all forms of transgression and subversion, including those that challenge textual and media boundaries. Hauntology allows us to open up and transform the texts in order to better understand them and our relation to them.

Also, while the texts I have chosen are recent texts, I hope that it is also evident that hauntology applies to a broad range of types of texts; it is not an approach limited to one specific cultural form but it is one which – at least as I have used it – is mostly useful for some kind of media/text analysis.

Works Cited

The Specter of Falling

05.12.08

Filed Under: Books and tagged , , , with 0 Comments

For the CEA conference in Pittsburgh March 26-28 next year, my proposal for a paper has been accepted. The abstract is below.

Although war does not explicitly feature in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, it haunts the entire narrative as the specter which sets actions in motion. 9/11 is the traumatic event which slowly falls apart as access to it becomes impossible. The lives of the novel’s characters fall apart, and the event haunts them as they fail to to reintegrate the memory of 9/11. As Cathy Caruth argues, drawing on the works of Paul de Man, the loss of connection to traumatic experience results in a referential loss, free of the weight of reference. The figure of the falling man literally revisits them in the performance artist who falls from buildings as a ghost from the past. His literal falling is meant to be a lifting of the trauma experienced by the onlookers, a way for them to grasp their own survival, to read the wound, as it were, of the unknowability of survival.

A synthesis of trauma theory and hauntology will allow us to explain the destructive repetition of the history of violence set in motion by traumatic events. We can thus begin to explain how the traumatic event is in itself already shot through with this destructive repetition – that trauma is a haunt/ing: an origin and a recurrence. DeLillo’s novel explicates the experience of trauma in the way the fall of the towers and the people falling from them spread into the lives of the survivors and become the guiding metaphor for the way they live on. The conflict of event and memory of the event which stands central for DeLillo’s novel reveals how the metaphors of war permeate and haunt the traumatic origin, how these metaphors inevitably fail our search for an external referent to make sense of the traumatic origin. In the end, direct reference is lost but reintroduced in the figure of falling: the falling man, the falling lives of the characters and the fall of meaning into entropy, DeLillo’s guiding metaphor.

American Utopias

04.11.08

Filed Under: Films and tagged , , , with 0 Comments

One of the ways that American independent filmmaking distinguishes itself from its Hollywood counterpart, is in its relation to American culture. While Hollywood films are often seen as partaking in the hegemonic structure of the dominant American society, independent films typically represent an alternative. This alternative is not just found in aesthetic practice and different modes of production, but also in the often critical dialog they establish with their own cultural context. One very specific place where the difference between Hollywood and independent filmmaking’s dialog with culture can be asserted quite clearly, is in the construction of utopian spaces and how these spaces are imagined as responses to contemporary culture. In this essay, I will argue that the utopian imagination is used by Hollywood to reinforce hegemonic structures, while the independent filmmaking often distances itself from the possibility of a utopian space. Hal Hartley’s The Girl from Monday (2005) will be the main film discussed here, but in order to understand what it reacts against, I will look at a number of Hollywood films that employ utopian strategies.

When looking at American independent filmmaking, we need to keep in mind that the label ‘independent’ is a quite unstable construction, mainly pointing out that it should be seen as existing outside of the Hollywood production system, than having any particularly shared features of their own. As P. Adams Sitney points out in his Visionary Film (2002), there was a distinctive shift in the late seventies and throughout the eighties where a convergence of social and historical forces altered American film (Sitney 409), a shift where the independent film emerged. Of course, as Emanuel Levy points out in his book Cinema of Outsiders (1999), there are really two different conceptions of independent films: “those that are acceptable to Sundance and those whose contents and styles render them virtually unshowable” (Levy 5).

The Sundance Film Festival, established by Robert Redford in 1980, thus became a turning-point for non-Hollywood filmmaking and while “independent film” began as a label for films without economic attachment to the Hollywood system, this was soon to change. However, this is not the place to discuss the decline and subsuming of avant-garde film into independent film in the US, but rather to point to the convergence which happened. While most independent films may have remained soothing and reaffirming, rather than questioning and challenging (Levy 494-495), it is clear that some independent films can be considered avant-garde, and will reject narrative conventions established by mainstream Hollywood and instead enter into a “dialog of forms and voices” and regard the concept of philosophical resolution or narrative closure as an occasion for parody (Sitney 411). It is this critical and subversive streak of the independent film, that I will relate to Hollywood’s use of utopian strategies.

From the point of view of most Hollywood filmmaking, these utopian strategies are used to mirror the hegemonic structures found in society. Instead of imagining an alternate space as a resistance to dominant society, these films place USA as the utopian space. Such an argument follows what Jean Baudrillard provocatively argues in his book America: the US is utopia achieved and because of this, there are no poor people in USA. ”The have-nots will be condemned to oblivion, to abandonment, to disappearance pure and simple. […] And rightly so, since they show such bad taste as to deviate from general consensus.” (Baudrillard 111). Baudrillard’s argument must of course be understood as ironic, and as pointing to the ideological erasure of the poor, rather than a serious argument of no poverty in America.

The argument follows from his larger claim that USA has torn itself from the historical: ”at a certain point they [Americans] freed themselves from that historical centrality” (81), which points to a similar approach to the utopian space as Fredric Jameson in his book Archaeologies of the Future, where he argues that utopian texts ”struggle desperately to escape our force field and the force of gravity of our historical moment” (Jameson 71). This is the standard argument that America’s national youth has left it without proper historical grounding, resulting in nostalgia, kitsch and a loss of the real. Such a view misses the point that mos Americans are already fully aware of this, and it is only in a European perspective that his is even considered problematic, as Steven Shaviro points out (16). Equally significantly, Baudrillard’s view also reproduces a reductively hegemonic view of the American society, which Hal Hartley’s film is precisely trying to unsettle.
Baudrillard and Jameson’s arguments are also opposed: Jameson argues that the utopian impulse functions as a critical and analytic method where capitalist society is rejected and replaced with an alternative (Jameson 230), while Baudrillard points out that utopia is used to perpetuate the capitalist society (Baudrillard 77, 95).

Consider Gattaca (Andrew Niccol 1997) which portrays the struggle of Vincent who tries to become an astronaut despite being considered an in-valid, due to his faulty genes. Diagnosed with a life expectancy of no more than 30 years, Vincent goes on to prove the system wrong by living longer and becoming an astronaut in spite of the immediate rejection. However, this does not result in the film portraying the system as problematic, but simply presenting Vincent as a heroic figure. Society is not challenged, as Vincent is praised. Here, the film rejects sympathizing with the in-valids and by extension those that the in-valid symbolically represent: poor people and people of color. The film’s conclusion is the individual’s victory over the system, not the collapse or change of society. The individual succeeds in spite of the society, but this also indicates that anyone may succeed, despite the conditions they are born. Matters of race and class – folded into the image of the in-valids – are rejected as arguments for one’s situation. The geneticism Vincent faces can still be conquered, if you work hard enough: no social divide is so large that it cannot be overcome. While this may seem as a positive thing, it is also reactionary view which denies the need for change, since “the talented will overcome”.

A range of other films, such as The Island (Michael Bay 2005) and Equilibrium (Kurt Wimmer 2002) also portray this fear of the loss of individual freedom, authorities being corrupted with no respect for individual rights and a clear sense of dread that the future will bring about a commodification of the human. Whether this future is portrayed as utopia which is revealed to be false, or as a dystopia, the common denominator is the view that the future will not be better than the present we have, or the past we once had. These films thus point to the crisis which Baudrillard argues USA is undergoing; not the European crisis of historical ideals that cannot be fulfilled, but instead ”the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence” (Baudrillard 77). It is this crisis which results in representing the future as worse than the present, and why conflicts are often resolved through nostalgic strategies. Films such as The Island and Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson 1976) reiterate the figure of Abraham Lincoln as savior.

These films thus perpetuate the view of USA as utopia achieved; this is as good as it gets, everything you could want to achieve is already true. The ideological erasure is also maintained in these films. The poor and the different – in-valids in Gattaca, the outcasts of Logan’s Run, the residents of ‘the Nethers’ in Equilibrium – are all marginalized through the films’ narrative. Although these films supposedly reject homogeneity, they do not argue for a heterogeneous society understood as a multi-cultural society. Only by striving towards a certain ideal is there a chance to break out of the conformity of the future. The tables are thus turned and a dominant device is revealed; they remain symptoms of the ideology which Hollywood generally represents: a capitalist consumer society and an acceptance of USA as utopia achieved.

Hal Hartley’s The Girl From Monday uses the utopian impulse to confront USA with its own hegemony, its construction of itself as utopia achieved. Hartley’s film poses a series of critical questions in the way it represents its future: its future balances between the dystopic and the contemporary, for it lacks many of the devices typically used to show that a film takes place in the future: there is no technological break from our present or even a specific date to go by, most of the film might as well take place in our time.

Fredric Jameson sees such a closeness to our own time as a problem which will in the end dissolve the possibility of the utopian impulse “which has forfeited its claim to any radical transformation of the system itself” (Jameson 168). I do not agree with Jameson in this assessment, as I believe it to be significant to see what the utopian text is trying to disrupt and react against. If we view Hollywood as part of maintaining the view of USA as utopia achieved, it is obvious to me that Hartley’s film is as much a reaction against Hollywood’s (representational) system, as against the American system.

The Girl From Monday takes place in a world where everything has been commodified and even the human has become a commodity: every citizen’s value can be found on the stock exchange and a person’s value derives from how much that person consumes. Since research has shown (in the film’s universe) that sexually active people who are not in a relationship are the most active consumers, a person’s value is closely related to sexual activity. Every time you have sex without commitments, your value increases. If you have sex because of love or even lust, it is considered perverted. This total coupling of sex and value becomes a symbol of complete commodification, where the only urge left is the urge to consume.

Opposed to this, we find a rebellious underground. Officially, this only consists of aliens – referred to as immigrants in the film – but as they look identical to human beings, they are difficult to locate. The interesting thing about these aliens is their radical difference from humans. They have no individual identity but are part of a greater whole, and even do not have physical bodies. They only assume a body when they arrive on Earth. The aliens originate from Star 147X in the constellation Monday, from which the film derives its title. The main character Jack Bell meets a woman from Monday, and initiates a relationship with her. The opposition between on the one hand the human as body, identity and consumption and the alien as inseparable, undivided and non-consuming is great, but the most important thing is how you can only define the aliens in the negative by how they differ from society. They are radically different, which is perceived as deviance by the official society.

Although Jack is the leader of the underground, the film’s ending suggests that this rebellion is impossible because even revolution, sabotage and terrorism are good for business as it further develops consumer society. This unbreakable circle is left as Girl From Monday returns to her (its) planet, while Jack – who has meanwhile discovered that he is also an alien – cannot leave because he has become too addicted to his own body.

The film’s disruption comes in through its cinematic form; made on digital video the whole spectrum of this medium is deployed: slow-motion, abrupt scene cuts, motion blurring and many other devices which clearly reject the narrative transparency which Hollywood is so well-known for and that Scott Robert Olson describes in Hollywood Planet (1999).

The narrative, such as it is, as well as the setting, is clearly dominated by a wry sense of irony, and we can easily see the film as distancing itself from the culture of desire, a culture of extreme commodification. But when Jack said that nothing much had changed, he is correct in another sense of the fictional world resembling our own. While there are discontinuities from our present world, technologically we only see school children using virtual reality goggles and gloves. Otherwise, clothes, cars, streets and so forth resemble present-day New York.

The film, however, has a peculiar narrative form resembling a Möbius strip, where not just the narrative twists back on itself, but where people are also trapped without potential for escape. Narratively, the film turns in upon itself here, not just because of the parallel between its opening shot and closing shot, but also because Jack and the girl were a couple, so there is also a repetition of his wife drowning; do we simply return to the beginning again? Throughout the film we have seen the same scene of Jack buying a gun and going down to the sea to kill himself; we are unsure of the placement of this scene in the narrative. The narrative space thus presents the same trap for the spectator as the consumer society creates for the characters.

The Girl From Monday does not present a solution, then, but clearly distances itself from the totally commodified consumer society. The aliens, even as they are represented with sympathy, do not represent a positive alternative; they cannot remain on Earth for long without becoming what humans already are. There is a very apocalyptic mood to the film which suspends the utopian impulse. The characteristic feature of the film is its critical approach to the present, and as opposed to the films earlier outlined The Girl From Monday rejects the vision of the American society as utopia achieved.

When Baudrillard argues that ”the disenfranchised, who have no voice and are condemned to oblivion, thrown out to go off and die their second-class deaths” it is precisely the way The Girl From Monday depicts the American society – the alien/immigrants and the rebels have no hope and no place in this society. Consumerism has taken over society and there is no room for those who resist this commodification. USA is presented as not a utopia, but a consumerist utopia, where everything is handled on consumer terms: there is no alternate space, no way of being on the outside – to be outside is to be as the aliens from Monday; either you are swallowed by the sea or you are turned into a consumer.

In this way, we can argue that The Girl From Monday is an anti-utopian work, defined by Jameson as works that are ”informed by a central passion to denounce and warn against Utopian programs in the political realm” (Jameson 199). This is exactly how The Girl From Monday functions; it denies and rejects the American society as a utopian society, but at the same time, no alternative utopian space is developed. The home planet of the aliens never becomes an idealize space; we never see it. Yet, they remain as vulnerable to commodification as we humans are. There is no utopian program to the film, instead the spectator is folded into the world being created; only through the cinematic devices which estrange the spectator, can a possible way out be located. This remains an ideological device, of course, but not a utopian one.

We find here a division in how the utopian space is employed in American film culture, and how the utopian discourse is used. Within the dominant culture which Hollywood clearly belongs to, the American society is viewed and represented as utopia achieved. The future appears uncertain and hostile, even in the cases where a positive development seem to have taken place. With Hartley’s film a critique is developed which is made possible through an alternative cinematic form of expression. This aesthetic alternative also represent an alternative view of American culture as a false utopia. The film is best understood as a parody of Hollywood’s typical utopian spaces; the future is dystopic but revealed to be similar to our present. USA as utopia achieved and the simulation of this perfect society is revealed to be one-dimensional.

What becomes very clear is how American film, either in its dominant or subversive form, has a clear connection to American culture’s self-perception. Whether it is a reproduction of dominant culture, as in the case of Hollywood, or as a disruption of hegemonic structures, as in Hartley’s case, films, both in content and form, articulate concerns considered significant for cultural discourse. In what I have laid out, the utopian discourse has shown itself to be not necessarily revolutionary, but also carrying a potential for being reactionary. The utopian impulse can be both radical or nostalgic and the utopian must be considered as an aesthetic device always closely connected to ideology.
For independent films, we can also see another more significant fact; that a culturally disruptive impulse will often require a disruptive aesthetic as well.

As I have argued, the cinematic disruptions Hartley uses in his film are necessary in order to articulate the cultural disruption. Without stepping outside of Hollywood’s cinematic transparency, it would impossible to escape a reproduction culturally dominant structures. To expand the point, just as Hollywood’s strategies have become globalized in the form of a distinctive commercial cinema, so can we point to a certain degree of convergence on the part of avant-garde and independent filmmaking, in the way that these cinematic forms always need to find alternative representational strategies, in order to resist the conformity of the Hollywood system. Instead of unifying by homogenizing their cinematic expressions, there is a move for a heterogeneity of strategies, even as they are all informed by a disruptive impulse, in order to articulate a different perspective on dominant culture and dominant cinema.

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