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.

Similar for free open academic work, which is what I’ll be discussing here. It is standard and proper practice for academics to present their sources and discuss agreements and disagreements in the open. What is generally not shared, are works in progress, course notes and similar academic bread-and-butter work. Some of the reasons for this is obvious and understandable: works in progress are not finished and may contain embarrassing mistakes, unclear rubbish and stuff that borders on plaigiarism if released because quotes haven’t been fully worked through. Course notes may be incomprehensible to others and include material that is copyright protected and cannot be shared publicly.

However, there are other less worthy reasons for doing the same things: a fear that people will steal your material, reduce your worth as teacher because others steal your ideas for groundbreaking courses, etc. In other words, we are dealing with a concern about academic capital: our research and our teaching (to a lesser extent) is what sell us to universities, provide us with research grants and get our conference papers accepted. A very understandable concern then arises that if we share our work, our value is decreased and we will lose our positions, grants and conference attendance. This view corresponds completely to typical, capitalist exchange.

Put in Althusserian terms, by reproducing academic labor power there is also a reproduction of submission to ruling ideology. An academic who does not share his or her work steps into this trap of submitting to an ISA which reduces academic thinking to a commodity like any other. Lack of sharing means viewing creative thinking and critical thinking as a commodity that can only be produced by the academic laborer, but still a commodity.

However, unlike regular commodities that are consumed, creative and critical thinking grows rather than diminishes when shared; they are not spread too thin, but instead (hopefully) inspire others to generate more creative and critical thinking. My argument is therefore a call for FOAW – free open academic work – which will not reduce academic capital, but instead produce more. As an academic who shares, it becomes possible to be a “bad subject” who rejects the ISA which reduces academic work to fixed-value commodities. I don’t agree with this view, and so will share my work. I don’t believe that this will create a perfect, ideal world, for there are also negative sides to sharing, which I need to think more carefully about. For now, let this stand as a call to more academic sharing – either in blogging form or any other.

Althusser is trying to work out the concept of reproduction, and how people accept the dominant order of the culture and society they live in. Much of what Althusser develops here, is later expanded by people such as Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. Reproduction, for Althusser as for Marx, is the necessary condition of production to take place. As Althusser states

To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’.

In other words, it is necessary to submit to the ruling ideology in order to be a “good worker”, and necessary to manipulate the ruling ideology in order to be a “good capitalist”. Ideology is for Althusser intimately tied up with skills and know-how, and he goes on to argue that it is not possible to learn one without the other:

I believe that the Ideological State Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.

Subjection – being subjected to (and a subject to) dominant ideology – is part of the educational system, which forms one example of what Althusser terms Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). The ISA is part of the State Apparatus, but does not function like the typical Repressive State Apparatus – ie. violence from police or military – but functions through ideology first, and violence later. In the case of the educational system, punishments only arrive if one does not follow the rules, but it is far more insidious in the way it encourages proper behavior by awarding good grades for those who follow the rules.

ISAs thus work mostly invisibly throughout society, and their work is done by ideolog, which is to say a particular way of addressing persons. Althusser begins by defining ideology in conjunction with Marx: “ideology is the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group.” However, Althusser moves on from this definition to a much more complex, and much more interesting.

First of all, Althusser does away with the notion that ideology is located in society merely as a set of ideas. What makes ideology so pervasive, is the fact that it is material. He reverses the typical notion of saying that ideology leads to ritual practices, and instead argues that it is in fact the ritual practices which create and embody ideology in material actions:

I shall therefore say that, where only a single subject (such and such an individual) is concerned, the existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.

It is here that interpellation emerges, from the way the individual is made into a subject by ideology:

all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject. This is a proposition which entails that we distinguish for the moment between concrete individuals on the one hand and concrete subjects on the other, although at this level concrete subjects only exist insofar as they are supported by a concrete individual. I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation

Interpellation of the subject is thus exactly ideology, which is also what prompts Althusser to say that there is no outside to ideology, and at the same time there is no outside ideology.

What is sometimes misunderstood about Althusser, is the notion that there is no escape from the interpellation of ideology and the subject position offered. This is not exactly true, as Althusser states that when we act according to ideology and performs the material actions required of us, we are ‘good subjects’. However, it is possible to be a ‘bad subject’ which is of course to not perform ideology. They require the intervention of one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus; military, police, etc.

While this seems to me obviously true, it also seems that this is one place where the ISA can take action just as much as the RSA. While the police will stop bad subjects who protest against capitalist ideology, such as in the WTO ‘riots’, there are plenty of cases where the ISA simply functions as ideological repression, such as generating the beliefs that sex before marriage is a sin, or that people with tattoos are criminals or whatever might be considered strictly legal but not within ruling ideology. Because of this, I will investigate the case of bad subjects in further posts.