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.

Mindy Fenske writes in an American context, but many of her arguments remain relevant in a Danish context, and her most interesting points are not national, but relates to understanding tattoos and tattoo culture. Fenske basic premise is that tattoos not only function as cultural representations, though they are also that. Tattoos are also performative in J.L. Austin’s sense – they do something, both to the owner and the viewer. This understanding of tattoos comes primarily from Austin and Jacques Derrida’s conception of the performative, as well as Judith Butler’s conception of gender and identity as performatively produced. Fenske also draws on W.J.T. Mitchell’s picture theory (primarily from What Do Pictures Want?, but also Picture Theory), which specifically focuses on understanding images “as if” they are alive. This is meant metaphorically, but Fenske provides a good example of how pictures perform actions; even an example we know well here in Denmark: the Mohammed caricatures in Jyllandsposten. These images act in the way they position the viewer, and can be considered as alive, because their action demands a reaction. In this way of dealing with cultural products as performative, Fenske is closely aligned to similar views, such as those expressed by Matt Hills in his How to do Things With Cultural Theory.

This is approach is a very useful way to deal with tattoos, because as Fenske puts it herself, a tattoo is not just an expression of one’s identity, but also a way of creating that identity. Furthermore, Fenske points out that tattoos are not simply evidences of resistant practices, attempting to deny a specific body ideal or opposing a mainstream culture. Rather, it is because of tattoo culture’s existence and location within mainstream culture, that tattoo culture gains its performative force. This a well-conceived and nuanced way of doing cultural analysis. Rather than viewing culture as a struggle between two extremes, it is rather conceived of in terms of processes in a productive network. She gains much of this argument from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their rhizomatic and territorialization discourses.

The analyses of tattoos fall in three parts: tattoo conventions, tattoos in advertising and modern primitivism. In doing so, she locates fields within and outside mainstream culture, which provides a good and balanced overview.

Departing from her personal experiences, we get an account of how tattoo conventions function as both an inclusive and exclusive space. As conventions often take place in hotels where other, nontattooed, guests are also present, a specfic space is created both physically but also more symbolically and performatively – in here you are different, if you are not tattoed: an inversion, in other words, of the outside world. Fenske points out how tattoos function not just as identity markers, but also how tattoos performatively creates a distinct cultural and social space, which makes this identity construction possible.

The next chapter focuses on advertisements who use tattoos. Here we are dealing with representations only, with no actual people behind. This also makes the chapter the weakest in the book, for even though it is shown how Tampax advertisements reinvent Rosie the Riveter, or the PlayStation game UmJammer Lammy employs tattoos, it does not move beyond standard representational analysis. Here it becomes evident how difficult it is for perfmative criticism to deal with textual products. The chapter remains interesting, but is not as strong as the other chapters.

The final chapter deals with the movement that Fakir Musafar has spearheaded in many ways: modern primitivism. Fenske convincingly shows how the modern primitivism movement employ earlier, often primitive, cultures’ use of tattoos, and how they view themselves as a continuation of these traditions. Fenske points out this use of original, primitive traditions is both an expression parallel to Edward Said’s Orientalism and a deeply felt desire to find one’s own space. These authentic cultures are not used in their historically founded actuality, but rather as a performative act and identity strategy.

The conclusion argues for the use of performative criticism, which the book itself is a fine examle of. It is evident that this method achieves more with this subject, while also making the analyses more dynamic, and so Fenske does not fall into classic traps of reductionism. It is, however, also evident that the more text-based a cultural product is, the more difficult it will be for performative criticism to deal with it.

Read the Danish review here.