A Ghost Story; or, Displacements of the Uncanny
28.10.09Filed Under: Culture, Hauntologies, Theoryand tagged Deconstruction, Gothic, Hauntology, Jacques Derrida, Theory
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.
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Bravo, a tale well told. I love a good ghost story this time of year. A very timely essay. I for one believe.
October 30th, 2009 at 7:31 am