Avery Gordon

'Avery Gordon's stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. She shows how fiction writing can sometimes function as a social force, as a repository of memories that are too brutal, to debilitating, and too horrifying to register through direct historical or social science narratives...'--George Lipsitz, University of California, San Diego

Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Ghostly Matters

Laurence Favre

Haunting is a frightening experience. It always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present. But haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done. Indeed, it seemed to me that haunting was precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. It is this sociopolitical-psychological state to which haunting referred.

Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. The ghost, as I understand it, is not the invisible or some ineffable excess. The whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, your attention. Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way, I tried to suggest, we are notified that what's been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us.

There is a critical undercurrent running beneath the main tide of the book, a preoccupation that is articulated as such only during a few key moments. Most prominently, Gordon labels this the question of “the something to be done." Indeed, throughout the book she thinks constantly about change, about what it is, how it can be brought about, and about the identity of the agents who would do so. Although she is deeply moved and motivated by the weight and the fate of the social, she is also, it seems to me, deeply invested in the question of the subject and in the prospects for critical agency. She is not so naive as to believe that agency is a matter simply of recovering an individual will or intention to act, however. Rather, she implies, radical political change will come about only when new forms of subjectivity and sociality can be forged by thinking beyond the limits of what is already comprehensible. 

Ghostly Matters is about haunting, a paradigmatic way in which life is more complicated than those of us who study it have usually granted. 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. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production. 

Ghostly Matters Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Highlights