Dispatches from the Colony

“How do we reckon with what modern history has rendered ghostly?”
—Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological lmagination

Gordon explains that “[t]he ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us.” Most importantly, seeing ghosts gives us the experience of being haunted, and “haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.” (8)

This entry was posted Sunday, July 5th, 2015 at 13.31 and is filed under Cultural Studies, Dwelling, Mourning, Passages, Spectral. Both comments and pings are currently closed.