Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

by Avery F. Gordon, Janice A. Radway (Foreword)

“Avery Gordon’s stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. ” —George Lipsitz “The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.”  —American Studies International “Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations. Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Theory, Academic, Ghosts, Cultural Studies, History

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Avery F. Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Visiting Professor in the Birkbeck Department of Law, University of London (2015-2018). She is the author of The Workhouse: The Breitenau Room (with Ines Schaber); Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People; Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination among other books and articles. Her work focuses on radical thought and practice and over the last several years, she has been writing about imprisonment, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them. She serves on the Editorial Committee of Race & Class, is the co-host of No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB FM Santa Barbara, and is the keeper of the Hawthorn Archives.

Reviews

[Alok Vaid-Menon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books on method and it's necessary for anyone who is making intellectual/creative work on marginalized people who have been disappeared from history. Gordon is critical of a tendency in scholarship to romanticize subalterns and instead calls for an appreciation of complex personhood which she describes as a reminder that all people are "beset by contradiction." My favorite line in this text is: "even those who called "Other" are never never that." There's a refusal here to flatten people, to define them exclusively in relation to their subordination. There's an insistence on the texture and multi-dimensionality that so often gets excised in the evocation of rebellious/marginalized ancestors.

Gordon's argument in this book is that "haunting is a constituent element of modern social life." What this means is that the trajectory of history never *truly* disappears oppressed people, there is always a trace that lingers. Our work, then, is to sit with that trace, to write "ghost stories."

Ultimately this book makes me reminder that things are not always what they seem, that there's a whole social world teeming beneath the visible. It also makes me recognize the co-presences of everything, to collapse Western dichotomies of past and future, and develop an alternative relationship with time.

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Avery Gordon cracks sociology open to phantoms. She's trained as a Marxist sociologist, but finds that social life is wilder and weirder than strict materialist explanations of domination and resistance would have it. She looks at psychoanalysis for broader explanations, and finds it is hyper-individualist, unable to acknowledge the weight of society on the psyche, which makes it reduce hauntings into disordered upflarings of an individual unconscious.

I found her writing compelling and often beautiful, especially her chapters on disappearance in Argentina and Toni Morrison's Beloved.

But also her writing is so thorny. I would ask her: do you not want to be understood? Are you worried that if we understand you, we will think you're unoriginal? I respect that Gordon is pushing back against a dry, divisive rationality that tries to rewrite the ghost into an explanation. But I think there is a difference between a wild lyricism that remains slippery to meaning, and cluttered jargon-blocks of vagueness. Sometimes Gordon achieves the first, but too often I found the second. Maybe I've just been out of school too long.

[Christy · Rating 3 out of 5]

As individuals are haunted by the traumatic incidents their psyches repress, so are cultures haunted by the histories of violence and subjugation they suppress in the name of "civilization." This in turn has consequences for the health of individual psyches. Some cultural productions manage to capture this haunting; Gordon is right to focus on them, although no skilled exegesis is necessary to prove Toni Morrison's Beloved is a novel about being haunted by the consequences of slavery. A great and useful central idea burdened with the disjunctive, fake-poetic, molehills-into-mountains exposition style of much postmodern critical theory.

[Sammy Mylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What's distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely. I used the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what's been in your blind spot comes into view. 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.”

[Emm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gordon commences with the statement that "life is complicated" and I love the way she courageously dives right into engaging all these complexities. She argues beautifully for a broadened definition of haunting that not only accounts for memory but also for the way we interact and understand each other and ourselves. This work of critical theory is absolutely fascinating! It is dense and a little hard to get into but is so, so rewarding. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on disappearances in South America and the idea of entire countries experiencing states of haunting--and how these hauntings dictate every aspect of their lives. Her literary commentary is just as insightful and endlessly interesting.

It may take a little bit of time, but is altogether a great read!

[Kidada · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a historian who researches the aftermaths of racial atrocity, I found Gordon’s book to be insightful and incredibly helpful. Great read for people who wonder about the afterlives of horrific violence and representations of it.

[Christina Dongowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this book by way of my interest in the idea of hauntings and being haunted – and I was completely floored by its originality of treating these concepts as serious and fruitful critical and sociological concepts. And how incredibly well written this is. I learned a lot from it, and it really encouraged me to further pursue my interests in the topic.

[☽ · Rating 4 out of 5]

tendency to repeat quotes from literature at intervals to emphasize a theoretical point but having read neither of the mentioned texts i was never 100% on how those quotes were powerfully salient or contextually hard-hitting

[Luke Hillier · Rating 3 out of 5]

More than usual, I want to emphasize the subjectivity of my rating –– I am sure this would've been four or even five stars if I was smarter and better versed in psychoanalytic/Marxist/sociological theory. As someone lacking those backgrounds, the sheer density here made it too difficult to enjoy this book, though I certainly admire and respect it. Furthermore, Gordon's distinctively lyrical style doesn't do any favors for comprehension, but damn does it have style! I was just as frustrated by the circular, opaque vagueness of her voice as I was enchanted by it, though I would've loved a few footnotes that start with "To put this plainly..."

So I probably only grasped 65% of what's being extended here, and even that was a challenge (this took me nearly two months of dipping in and out of to finish). I don't regret reading it, but I also felt unsatisfied when it ended and the clouds had never parted to allow clarity to shine through. From what I gathered, Gordon is arguing that ghosts are a social reality, and their haunting comes about through an affective charged strangeness which reveals something that is missing (a loss, a life, a path not taken), and is enacted by a ghost who is alive and deserving of our hospitality. To that latter point, ghosts arrive with desires, namely for transformation of and reckoning with the social forces that displaced, erased, neglected, and disappeared them in the first place. Does that sound silly? It doesn't matter. Throughout my reading, I kept thinking of this line from the spoken word poem Mass Graves: "I don't care if you don't believe in ghosts / They believe in you."

What I wished for, beyond or I guess in service of clarity, was practical application. This is ultimately a book on scholarly methodology, a way of engaging academic research that attends to those elided by history while attending to their complex personhood (TM). She's not so much interested in performing a spectral metaphysics, let alone a seance. But I wish she was.

[caro · Rating 5 out of 5]

life changing!

[samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

• What's distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, some- times very directly, sometimes more obliquely. I used the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what's been in your blind spot comes into view. 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.
• "Ghosts hate new things" (21). The reason why is because ghosts are characteristically attached to the events, things, and places that produced them in the first place; by na- ture they are haunting reminders of lingering trouble. Ghosts hate new things precisely because once the conditions that call them up and keep them alive have been removed, their reason for being and their power to haunt are severely restricted.
• This is a project where finding the shape de- scribed by her absence captures perfectly the paradox of tracking through time and across all those forces that which makes its mark by being there and not there at the same time.
• 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.
• If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for- granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not sim- ply a dead or a 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, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening.
• Hypervisibility is a kind of obscenity of accuracy that abolishes the distinctions between "per- mission and prohibition, presence and absence." No shadows, no ghosts. In a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are led to believe not only that everything can be seen, but also that everything is available and accessible for our consumption. In a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility,we are led to believe that neither repression nor the return of the repressed, in the form of either improperly buried bodies or countervailing systems of value or difference, occurs with any meaningful result.
• "the point of hav- ing your own object world, and walls and muffled distance or relative silence all around you, is to forget about all those innumerable others for a while." To remember "would be like having voices inside your head" (3is).5 It would be like having voices inside your head because a postmodern social formation is still haunted by the symptomatic traces of its productions and exclusions.
• Hyper- visibility is a persistent alibi for the mechanisms that render one un- visible:
• Toni Morrison's (1989) argument that "invisible things are not necessarily not-there" encourages the complementary gesture of investigating how that which appears absent can indeed be a seething presence. Both these positions are about how to write ghost stories—about how to write about per- missions and prohibitions, presence and absence, about apparitions and hysterical blindness.
• How do we reckon with what modern history has rendered ghostly? How do we develop a critical language to describe and analyze the af- fective, historical, and mnemonic structures of such hauntings?
• It was in such a spirit that Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944] 1987) wrote a two-page note, appended to The Dialectic of Enlightenment, entitled "On The Theory of Ghosts." Despairing at the loss of historical perspective, at our "disturbed relationship with the dead—forgotten and embalmed," they believed we needed some kind of theory of ghosts, or at least a way of both mourning modernity's "wound in civilization"
• It is not a case of dead or missing persons sui generis, but of the ghost as a social figure. It is often a case of inarticulate experiences, of symptoms and screen memories, of spiraling affects, of more than one story at a time, of the traffic in domains of experience that are anything but trans- parent and referential.
• The margins of the story mark a border between the remembered and the forgotten"
• In chapter 2., forced to take a detour, I go looking for a woman, Sabina Spielrein, who was not in a photograph in which she was supposed to be. I find her in psycho- analysis, the only human science that has taken haunting seriously as an object of analysis. But psychoanalysis does not know as much about haunting as it might seem.
• Chapters 3 and 4 venture to contemplate haunting and ghosts at the level of the making and unmaking of world historical events. Chapter 3, written around Luisa Valenzuela's novel Como en la Guerra/He Who Searches, is about the system of state ter- ror known as disappearance in Argentina. Chapter 4, centered on Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, is about Reconstruction and the lingering inheritance of U.S. racial slavery.
• [Chapter 2]
• the experience of the uncanny is not simply "intellectual uncertainty." It is what I call being haunted, a state, I will emphasize over and over again, that is not simply one of cognitive doubt, or of the unknown, but something else.
• Freud: The creative writer can . . . choose a setting which . . . differ[s] from the real world by admitting . . . ghosts of the dead. So long as they remain within their setting of poetic reality, such figures lose any uncanninesswhich they might possess.... The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts as well all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in real- ity has it in his story.
• Spielrein absent from photo of 3rd Psychoanalytic Congress: she refused to pose for camera
• the replacement of the visual spectacle (Charcot photographing hysteria) with the talking cure marks the transition, through Josef Breuer and Anna O, to psychoanalysis proper.
• Sabina Spielrein saw spirits. Sabina Spielrein haunts the institution of psychoanalysis.
• Regine Robin's statement that "something crosses over the disciplinary boundaries which only fiction can apprehend, like a trace of unassumed contradictions, as the only way to designate the locus of its own production" (1980: 2,35). The fictional, the made-up, the invention that comes between me and my object of study and that is the result of the encounter, a real thing. It is never fully ours for the making, of course, and that is why those "unassumed contradictions" come like traces, often remain as traces, the tracks of our fieldwork, dragging all that construction into the relationship between me and knowledge.
• what method have you adopted for your research? Or, more precisely, how can a fiction be data? What is this about ghosts and haunting? Why do you call it sociology?
• How can we tell the differ- ence between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, they insisted? How can we tell the difference between one story and another's? It will all hinge, as we shall see, on that double modality of telling—to recount and to distinguish.
• The unconscious draws us, as social analysts, into another region or field where things are there and yet hidden, where things stand gaping, where the question of how we present a world, our own or another's, becomes a question of the limits of representation.
• This identification with the consciousness of others is uncertain, Freud says, because it relies only on an inference that it is like our own.
• "this method of infer- ence, applied to oneself in spite of inner opposition, does not lead to the discovery of an unconscious, but leads logically to the assumption of another, second consciousness which is united in myself with the con- sciousness I know" "a consciousness of which its own possessor knows nothing is something very different from that of another person"
• Freud is vexed by the possibility of conceiving the un- conscious as the life of others and other things within us, the specter of a social unconscious raises its head. The Freudian unconscious is not a social unconscious.
• Freud's science will try, once and for all, to rid itself of all vestiges of animism by making all the spirits or the hauntings come from the unconscious, from inside the troubled individual, an individ- ual, we might note, who had become increasingly taken with the ani- mation of the commodity world. HMM I THINK IM WITH HIM ON THIS ONE
• Freud's mature unconscious replaces origins of haunting in the worldly contact between self and other. The unconscious is NOT SOCIAL
• Uncanny experiences are haunting experiences. There is something there and you "feel" it strongly. It has a shape, an electric empiricity, but the evidence is barely visible, or highly symbol- ized.
• Freud divides uncanny experiences into two classes, those that arise from the revival of "repressed infantile complexes, from the castration complex, womb-phantasies, etc." (U 2,48) and those that arise from the return of "surpassed" "primitive beliefs."
• he admits, and is troubled by, the presence of uncanny experiences that are not re- ducible to the acting out of an individual's psychic state.
• But it is pre- cisely the experience of being haunted in the "world of common real- ity, " the unexpected arrival of ghosts or wolves or eerie photographs, that troubles or even ruins our ability to distinguish reality and fiction, magic and science, savage and civilized, self and other, and in those ways gives to reality a different coloring. The "reality-testing" that we might want to perform in the face of hauntings must first of all admit those hauntings as real.
• Freud might have called the primitive or the archaic the social and thereby have supplemented the Marxist notion of estrangement. The social is ultimately what the uncanny is about: being haunted in the world of common reality. I am not sold on this
• It is an enchanted encounter in a disenchanted world between familiarity and strangeness. The uncanny is the return, in psychoanalytic terms, of what the concept of the un- conscious represses: the reality of being haunted by worldly contacts.
• After having dragged the human sciences into all these ghostly affairs, Freud's science arrives to explain away everything that is important and to leave us with adults who never surmount their indi- vidual childhoods or adults whose haunting experiences reflect their in- correct and childish belief in the modes of thought of their "primitive" ancestors. She wants something of Freud that is not Freudian
• Dear Sabina…Is this why you have come back to haunt me, because rumors of your re- covery have reached you?
• [Chapter 3]
• To confront those who become desaparecido (disappeared) under the auspices of state-sponsored terror in Argentina, within what Michael Taussig (i99z) calls the Nervous System, or, as we will see in chapter 4, to confront those who were lost on their way to North America in the flow of a juridically enforced international trade in human property, is to contemplate ghosts and haunting at the level of the making and un- making of world historical events.
• In these mat- ters, you can only experience a haunting, confirming in such an experi- ence the nature of the thing itself: a disappearance is real only when it is apparitional.
• Thus far, I have considered three characteristic features of haunting. We have seen that the ghost imports a charged strangeness into the place or sphere it is haunting, thus unsettling the propriety and prop- erty lines that delimit a zone of activity or knowledge. I have also em- phasized that the ghost is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken. From a certain vantage point the ghost also simultaneously rep- resents a future possibility, a hope. Finally, I have suggested that the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice. Out of a concern for justice would be the only reason one would bother. What about lament? Ghostly lament?
• Rather, my purpose is to encourage us to think that the very way in which we discover things or learn about others or grapple with history is intimately tied to the very things themselves, to their variable modes of operation, and thus to how we would change them.
• Luisa Valenzuela is an Argentine writer, the author of several novels and short story collections all explor- ing the social and psychosexual dimensions of repression and desire. In Luisa Valenzuela's story, a man becomes haunted by a woman who is barely there. He is searching for her, for knowledge, for himself. She is haunted by something else it takes him a long time to figure out. The search is everything to him. What does he find when he goes look- ing for the woman who has become an apparition? The knot of the ghostly and the real.
• For the Mothers, the photographs were a spirit guide to the desapare- cidos and to disappearance as an organized system of repression. The photographs—"token[s] of absence" and potent evidence of what is harrowingly present—constituted a repertoire of counterimages, part of a movement to punctuate the silence, to break the studium-like quality of disappearance, to "layclaim to another reality"
• Where are the disappeared? The disappeared are in another world, a world some Mothers were taken to also. This is, surely, one of the rea- sons the Mothers knew that disappearance was not death. Disappear- ance was all around them, they smelled it, they sensed it, they felt its be- witching compulsion: it was always threatening to envelop them. The disappeared have gone through the other door, its floods of tears with consolation enclosed.
• To insist that disappearance is not death but its own state of being consolation enclosed—because it exists and is living with us, doing things to us, scaring us, driving us from our homes into exile, making us incon- solably lonely, or crazy, or unable to see what is right in front of our faces, or because it is goading us to fight—is to pinpoint its haunting quality. To withstand and to defy its haunting power requires speaking to it directly, not paralyzed with fear, out of a concern for justice. How we can talk with them? (Agosin 1990: 37).
• A bag of bones tells us nothing about disappearance. A bag of bones is not justice. A bag of bones is knowledge without acknowledgment, the "sacramental transformation" of information into publicly sanctioned truth (Weschler 1990: 4). A bag of bones only aims to eradicate "any meaning that death might have in society," aims to eliminate "historical memory" and public memorials in a context where death is a supreme instance of national sovereignty (Franco 1986: 12.). The Mothers in- sisted on keeping the disappeared alive because they opposed the false reconciliation that national-sponsored grieving for the dead and for burying the "terrible" past promised.
• The Mothers insisted on Apari- cion con vida because they sought not to bury and forget the dead, but rather a "dynamic reintegration of the dead and disappeared into con- temporaneity" (ibid.: 14).
• Disappearance is not only about death. Disappearance is a thing in it- self, a state of being repressed. To counter it and its particular mode of operation requires contact with and work on what it is. As we shall see in a moment, disappearance is a state-sponsored procedure for produc- ing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission.
• [4]
• Somewhere between the Actual and the Imaginary ghosts might enter without affrighting us
• [On Beloved] The ghost enters, all fleshy and real, with wants, and a fierce hunger, and she speaks, barely, of course, and in pictures and a coded language. This ghost, Beloved, forces a reckoning: she makes those who have contact with her, who love and need her, confront an event in their past that loiters in the present. But Beloved, the ghost, is haunted too, and therein lies the challenge Morrison poses.
• Yet, what they see or think they see can never quite grasp what Toni Morrison asks us as readers today to comprehend: that Beloved the ghost herself barely possesses a story of loss, which structures the very possibility of enslavement, emancipation, and freedom in which the Reconstructive history of Beloved traffics.
• However, neither Sethe nor the oth- ers can perceive that the ghost that is haunting them is haunted her- self.
• In the latter part of January 1856, Margaret Garner, the slave mother, killed her child rather than see her taken back to slavery.
• "Rather than" suggests a causal explanatory relation be- tween these two moments, one seemingly individual and private—a mother kills her child—and the other systemic and public—Slavery.
• For the majority of lay abolitionist readers, the slave narrative was popular sociology. It possessed a distinctive factual value because it told you what life was really like for the slave striving to be free. And it pos- sessed a distinctive factual-moral value because it provided the believ- able proof that the slave, legally property, was a potential citizen, a human being. The slave narrative was expected to bear witness to the institution and experience of Slavery simply in plain speech and thus, by implication, sincerely.
• As it retells one story and in this way summons another, it remembers some of what the slave narrative forgot, creating a palimpsest, a document that has been inscribed sev- eral times, where the remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased scripting is still detectable.
• Belov

[sean]

i lack a sufficient grounding in academia to fully grasp the significance of gordon's call to consider haunting a serious methodological avenue for sociological inquiry, but this book has much value beyond that. a poetic and lyrical writer in her own right (though never at the expense of clarity or rigour), gordon proposes that we consider haunting as a structure of feeling in raymond williams's sense, i.e. as a "conception, or sensuous knowledge, of a historical materialism [citing walter benjamin] characterised constitutively by the tangle of the subjective and objective [...] as the tangled exchange of noisy silences and seething absences." her close readings of luisa valenzuela's he who searches and toni morrison's beloved provide her more structural and historiographical analyses with texture and depth. some of her conclusions seemed a little self-evident, particularly the synthesis of marxism and psychoanalysis (did the frankfurt school never exist?). but this is an excellent, useful book, one that has helped me understand how affect can fit in with a materialist, liberational politics.

[Ruari Paterson-Achenbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

(slight cheat because I didn't read the 3rd chapter) BUT underneath some of the more obscure phrases / idioms / dense postmodern and psychoanalytic jargon .... this is actually pretty great. It's not entirely what I was expecting, but had some really significant stuff to say about HOW we do sociology, what and whom we devote time to, what it means to consider the present as a sociological focal point. Also the chapter on Toni Morrison is pretty essential reading (the rest of the book ... less so? idk maybe it would've been less good without the introduction). ANYWAY for its really beautifully written reflective segments and its reckoning with the very discipline it situates itself in, 4*. Want to read more stuff about spectrality now x

[Jonatan Södergren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant social analysis perhaps best summarised by Gordon herself, ”Ghostly Matters is thus, on the one hand, a modest book and, on the other hand, quite ambitious. Its modesty lies in its very simple point. Ghostly matters are part of social life. If we want to study social life well, and if in addition we want ro contribute, in however small a measure, to changing it, we must learn how to identify hauntings and reckon with ghosts, must learn how to make contact with what is without doubt often painful, difficult, and unsettling. This book’s ambition lies in asserting that in order to do this, we will have to change the way we have been doing things” (p. 23).

[nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is just gorgeous. It--along with Fred Moten's In The Break--is one of the few academic books that I'll pull out just to read for pleasure. And much like Moten, it pays to spend some time with it--for understanding's and for pleasure's sake.

[Jenny's Therapist Book Nook · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book explores how unresolved trauma, both personal and generational, haunts like ghosts. We sense its presence yet can’t see it. Or perhaps we choose, either consciously or unconsciously, not to see it–at least not with our current methods for seeing and knowing the world. Gordon says, “The ghost makes itself known to us through haunting and pulls us affectively into the structure of feeling, of a reality we come to experience as a recognition.” It’s the way we all walk around the bed in the room that’s not there.

This is a revolutionary approach to engaging with trauma. It makes possible, the mystical pursuit of interacting with the essence of generational trauma that we will never know in the concrete way we know physical matter. The present is made of the elements of the past, both remembered and forgotten. Knowing the affective past comes to us through symbols, dreams, and intuitive identification.

The book reminds us that we can traffic our conversations through a different mystical and magical channel to be a part of transforming “a shadow of a life into an undiminished life whose shadows touch softly in the spirit of a peaceful reconciliation” and concern for justice.

I'm eager to delve deeper into these themes with you. Why not join me on my blog? It's a welcoming space where we can explore these topics from a mental health perspective together. Looking forward to our conversation!
https://jennybsmith.com/blog/ghostly-...

Gordon explores this topic using great works of fiction, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved and Louisa Valenzuela's He Who Searches. Gordon also considers psychoanalysis and how Sabrina Speilrein's invisibility and absence in a picture and a moment in time may have or could have been one of the most significant discoveries in the field of psychoanalysis.

I give this book five stars. As a therapist, it changed the way I think about trauma. The words spoke to that which already lives within me but didn’t have a map to locate.

For example, I have always sensed and known, in an affective way, my parent's trauma. Most kids do. But these stories came to me in a dream that used the symbol of a wolf combined with my mother’s childhood home to help me know something that couldn’t be known intellectually. In my dreams, as a child, if the wolf was awakened by my attempts to reach my mother, he erupted into a snarling terror, chasing me across the fields of farmland.

As an adult, I wonder if I asked the wolf what it needed me to know. What was it trying to share or warn of? This has become a tool in the exploration of my family history and the layers of generational trauma that created the unpredictable emotional undertones in my home, my parent’s childhood homes, my grandparents and great grandparent’s childhood homes, all the way through the unknowable despair of the Vietnam War, World War II, and surely back to the Civil War and beyond.

[Ai Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really moving and important look at haunting as methodology, and for exploring haunting as a mode of identifying how systems of power and sociality coexist in the current day. I'll note that I read "A Glossary of Haunting" by Eve Tuck and C. Ree before I read this book, so my reading was pretty heavily colored by that essay (which I strongly recommend to everyone ever all the time.) I particularly enjoyed chapters three and four, as I thought they lent themselves most strongly to what I do as a historian, so obviously ymmv on that point. Her weird obsession with haunting being fixed by justice, and as a means towards a solution (or a signpost towards that solution) was very odd to me given what "Glossary" has to say, and I'm still teasing out how I feel about that (can we give ghosts justice? Will ghosts just go away?)

The book is very beautifully written, though, and I will no doubt mine it heavily for quotations in the future! I'd definitely recommend this to anyone thinking about haunting as a theoretical concept for their work.

[Marty Heath · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book presents a very interesting framework for social analysis & a useful call to action. Despite this (and my appreciation of the 4th chapter in particular) the non-traditional writing style makes this a very dense and somewhat confusing read. Even so, if you are willing to give it the time it reveals very interesting kernels and connections. If not, a dedicated reading of just the first chapter will clarify the primary framework (which does not necessarily become more clear as you see it applied in the later chapters).

[Fionnán de Goeas Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5 stars.

Read as part of one of my graduate seminars for this spring.
Gordon's conception of haunting as a methodological framework is fascinating, cogent, and honestly a gamechanger for social theorists/scholars whose work delves deep into the past, present, and future(s). Taking an interdisciplinary approach (in the pure Barthesian sense—and in my opinion the best approach), Gordon introduces something that later scholars such as Hartman will build upon. It is a new fixture within my favorite theoretical texts.

[Tanisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Haunting is a frightening experience. It always registers the harm inflicted or the los 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 main 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."

[Rebecca Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for academic work I'm doing exploring how our bodies archive trauma, memories, and our ancestral pasts, but this book is interesting for anyone hoping to explore the complexities of being human. How do we confront our ghosts, personally, societally, and institutionally? Gordon's sociological text turns to literature to identify how distinct cultural moments have enabled and disabled us from confronting complex personhood.

[Ted J. Gibbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gordon provides an undoubtedly great contribution to multiple sociological fields with her interdisciplinary approach, particularly her expansion of the spectre as a revenant of social violence. However, much of the text felt needlessly padded-out with excessive summaries of other texts, making certain sections of the work less revelatory than at first seems promised. All in all though, good stuff!

[apollo · Rating 5 out of 5]

a stunning and profound book that sharply pushes against the boundaries of sociology. despite being very dense, topically heavy, and very very abstract, I genuinely enjoyed reading this and found it extremely helpful in thinking about how I approach research, sociology, and my personal connection(s) to history and systems of oppression. this is definitely a book that you have to read again and again and will probably pick up something very different each time you read it.

[KKDDBB · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though stylistically I sometimes found this a hard to follow read (repetitions that muddy the water more then they explicate) and stylistic choices that did not really carry a point. Having finished it I realize why Gordon used this form of writing. There is a type of inhabiting the thing that is propagated. I would still really recommend this book because it's a great gateway into looking at haunting and the ghost as an entity that influences the social and the ways in which fiction can engage with (social) hauntings. (Writing this for a future self so I'm not doing the book justice here)

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Book. Great methodology for thinking about the traces colonialism has left. Also her dissection of all the things Toni Morrison is doing in Beloved, really illustrates why Toni Morrison was the greatest American writer to describe all the nooks and crannies of the aftermath of the Slavery all the way into the present

[iris irimia]

«To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. That is Utopian grace: […] to long for the insight of that moment in which we recognize, as in Benjamin’s profane illumination, that it could have and can be otherwise»

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

So compelling and interesting!! I especially liked Gordon's perspectives on lesser known historical events like the dark sides of early psychotherapy, or Argentinian disappearances. Unique and worth a reread!

[Dearwassily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at what haunts us.

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5!

[Khazna · Rating 4 out of 5]

dense but essential!