Ghosthood and the Uncomfortable Familiarity of Haunting

To be haunted is to be full of ghosts. Mainstream cultural understandings of ghosts usually refer to the lingering and present soul of a person who has died, usually symbolised or embodied by an invisible, humanlike figure. However, with the conception of hauntology in the 1990s (Derrida), popular culture, political discourse, and literary analysis took a spectral turn, summoning dormant ghosts back into the zeitgeist. A key pillar of that hauntological thought is absence. The absence of a solid definition for the ghost is core to its existence–to understand ghosts is to admit uncertainty in that very understanding: “Its own status as discourse or epistemology is never stable, as the ghost also questions the formation of knowledge itself and specifically what is placed outside it” (del Pilar Blanco and Peeren 9). This elusiveness is at the heart of my interest in ghosts, and the notion of haunting; the same elusiveness I associate with feelings and experiences I can’t explain, that make people turn to science, spirituality, or superstition. But what happens when we look deeper into this impalpability?  

What is the ghost trying to tell us about our self, our environment, and our way of thought? 

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What drew me to the tangible absence of the ghost was my own ill-fitting identity. I wanted so badly to escape the horror of being known, the discomfort of being seen, and the pressures of personhood. I needed a reverse-exorcism, to achieve “ghosthood”: a personhood that has been saturated with ghosts. But ghosts have an advantage to me. They float in the crevices that my rigid body cannot reach (between our believed dichotomies: body and self, then and now, presence and absence). How can I work within these limitations? What can I observe in the ghost and apply to myself?

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To start approaching what makes a ghost, I posit fluidity as disregard for limitations and absolutes, and the acceptance of change and open-endedness. (never one side of the coin, but somehow the way it flips and shifts)

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The ability to live with one’s ghosts, that is, to embrace one’s fluid and multitudinous nature, implies foregoing linearity or chronology in understanding the self. Consequently, this allows a nonlinear understanding of the world–and with it, the ability to see ghosts in everything. The ghostly subject recognizes that just as the self exists in fleeting instances, so does time. Time, like the self, falters and shifts. (they move within the overlapping folds of time; real time: the looping, skipping, fluid thing)

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It is through nonlinear understanding that other possible worlds are unearthed, existing outside the margins of the linear passage of time. Ghosts practice this nonlinearity through the simple act of appearing–breaking, with their timelessness, the chronology of our lives. Contrary to the belief that they signal an inability to move on, ghosts instead mean only to signal. In that way, ghosts are signifiers, but whose signified isn’t necessarily fixed. Their appearance points to a lack in present conditions, and to the possibility of correcting this lack and achieving justice (Derrida 165). They are mute heralds: omissive, not in the sense of committing this erasure, but of emphasizing the presence of absence, of a counter-narrative which exists between the lines. (they live in the subtext, dodge the dots and crosses; they allow room for contradiction)

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Admittedly, it’s difficult to identify with that which isn’t fixed. We may scramble to find the core of who we are, the one true unshakable meaning. But the ghostly self grows in directions that challenge and often contradict each other, and must accept each of these as part of itself. The result, as it twists and turns, folding onto itself, is a ghostly self that is layered with a multitude of meanings, born of an abundance of experiences and associations. “The question, therefore, is of not where I am, but when I am. The answer is clear: when “I” begin to repeat myself, establishing a series of internal deaths that, while eroding the “real me,” nevertheless produce a series of bodily identities layering one another.” (Trigg 219) (now you tell me I remind you of a friend, but one that you can't seem to name)

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Transformativeness lends a directionality to these layers, such that they stay in constant motion, mutating and shifting between meanings. The two qualities work together to create a ghostly self that is perpetually metamorphosing, but that retains its memory. It does not completely evaporate all ties to (bodily, cultural, or social) structure, but rather sees them as instances of grounding–landmarks, rather than tethers. (I ornament my presence with souvenirs from my prior incarnations, but they have no weight on me)

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If personhood can become haunted by exhibiting fluid, nonlinear, omissive, layered, and transformative qualities, then we can understand subjects exhibiting these qualities as haunted. But what is a haunting in this context? Traditional hauntings are often associated with symptomatic effects: a cold spot, a flickering of the lights, an EMF reading. After all, “the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place” (Gordon 107). Let’s consider two subjects, technology and place, which, to me, evoke a similar inexplicability as the ghost. In fact, within books and films of the horror genre, the notions of technology and place are often associated with haunting. Why is that? And what can observing these case studies reveal to us about its outward effects?

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The ghost is in the TV. The ghost creates static on the radio. The ghost looms in the back of the photograph. The ghost calls the phone. The ghost swings the creaky door. The ghost pounds on the walls. The ghost is inside the house. The ghost is the house itself. 

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Technology is a deeply haunted field. In its ability to record sound and image, it preserves the past such that it is accessible in the present and future. In projecting these recordings, it creates ghostly duplicates of past selves that may outlive us, making us confront our past, present, and future at once, and challenging linear time. In its tendency to reflect, aesthetically and functionally, the styles and limits of its time, it is evolutionary and transformative, but still highly referential. In its attempts to become more invisible, more relatable, and in seeping into every corner of our world, it is fluid, both in shape and in meaning. Throughout history, breakthrough technologies like the radio, the camera, the X-ray, and others, have sparked discourse about ghosts and mortality. This happened for a multitude of reasons, from those who instantly wished to use these technologies to glimpse or communicate with the dead, to those who feared that these disembodied recordings were slowly consuming their souls, to those who found that what these recordings were really doing was immortalizing their users. There is an interesting contradiction at play between the replicated digital self, recorded whether in voice or image, forever frozen in time, and the decaying of this digital self, evident within the crackle of old records, the weathering of a photograph, or the poor quality of the digital images of our childhood. This unequal temporality gives way to an uncomfortable meeting of familiar and distant, one that draws us in with recognition but keeps us away by making apparent its own absence.

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The hospital at night is a museum of white tile and fluorescent lighting. It’s as though I’m not in a place at all, but in a state of waiting. I try to imagine it being anything else. By day, it is noisy with stories. Is it possible for a place to be more haunted in daylight? I take refuge in a dimly lit radiation room. (every time we create a new technology, we use it to look where we're not allowed) I found myself staring at the X-rays, all lined up on the hospital wall. In a meticulously arranged collage, the image of my own death. Medically, it was inconclusive, but mentally, it was exhilarating. 

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To say that a place is haunted is high praise. To ascribe ghosts to a space is to give it “social meaning and thereby make it a place” (Bell 820). Ghosts conjure social meaning through their connection to memory. Collective memory–such as memories of war, of victory or loss, historically impactful and large in scale–can often leave prints on a place, such as bullet holes, sculptures, and architectural interventions. These marks could also be invisible, like changes in demographic, or an increase in surveillance, a feeling of ease or unease. However, smaller scale or even individual memory also leaves marks on a place. In cities where people grew up, met friends and family, played, commuted, and lived their lives, it is possible to feel the remnants of those memories. But place is inseparable from time; places that we have grown up with age, transform, and die, and in that, they become heralds for the infallibility of death. In experiencing a place that has undergone transformation, such as a childhood home that has changed ownership, or a war-era building that has been repurposed, we experience a layering of moments in space and time, carrying with them the memories of each of these layers. They imply that we are never only in one place at a time, but in a multitude of different places, as a multitude of different versions of ourselves, happening all at once, feigning the appearance of progression. The result is a homesickness tied to the feeling of being “homeless in time” (Trigg 196), the feeling that this place no longer feels ours. The walls may stand in the correct positions, but they have been painted a different colour, and the photos have been taken off. We open a door expecting a toilet, and find in its place a closet. The absence of what we know, like the presence of that we don’t know, becomes central to the shape of the place. (Fisher 64) Our memories and perceptions of the place become clouded by the sense of something missing, placing it at the uncanny intersection of familiarity and unfamiliarity. 

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There is a distinction to be made however between the uncanniness evoked by this dissonance, and the manufactured uncanniness epitomized in contemporary, neoliberal urban design. The latter is a method of suppressing personal and collective identity in favour of a globalised and capitalist (and frankly, boring) non-place (Augé).

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But a place can be a ghost, too. It haunts, in whispers of before, that have survived in forgotten corners of the city, in its own felt absence, in little acts of rebellion (I think of graffiti, of hanging out in parking lots, of video games and movies that place literal ghosts in the creepy, liminal emptiness of the global city and its failed landmarks). A place, once haunted, cannot be truly destroyed. Surpassing its built form, place is an amalgamation of memories, stories, energies in the air.

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In virtual space, a junction of place and technology, the ghostly qualities that we see in these phenomena become amplified. Virtual space becomes haunted by interacting with the physical barrier of the human body. For the user, a television or computer screen serves as a fourth wall. When they are immersed in virtual space, the fourth wall could be said to be intact, meaning that the user is forgetting (or ignoring), to a certain degree, that they are a physical body outside the virtual realm. However, due to technological limitations, that physical barrier still exists, and with it cracks in the otherwise intact fourth wall. The oscillation between physical and virtual body/place creates a dislodging effect, placing the user on a nonlinear positioning. The barrier is transformative, it blurs and sharpens intermittently, but it is always there, keeping them aware of their physical self polluting the virtual environment, and turning the experience of self into a fluid one.

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I remember certain video game environments the way I remember houses I grew up in. Some new games have almost lifelike graphics, impressive ambient scores, and haptic responses that make it easy to lose yourself. But even seeing low-poly architecture with low-poly monsters on a boxy TV screen (with music playing harshly through cheap speakers) had us forgetting ourselves. You wouldn’t be able to convince me, then or now, that those weren’t real places.

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Ghosts matter because they challenge the binaries and standards that uphold the rigid structure of our world. They manifest themselves in instances of haunting, creating inexplicable feelings on the spectrums of comfort/discomfort and familiarity/unfamiliarity, often tied to time and our position within it. I first turned to technology and place for this reason, that they carry a quality of something beneath the surface, be it in their history or our own in relation to them. They may inspire feelings of familiarity and nostalgia, but their tendency to age and transform and become obsolete can make us feel distant from them, and it is in that paradox of distant familiarity that ghosts build their homes. 

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Still, they are tangible evidence of human existence. They may reflect the dominant aesthetics of their eras and systems of power, but they are witness and messenger to the stories of the masses. We leave traces of ourselves in the places that we frequent, and we preserve traces of ourselves in the devices that we carry. We do this to insist on our existence, because we want to be remembered. We hope that we can appear, like ghosts, and disrupt the narrative. Observing ourselves in relation to technology and place, how they live inside of us as much as we live inside of them, further asserts our ghostliness. We are scattered over everything we touch, existing at once in past, present, and future, omnipresent and wishing to be heard.

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I am no longer interested in being an unshakable absolute. At the core there is a blur. I live in many houses. I am a ghost haunting these houses. I am a haunted house. I fold these affirmations into little charms I keep in my pockets. If we let ourselves, our houses, and our histories be haunted, we’ll be better equipped to tear at the surface of old stories and hear ones beneath their veil. The way we feel about things is as true as their atomic concoction, and the fact that our feelings change makes this all the more true.

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