#avery f. gordon

[heavenlyyshecomes]

Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

[saintmaudes]

Disappearance is an exemplary instance in which the boundaries of rational and irrational, fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, person and system, force and effect, conscious and unconscious, knowing and not knowing are constitutively unstable. Nothing characterizes a terroristic society where the state, in the name of a patriarchal, nationalistic, Christian capitalism, is disappearing people more than haunting does. Haunting, however, is precisely what prevents rational detachment, prevents your willful control, prevents the disaggregation of class struggle and your feelings, motivations, blind spots, craziness, and desires. A haunted society is full of ghosts, and the ghost always carries the message—albeit not in the form of the academic treatise, or the clinical case study, or the polemical broadside, or the mind-numbing factual report—that the gap between personal and social, public and private, objective and subjective is misleading in the first place. That is to say, it is leading you elsewhere, it is making you see things you did not see before, it is making an impact on you; your relation to things that seemed separate or invisible is changing. This is not to say that the gap or the reification is not an enormously powerful real experience. Nor is it to say that haunting somehow transcends the actually existing social relations in which we live, think, and think up new concepts and visions of life. Quite the contrary. But these questions remain: what effectively describes the gap as an organized and elaborate symptom, and what describes the moment when we understand that it is, in fact, misleading us?

Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

[littleforgottenlibrary]

Ghostly Matters - Avery F. Gordon

[jacobwren]

I would say on one hand, it feels unreasonable – maddening – to want to be loved for asking people to think critically about things they’d rather not, for asking people to love you for questioning their notions of what’s beautiful. On the other hand, we would have a very different culture if the critical object was the beautiful, beloved object. You might make a different kind of art in such a context. The possibilities of this cultural change are unforeseeable at this point.

Avery F. Gordon

[besmirchthis]

The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening.

Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

[milkboydotnet]

Being haunted draws us affectively, something 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 a transformative recognition.

Avery F. Gordon and Janice Radway, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

[pefkaes]

"But it is precisely the experience of being haunted in the "world of common reality," the unexpected arrival of ghosts or wolves or eerie photographs, that troubles or 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."

— Gordon, A.F. (1997). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press.

[pefkaes]

“The question of method may be a matter of fraud and artifice, but they wanted to know how to tell the difference between one story and another, and in order to try to provide some clues it will be necessary to speak of ghosts and hauntings and crazy women and territorial dislocations. It will be necessary to take a detour.”

— Gordon, A.F. (1997). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press.