Avery Gordon's "Ghostly Matters" and the Haunting of Sociological Research

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4 Responses

  1. tom wengraf says:

    “Yet, Spielrein is not among those in a photograph taken at the Weimar Congress in 1911. Her absence from the photograph haunts Gordon. Her diaries and letters haunt Gordon.” It is because Gordon knows about Spielrein that the latter’s absence from the photo haunts her. It is because the relatives of the “disappeared ones” knew the disappeared ones that they could generate a sense of ‘being haunted’ among non-relatives.

    “Therefore, to thoroughly understand the state terror and desaparecido of Argentina requires one to contemplate ghosts and hauntings”. It is crucial that some people (the ones who know about the disappeared ones) work to force the ignorant and the bystanders who would prefer not to know to bring the “disappeared” into their knowledge and then into central focus.

    To talk of “alternative methods and forms that can produce reality and truth” is for me to produce mystifying talk. The ‘hauntings of the disappeared” is a work of people in the present not changing the reality of the past but working to tell the truth which has been hidden and denied (and often continues to be so, see climate denial). If this work of recovering some truth about the past is successful in changing the reality of massive denial to a new reality of at least partly-recovered memory, then “ghosts and hauntings” as a work of motivated contemporary action has been successful.

    But there are no ‘ghost-effects’ , there are no ‘haunting effects’, without people trying to trouble existing hegemonies of unconsciousness. A mode of talk that makes this difficult to see or think is itself guilty of concealing the reality of the real work of real militants, and generating an amnesia of its own.,

  2. Jan says:

    Hi,
    Nice summary of Avery Gordon’s work. Can you please share the name behind the handle so I can cite in my paper.

    Many thanks,
    Jan

  3. Jan says:

    Hi,
    Nice summary of Avery Gordon’s work. Can you please share the name behind the handle so I can cite in my paper.
    (rademacher)

    Many thanks,
    Jan

  1. 10th October 2014

    […] they were convinced that the building was haunted, which reminded me of Avery Gordon’s work, Ghostly Matters, which deals sociologically with the lingering of ghosts and disappearances; “to be haunted is to […]

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