RabachK VtP Annotation: GhostlyMatters

To begin, Avery Gordon proclaims “that life is complicated may seems a banal expression to the obvious, but it is nonetheless, a profound theoretical statement—perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time” (3). It is these complications, especially those that are seemingly invisible, that Gordon explores in her book titled “Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.” These complications are, of course, met with contradictions. For Gordon, however, it is these very frictions and tensions that are cause for analytical importance. This book is not only about methodology, but perhaps more importantly, about epistemology: How do we know things? How do we render absences present? How do we listen for silence? How do we wait for ghosts? And most importantly, how do we make “the fictional, the theoretical, and the factual speak to one another” (26)? I’d even argue Gordon’s book prompts us to ask: what are some ways we may rethink the fictional, the theoretical, and the factual?Of course, the title “Ghostly Matters,” refers to specters and hauntings. It may conjure imaginaries of horror, trauma, fright. Or it may conjure an imaginary of the immaterial. This, however, is precisely what Gordon is writing against. Haunting, for Gordon, is not immaterial. In fact, it is an entirely new form of materialism (69). Haunting gives us access to the present. For Gordon, reckoning with ghosts “is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the past, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had” (183). It gives us new possibilities—possibilities we never knew we had. Haunting gives us traces of the past. Traces of absence. It allows us to track history’s imperfect erasures (146).