A number of recent horror fictions have returned to the trope of the haunted house to reveal the anxieties over becoming house-poor; buying into a lifestyle which then disappears. Films such as the Paranormal Activity series (2009, 2010, 2011) insist on the disruption of the hyperhouse as a doomed endeavor, one replete with economic disaster as well as family breakdown. Finally, with American Horror Story (Ryan Murphy & Brad Falchuk 2011) we find the most extreme example of a family unable to move out of “Murder House” because of the downsized economy, and the result is that the wife is raped by a ghost in order to give birth, it seems, to the Antichrist.

This paper will argue for a reevaluation of the haunted house story as one which sees the current economic crisis as an apocalyptic moment, destroying the picture-perfect dreams of the American family with their own house, SUV and 50” plasma TV. The household economy becomes an image of society’s household economy. In this way, I am really talking about a social ecology represented on and in a screen ecology – ecology coming from the Greek word oikos for home/household and -logy meaning the study of. So, I propose to study screen representations of homes in order to understand the US social household. In this way I draw on what Frank Kermode calls consonance between fictional plots and the way we make sense of the world.

I wish to make a couple of banal observations here about the apocalypse and the end and how they they relate to an American ecology. Banal because how much more can be said about the current economic crisis which originated in the US but have since rippled all over the world. Is this state of crisis simply the perpetuating logic of capitalism, a crisis created to sustain that favorite capitalist game known as creative destruction? A crisis, as Frank Kermode tells us, is simply one way of structuring what cannot be structured: in imagining an end for the world we are simply categorizing a pattern on something which is not ordered – the flow of time – but which is turned into history through this categorization. This narrative understanding of the apocalypse provides security and comfort because it controls our perception of time and makes sense of it as something which has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so the economic apocalypse we are all living through is simply an ordering mechanism for why we must go out and spend in order to postpone the economic collapse always-already waiting for us, right there at the end of our credit limit.

If there is any logic to this scheme of perpetual spending to stave off the apocalypse – and I’m not saying there is – maybe it comes from recognizing that the apocalyptic is not a state of affairs but a mode of thought, as Evan Calder Williams argues in Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Williams 2011) In this sense, the financial crisis becomes simply a way for us to conceive the world but more insidiously than that it becomes a misapprehending the world, suggesting that the crisis was inevitable yet unpredictable, no one’s fault yet the result of our own choices. Conceived this way, we may say that crisis is a force that gives us meaning. Williams’ argument is that the late capitalist system has become apocalyptic in itself because it has an inherent state of entropy built into it. I believe that this is revealed by the current financial crisis and is best explained by the going-awry of what George Bataille has called the accursed share.

The accursed share is defined by Bataille as a necessary wasteful expenditure, enacted to let lose the pressure of a growing system. Such release is necessary no matter what. What I believe we are experiencing is the fact that all of a sudden excess wealth is tied up into real estate from which it can no longer be spent, since the housing bubble has burst and the inflated wealth created by credit and loans has disappeared. What happens, then, is that massive amounts of wealth have vanished thereby creating a vacuum.

Bataille describes what occurs when surplus wealth cannot be spent: “For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion.” (Bataille 1991, 24) What happens when surplus wealth vanishes in a puff of smoke? I believe it does not explode but implodes instead, creating pockets of devastation in the suburban landscape, pockets which are filled with the lingering traces of that surplus wealth come back to haunt the inhabitants.

Houses are interesting constructions, filled with what it means to be human for one of the defining aspects of a house is that it never only houses – it is also, in the words of Mark Wigley, “a mechanism of representation.” (Wigley 1993, 163) What these recent haunted house films tell us is an ongoing attempt to domesticate and thereby control the surplus wealth put into them. However, the very fact that they are haunted reveals that these houses and the surplus wealth is very much not domesticated and is perfectly happy to bring about the end of life as we know it. As Barry Curtis points out “Houses are deeply implicated with humanity, and yet they are not human. The tensions arising from that anomaly stress other borders and distinctions in ways that activate acute anxieties.” (Curtis 2008, 10-11)

The houses we find in these recent ghost films are on a whole hyperhouses, which interestingly means that they have no real history. The ghosts who inevitably haunt them are therefore young restless spirits, tied more to people than places. Interestingly, one thing which unites many haunted house stories – recent or otherwise – is the idea of illicit ownership and rightful inheritance. (Curtis 2008, 34) If haunted houses always inscribe a relationship between past, present and future then it is surprisingly clear that the ownership of these hyperhouses is illicit and not only the result of past transgressions but also indicative of future worries and troubles – in this case, the foreboding and inevitably impending capitalist catastrophe. What happens is that the house under capitalist catastrophe ‘grows hard,’ as Benjamin Noys puts it, in the form of an unpayable mortage. (Noys 2011, 49) Not only has value become detached from use but as the equity of these houses dies, we find a terrifying ghost returning as the houses end up possessing the owners, rather then the other way around.

These films are apocalyptic in the way they center on a concrete crisis but the way out is either impossible or can only come about by releasing the surplus wealth. If we try to understand these films in the light of Kermode’s typology of apocalyptic fictions – empire, decadence and renovation, progress and catastrophe (Kermode 2000, 29) – we see that these films are primarily of the catastrophic variety, even when we might think that they might hold a kind of renovation. I will return to this idea of problematic renovation, but first look at the catastrophic variety. Here it makes sense to point out the difference between our concepts of crisis, catastrophe and apocalypse. For most apocalyptic fictions, the crisis event is a revelatory event which carries with it a clarification of things. The crisis is an expected expression of the inevitable apocalypse and as such is only a transitory state. Catastrophe, however, is what Williams calls an “end without revelation, a historical void, an end of the road that cannot point beyond itself.” (Williams 4) It is this catastrophic mode which the recent haunted house films are placed within – there is no alternative or difference, only the undifferentiated continuation of the world as usual.

If we try to examine the relationship between structure and inhabitant for the couple living in the hyperhouse of Paranormal Activity is not simply one of past sins (as explored in the third film) but also a living beyond their means. The film opens memorably on a big-screen media center playing a music video of Disgorge’s “Consume the Forsaken” which has suitably demonic lyrics. We find in this opening shot a conflation of the screen and the demonic, a conflation which I take to be symptomatic both of anxieties of the screen but more specifically of the anxieties of consumption. Right after the opening shot, Micah carries the camera to the front door where his girlfriend arrives home in a cute little sportscar. All the signs of comfortable middle-class wealth is established, while at the same time the neighborhood is also established – all the houses look identical, part of the same tract construction project. Conformity and consumption is established immediately before we move indoors and never leave again.

Katie is clearly annoyed with the camera and its size, clearly finding it to be an intrusion in their life and insists on knowing how much the camera cost, but Micah never answers. The state of the couple’s house is awash in all manner of anonymous and bland consumer goods; the big screen TV, the media center in the den, Micah’s work station with multiple monitors and of course the cameras he bought, the tri-pod, the firewire to connect the camera to his laptop, etc – everything tells the story of suburban living in all its blandness and sameness; there is no history to the house, nor to the objects they own. There is a strong sense of conspicuous consumption here, where the couple acquires objects and commodities simply for their own sake.

We learn early on that Micah is a day trader, which ties the film into the unstable financial flows of network capitalism, since the function of a day trader is to navigate financial flows and ebbs throughout a day, in order to sell and make money through a fast turn-around. Day traders therefore subsist primarily on bubbles, where there is a constant increase in stocks, bonds and other investment opportunities. The work of a day trader is precarious and risky and the couple’s precarious economic situation is emphasized throughout the film, both jokingly and seriously. When Katie and Micah decide to contact a psychic to help with their troubles, Micah offhandedly asks if maybe the psychic will have any good tips for the stock market. While clearly a simple joke it also reveals something about the unpredictable nature of finance capital and the idea that one almost needs to be a psychic to do well. More troubling is the deeper correlation between Micah’s investments and the supernatural presence in their house – as the demonic presence grows stronger and more dangerous, Micah starts to lose money and while he claims that he will make it all back again, inevitably the demonic presence becomes a parallel to the inherently treacherous investment markets.

My point is that Katie and Micah are established as the typical American couple which overextend their credit rating, live on risky day trading contingent on bubbles rising through the economy and have are fully enmeshed in this hyperconsumerist lifestyle of tract hyperhouses filled with all the latest gadgets and it is this lifestyle which comes back to haunt them in the form of the demonic presence. This demonic presence is never revealed or explained in this film or the later films so far. Instead, the film ends with Micah being killed, which he must be as punishment for his day trading sins; he is part of the problem of the capitalist catastrophe taking place. This 2007 film thereby premediates the crash which everyone saw coming but did nothing about. Tellingly, however, there is no indication that the demonic presence has been vanquished. As with so many horror films, evil remains uncontained and is free to wreak its havoc in later sequels. Interestingly, although there are two more films in the series and a third one on its way, none of these are chronological sequels but instead prequels of one variety or another.

Paranormal Activity 2 takes place two months before the first film and opens significantly on what appears to be a burglary which will later be revealed to be the demonic presence. Kristi, the sister of Katie, and her husband Daniel install security cameras to catch the burglars but things never pan out in that direction. Here we find another example of how the demonic domestic disturbance is connected to that of wealth. The house intrusion is the origin of the haunting and the time when the house becomes unsafe. What we also see is that the couple is not to blame, the intrusion is wholly external and unlike the first Paranormal Activity neither have jobs that deserve punishment. Tellingly, Kristie and Daniel are killed by Katie who suddenly rushes into their house and murders them both. Here the violent end is associated with the day trader couple and once again the film ends with Katie on the lose, whereabouts unknown.

Evil remains uncontained and since the third film is also a prequel and we still have no information about the fourth installment, the apocalyptic tone of these films come from the fact that we may imagine the end of these couples but there is no resolution in terms of the demonic presence, nor is there any kind of attempt of progression or systemic change. These films do suggest that conspicuous consumption, bubble economy and suburban lifestyle in general is based on a problematic foundation where the cracks will come back to haunt the inhabitants, the problem is considered external to the inhabitants and the houses themselves. The houses end up as mechanisms for representing the unstable economic situation and we do get a distinct sense of catastrophe but there is no solution – only an enfolding of an apocalyptic wasteland onto suburbia.

Turning to a more explicitly apocalyptic case, American Horror Story portrays a family which moves into an inexplicably inexpensive house in order to pick up the pieces of their broken family – ironically named the Harmons. As it turns out, the house is massively haunted with at least one ghost from each decade the house has existed – since the 1920s. As such, the house does not exactly tie into the hyperhouse framework, but does connect to the housing bubble because the previous owners were in the process of flipping the house before they were murdered – renovating an old house and selling it for a large profit. Because of the housing slump they were unable to do so and so the Harmons can buy a house they could otherwise never afford. The accursed share ends up being precisely what haunts them, as they cannot leave the house once the hauntings become too intense since they have ended up on the edge of foreclosure – able to pay the mortgage but unable to suffer the economic loss that would come from selling the house at a loss.

This fact raises significant issues of ownership – as Curtis points out, haunted houses are both possessed and possessing (Curtis 2008, 66) which is clearly the case once the Harmons cannot move out of the house – symbolically, the house now owns them as much as they own it. That the ghostly inhabitants are also part and parcel of this dual ownership becomes obscenely clear in the case of the rape of Vivien (Connie Britton), the wife of the couple, especially as she becomes pregnant with twins – one the child of her husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) and the other that of one of the ghost of the house, Tate (Evan Peters). Not only does this suggest that Vivien is now somewhat wedded to the house, it is also revealed that Vivien might very well give birth to the Antichrist.

Will (Daniel Craig) in Dream House is the victim of a more explicit house invasion where his family is killed. Despite being suspected of murdering his own family, it is revealed at the end that a burglar was in fact the real killer. Although Will fails his patriarchal duties to protect his family from harm, they forgive him to pass on and so he is absolved of any wrongdoing, going on to write a book about the events and thus profit on his misery. As far as the house goes, we see a picture-perfect hyperhouse with all the latest accessories and a happy family living a happy life. What is revealed is that the house is in ruins, boarded up and broken down. This dichotomy can only serve to activate the imagery of hundreds of foreclosed houses around the U.S. and the nostalgic past of how this should look. It is the myth of the ideal home revealed to be a tragedy. As Curtis points out,

’The Ideal Home’ is a complex ecology of past and present, interior and exterior, configuring a resolved relationship between structure and inhabitant. The haunted house is a scenario of confrontation between the narrative of the inhabitants and the house. What haunts it is the symptom of a loss – something excessive and un-resolved in the past that requires an intervention in the present. (Curtis 2008, 34)

But what is required in terms of intervention of the present, is not simply the traumatic events of the murder of Will’s family, but a reintegration into financial stability. Will serves as an emblematic image of the man who has lost everything and lives a life on the dregs of society, scraping by only on the mercy of others. He must leave this life behind and reintegrate back into society. On the one hand, then, the tragedy and economic ruin which has befallen Will is clearly marked to not be his fault and instead something terrible from the outside has happened to him – he is a victim of circumstances beyond his control. On the other, however, the only way to move on – transition, in other words – is to feed back into the game of economic growth – he writes a bestseller. Thus the film reveals a disturbingly reactionary thrust which does not blame the game but instead what might be called a few rotten apples; the only way out isn’t to blame the cause for one’s misery but to drag oneself up by the bootstraps and get back in the game.

This ending thus seems to promise some form of restoration but it should also be relatively clear that Will does not truly progress but rather returns to his old ways. The restoration which can be said to take place is Will recovering from the trauma of losing his family and getting their forgiveness. Certainly the film wants to present this as a relatively happy ending, whereas my point is that there is no real cultural progression – Will feeds back into the system and manages to get out of his poor conditions by publishing his memoirs. His trauma is thereby commercialized and helps him generate surplus wealth but of a catastrophic variety. My argument is not that the film necessarily should present an economically progressive agenda although I do claim that it is telling that it does not. There is no way out, only a way back into the apocalyptic machinery. The solution is not to change the system but to find a new way to generate capital.

Here we find a perfect example of Fisher’s dictum that there is alternative, that the world may end, our families may die but the only resolution is to write a bestseller about it – experiences only make sense, are only real experiences, if they can be packaged, marketed and sold for a profit. Who cares about the experiences of the disenfranchised, since these experiences cannot be capitalized upon? Or more insidiously, why do the disenfranchised complain and desire to overthrow the system, when all they have to do is write memoirs of their experiences? If they do this, they will end up like Will, back in a hyperhouse with a nice hardwood floor, forgiven by their families because after all it was never really his fault at all.

These arguments are of course paradoxical and opposing. If Will was never to blame for what happened, if all that befell him truly came from an outside system, this would seem to suggest that the system itself is faulty and that it should be fixed or thrown out. Yet Dream House never even looks in that direction, instead insisting that all Will needs to do is get over his loss, accept that shit happens and start to feed back into the system. One person might be at fault (Elias Koteas) but not the system. The system is not wrong and in fact Will himself desires to get back into the system, not to reject it. Will’s delusional fantasy is that he and his family has just moved into a new, wonderful house. The house is as central to his desires as his family is – he does not simply want his family back, he wants his house back. He wants his house to forgive him, to accept him back into its lush interior, not the rotten carcass it actually is. Will’s house, then, is in fact the monster Will tries to please and we may regard it, significantly, as not just the house that Will built in his mind but in fact the unquiet house of capitalism.
What does it mean to live in a world where the end has already happened? This seems to be the hidden questioning in these recent films, of which I have only discussed a small sample. The most telling fact is that there is no change; the past, the present and whatever we might think of as the future all blur together in the same suburban routine. The system moves toward entropy and reveals the disturbing fact that maybe even our safe suburban zones will also turn into what Williams refers to as

hellish zones of the world, whole populations destroyed in famine and sickness, “humanitarian” military interventions, the basic and unincorporable fact of class antagonism, closure of access to common resources, the rendering of mass culture more and more banal, shifting climate patterns and the “natural” disasters they bring about, the abandonment of working populations and those who cannot work in favor of policies determined only to starkly widen wealth gaps. (Williams

Many of these events have already occurred, even though the whole point of suburbia was to keep these things out. What is interesting about this current historical moment is that there is none of the millennial mysticism to supply and feed our apocalyptic imagination. Rather, we could easily argue that we are at the beginning of an age – the glorious new world of the 21st century – and so, having survived the end of the world in 2000 as well as the Y2K bug, we should be in a moment of restoration and joy. As it turns out, this is not where we are and instead we are facing what some have hastily called the end of capitalism, but what seems to be is simply another turn of the screw of finance capitalism. As such, it seems that this apocalypse is not an end, nor is it a beginning. None of the fictions discussed here have shown any kind of finality or sense of change, they remain more of the same. What they reveal is a concern not about the end of the world but about the end of Western wealth – symbolized by the hyperhouse and imagined as haunted because the foundation is not so quiet as could be wished for.

What really seems to be the apocalypse here is the poverty of these films’ imagination. Even after the end of people’s personal world – trauma, loss, etc – the world lingers on with no change to show for it. These films therefore are part of Fisher’s basic argument that there is no alternative. What they reveal is the certainty that the terrifying return of the catastrophic accursed share really only creates a permanent state of crisis; an unexceptional state of exception.
The problem for the haunted house films that I have discussed here is that there is no alternate concepts with which to critique our perpetuating crisis: “our supposedly critical concepts of exit from capitalism – freedom, difference, excess, the multiple, and flight – all-too often lead back in to capitalism.” (Noys 2011, 55)

This holds true for the films as well; they have no way out but what is more – most of them do not even wish to find a way out. Dream House can only imagine feeding back into the system, while Paranormal Activity sees suburbia as a space fraught with dangers but never attempts to escape it, only to trade up to bigger and better houses – escape through conformity. This poverty of the imagination reveals not only the obvious fact that these films in themselves are reactionary but also that our current historical moment in itself is reactionary and incapable of imagining any form of alternative. If even concepts and words such as deceleration, vacuum, withering and undeath are all subsumed into the same inescapable crisis, then where might our new vocabulary come from which will lead us out of this crisis?

It is not that I expect mainstream culture to be the place where revolutionary politics emerge but it is interesting that while these films have no problems decoding the predicament we are in, we find no utopian or revelatory moment. In this way, the apocalyptic imagination has failed, the crisis reveals itself to not be a distinguishing moment but rather a situation of permanent catastrophe. To the extent that mainstream fictions often end up as faithful manifestations of basic ideological forms, their silence on what comes after capitalist catastrophe is too telling – there is no alternative, for these fictions and so all they can do is imagine and represent the end as a state of ongoing, permanent catastrophe. This lack of even an imaginary solution to capitalist catastrophe might prove to be the real end.

Such a flickering status enacts a central concern to the whole project. Kevin Begos’ stated goal with the whole project was to criticize the way the art world worked; the increasing value which works of art gained as time passed, the almost religious connotations given to a work of art and the whole capitalist inflection of buying, selling and re-selling art simply in order to turn a profit (“Kevin Begos on Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)”). In other words, what Begos was dissatisfied with is what we also know as the aura of the work of art, as articulated by Walter Benjamin in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). By creating a work of art that would die in the process of reading and viewing it, this auratic process would be circumvented and disrupted. They did this by making a book that would literally die and disappear and so lose its value.

Walter Benjamin’s argument about the aura of a work of art is of course well-known, but it is worth rehearsing here, to read it against the Agrippa project. Benjamin’s basic argument is that the aura of a work of art comes from its “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” and that the “presence of the original is the prerequisite of the concept of authenticity. (Benjamin 1969, 220), which is equally important. The unique authenticity of the work of art comes from the fact that it cannot be reproduced, it cannot exist in more than one place at a time and that only the original can be authentic.

At first glance, Agrippa fulfills all of these criteria and it is also evident that due to the limited print run of both the deluxe edition (fewer than 95) and the standard edition (an unknown number of copies, certainly less than 350). The fact that every deluxe edition was hand-bound (by Karl Foulkes) and then signed by both Gibson and Ashbaugh further increases the aura of the book and makes every book unique, as well as a truly collaborative project with several ‘authors’ or creators (Hodge 2005). Although Agrippa is thus in one way mechanically reproduced and so should have no aura in Benjamin’s sense, it’s uniqueness and rarity means that it has ended up as an object with a very strong aura. Seeing the actual book thus takes on a deep meaning of authenticity. As Benjamin points out,

reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. (Benjamin 1969, 223)

The very unique nature of Agrippa thus provides it with an aura of an authentic art object which cannot be reproduced. This much is certainly true; the complicated process of making the book and the fact that the poem encrypts itself as we read it, means that the book cannot be reproduced without losing its uniqueness. Conceptually and performatively Agrippa is a transitory object, since it disappeared from public circulation after its publication and since the poem will vanish upon execution. Agrippa is thus a very strange aesthetic object; it is both unique and transitory at the same time. In fact, its uniqueness is dependent on its transitory nature, on its very act of disappearance. In other words, the work of art enacts its own death and exists only as a ghost –  the aura of Agrippa becomes spectral, a function only of its own death and disappearance. Agrippa is authentic only because of its death, since that is its very aesthetic device – to die and exist only as a memory. Benjamin argues that the

authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. (Benjamin 1969, 221)

Agrippa, particularly the poem “Agrippa”, certainly had a substantive duration but most of what we are examining (here and what others have examined elsewhere) is the history of the poem; the corpse of the poem as we may now find it on Gibson’s website, as well as the permutations it underwent before its interment. But this deathly existence, this disappearance of the book (if only of the readable text that it contained), is not as rare or unusual as we might imagine. Peter Schwenger cites Maurice Blanchot as an inspiration for the entire project, and further argues that a “book never realizes its desired full presence; its realization occurs only and paradoxically through absence” (Schwenger 1995, 278). The realization of the book occurs only through its absence. That is exactly what Agrippa (re)enacts and makes explicit; yet, this absence is what Schwenger (citing Sartre citing Mallarmé, plenty of ghosts lining up here) terms a “resonant disappearance” (Schwenger 1995, 278). Resonant because it generates and creates meaning; as Victor Vitanza points out (writing explicitly about Agrippa):

The centermentalist idea here is a book disappears. It is not about a professor selling his books; it is about a writer sky-writing, that is, writing the disappearance. “Writing” that doubly disseminates and dissipates. It is about remembering is forgetting. (Vitanza 2001, 81, italics in original)

Disseminates and dissipates. Only by dissipating, by disappearing, can the book become what it was meant to be: a textual and digital ghost. The material form of the book and the poem both attempt to enact the theme of the poem; it attempts to become what it thematizes – the passing of death into memory. Yet there is something which we should keep in mind here and that is the already planned rarity of the book as physical object – even the small edition was only meant to be produced in 350 copies, a print run which is exceedingly low, especially considering Gibson’s status at the time as a bestselling author. Furthermore, the fact that the book was supposed to disappear and that the poem can only be run once before being lost, it is rather evident that the book and accompanying floppy diskette would become extremely collectible. With the print run being cut off before completion and no records of the actual number of copies made and the fact that only three copies plus one inspection copy being accounted for, the book has in fact become more of a sacred object imbued with more aura and uniqueness in time and space than is the case for most books published.

Certainly, when I went to the New York Public Library on November 5th, 2009 it felt more like a quest for a long lost artifact than going to read a book. With the need for a special appointment, sending my research ahead for the librarians to judge if it was worthy, being required to hold up my newly acquired New York Public Library Card against the glass door before it being unlocked so that I might enter, handing over my bag, ensuring that I only brought pencil and a notebook (no exploding pens in here), finally being presented with Agrippa and pieces of foam to place it on so that the table would not damage the book, this certainly felt like a Work of Art – more like the Mona Lisa than a novel. Because of the rarity and scarce circulation of the book, it has also been natural for most critics who have worked on Agrippa to primarily focus on Gibson’s poem and its logic of disappearance and transmission. While most have invoked the physical book and its unusual status no serious work has really been done on the book or on the connection between the book and the poem-program; yet it is clearly evident that much of the aesthetic effect resides in the book and in the space generated between the book and the poem-program. In order to fully appreciate the work, we need to analyze this hauntological space and the status of the book.

socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaging with popular ontologies of representation. (Gitelman 2006, 7)

However, this definition little to suggest the experience of interacting with media, which is why I argue that we encounter individual works of media as phenomena, objects that are in the world and which engage our senses and our minds at the same time. The advantage to this approach is that it enables us to insist on the materiality of media objects as inherent to any operation of a medium, while at the same time remaining sensitive to the cultural embedding of every medium. Furthermore, it also locates one of the most important aspects of a medium – its mediation – as inherent of our experience of that medium. A media phenomenology would therefore insist that media are an inherent part of the way we structure our lifeworld and that we cannot separate object from experience, but that media objects are part of the operations which media perform on us as much as the operations we perform on them. This notions of media performing operations on us obviously brings up the thorny question of agency and media. On the one hand, I find myself agreeing with Lisa Gitelman when she argues the media do not have agency and are not autonomous, that we write this way because agency is so hard to specify. (Gitelman 2006, 9) However, at the same time it seems to me perfectly obvious that Bruno Latour is right when he insists that objects have agency in themselves. (Latour 1994) When my dishwasher fails to work, I do not blame the engineer or the salesman at first, I blame the dishwasher. When I cannot find a significant quote, I do not blame the author or myself, I blame the confounded pages of the book for not yielding the information I crave. In our experience of objects, they appear to have agency and we react accordingly, yelling at the dishwasher or throwing the book in a corner.

In order to be able to discuss media more analytically and concretely, I will proceed from the idea that media may be broken into five different dimensions: form, materiality, practices, protocols and mediation. To sketch briefly what I will discuss in detail later, form covers the patterns, structures, and aesthetic devices of the individual work. Materiality is a shorthand for the material embodiment of said work, although as we shall see it is of a much higher level of complexity. Practices suggest the cultural embedding of the medium, ie. the different uses we put it to and the cultural work the medium does. Protocols describe the social, economic and material relationships in which every medium exists. Mediation is the force which takes place between two bodies, whether human or nonhuman, occurring through several different strategies including transmission, signification, representation and presencing. It is my argument that these five aspects enable us to understand a medium’s being-in-the-world in full, in other words the ontology of the medium. There are two things to be said about this notion of medium ontology, the first being that every medium always stamps its own ontology on its products and processes. This argument comes from Adan Evens regarding digital media, arguing that the digital “it never submits entirely to the simulated, stamping its products and processes with its own ontology” (Evens 2009) but I take this to be true for every medium. A medium always simulates reality and its ontology determines and limits how it simulates reality. The other thing is that the reality status of a medium is always under renegotiation. This argument comes from Edward Branigan in his book Projecting a Camera, where he states that “The reality status of a new medium is relative.” (Branigan 2006, 119) I agree but I do not think that Branigan goes far enough; the reality status of every medium is relative for when a new medium loses its newness and instead becomes an old medium or perhaps even a dead medium, it also loses its reality status. It should be evident that for me, Evens’ simulation and Branigan’s reality status amount to the same thing – do we believe, so to speak, in a medium’s mediation? Does it convince us about its true and accurate representation of reality and does its embodied nature recede and become transparent for us?

These questions and more like them, can only be answered historically. There is no definite or ultimate level of reality status which a medium can achieve, and even though in our current media climate digital networks have assumed the pinnacle of media representation, I agree with Gitelman when she points out that this idea is simply an overdetermined sense of an ending. (Gitelman 2006, 3) Certainly all the cultural practices and media protocols which surround our media are subject to the same historicity as anything else in our culture and so are the forms and objects which make up our media. A media history is the only way which we can understand the changing nature of the operations media perform and how these operations change and alter our perceptions, not just of the media themselves but of the world around us. The lifeworld of media changes, just as we change it and it changes us. As Gitelman points out, media are denizens of the past in a double sense; 1) a medium always comes from somewhere and 2) a medium is integral to our sense of pastness because we access the past through media representations. (Gitelman 2006, 5) There is, I believe, also a technological-material aspect to this sense of past media representations, in that certain histories are only accessible through written texts, while others (newer) histories are accessible in a number of different media, such as pictures, phonographs, videos and so forth. The reality status of each of these inscriptions matter as much as the mode of representation employed. For this reason, it is not accident that the works I have chosen to deal with all engage with this sense of pastness both in their representations and in their very materiality. Of course, it is impossible to separate representation from materiality, something Gitelman herself points out when she says that media are integral to a sense of what representation itself is and that media both represent and delimit representation. (Gitelman 2006, 4)

Before the waters become too muddled, let us turn to my five aspects of media, starting with form. With the question of form, I wish to suggest that we must pay attention to the specific configuration of any given work in order to fully appreciate the effects of said work. In other words, we need to pay attention to the patterns, structures and devices employed by the work. Rather than try to suggest any kind of separation between form and content, I would rather say that form creates content and content shapes form. There is only an oscillation between the two, as certain kinds of contents may only be expressed in specific forms, while specific forms lend themselves to particular contents. With this in mind, I do still wish to keep my focus on the form of content rather than any kind of meaning which may be inherent in the content. Here, I wish to inscribe myself into a specific methodology identified under a helter-skelter banner of new formalism, which considers form as an essential part of understanding historical, political and cultural concerns of a work. In this way, I wish to suggest an emphasis on what we know as the poetic function, that melodious noise which heightens consciousness of the medium and disrupts the referential function. (Guillory 2010, 352) We recognize this concept of the poetic function as one of the main fields of study for the Russian Formalists, concerned especially with the literariness of literature even as this sense of literariness cannot be separated from other forms of writing. Literariness is obviously a poor phrase for my study of media, so instead I propose to use the term mediality as the overarching term for the thickening of the medium and the corresponding estrangement which takes place through this thickening.

One other part of form which is important here, lies in the fact that any formal feature of a work must necessarily be inscribed in some way, which is where my concern with form connects with my concern for materiality. The inscription of the work, it is important to keep in mind, is always both semiotic and material (Gitelman 2006, 6) but just as significantly inscription is a material use of inscription technologies. Inscription technologies are defined by N. Katherine Hayles as any device which initiates “material changes which can be read as marks.” (Hayles 2002, 24) So far so good, but Hayles’ definition overlooks the fact that

Inscription is a form of intervention, into which new machinery continues to interpose. Ink is imposed on paper, while pens and keyboards intrude into the posture of hands. Grooves are incised into phonograph records, while sound echoes in our ears. The genealogies of inscription allow what anthropologist Michael Taussig calls “particular” histories of the senses, as different media and varied forms, genres, and styles of representation act as brokers among accultured practices of seeing, hearing, speaking, and writing. (Gitelman 1999, 3)

Gitelman’s suggestive quote first of all clarifies how media have agency, in the way the technologies themselves “intrude” but with her reference to the senses, we can also see how both McLuhan and Benjamin will become relevant alongside the entire discussion of presencing. For now, however I wish to focus on the way that inscription serves as a transformation, which carries us into an understanding of materiality as an emergent property, most usefully explained by Johanna Drucker’s argument that materiality consists of “two major intertwined strands: that of a relational, insubstantial, and nontranscendent difference and that of a phenomenological, apprehendable, immanent substance.” (Drucker 1994, 43) Here we can see a separation parallel to that of the typical Western separation of mind/body, where the content of a work of art (should) target the receiver’s mind and is therefore conceived of as an ideal form, above the concerns of gross matter. The apprehendable object might be fetishized as an auratic object because it has been in contact with the maker’s hands but even here this is only to ground the idealized, aesthetic experience in an authentic sender-receiver relationship. Drucker is careful to point out that her distinguishing between form and substance constantly involves a dialectical, interpretive encounter and so goes against the notion of idealized representation.

In a later work, Drucker takes issue with the supremacy of code, arguing that even though code may be conceived in mathematical terms, as ideal form, it can never be expressed without recourse to some kind of materiality. Information is always lost or altered when it is stored or transmitted; “ Materiality cannot be fully absorbed into ideality, nor can it be understood as a mechanical, self-evident literal identity. Something is always lost when, for instance, a text is translated into ASCII format.” (Drucker 2009, 141) Another way of putting this, would be to say that there might be an idealized code conceivable in mathematical terms, but as we know from information theory, there is always an element of noise no matter what channel we use. Furthermore, this noise is not necessarily a negative property which destroys communication but may itself be a productive property of the channel and employed in different aesthetic ways, such a work’s mediality. As Drucker puts it, materiality constitutes a system in which there is always both loss and gain in the processing of information, which amounts to a transformation. It is this transformative process between form and substance, in which production, expression and interpretation exists through means of subjective inflections – both of sender and receiver. (Drucker 2009, 142-143)

This view of materiality is similar to and most likely inspired by Hayles’ view of materiality as emerging from interactions between physical properties and a work’s artistic strategies. For this reason, materiality cannot be specified in advance, as if it preexisted the specificity of the work. An emergent property, materiality depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops – strategies that include physical manipulations as well as conceptual frameworks. In the broadest sense, materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create meaning. (Hayles 2002, 33) Here, Hayles is continuing a form of media analysis originating with Benjamin which sees meaning as intertwining with the artefact itself. Meaning is partly material, in other words, and not simply representational.

Furthermore, the meaning of a work is also determined in no small part by the practices in which the work is embedded. It is the established cultural practices surrounding a given medium which ensures that I read a book from front cover to back cover rather than vice versa, that I do not place my painting in my record player and do not hang my records on my wall. Except, of course, that I may very well (and in fact do) hang my records on my wall, in order to enframe the album cover as a visual work of art. Here, then, is the connection between the materiality of a media object and the practices which support it, becomes evident in what Latour has termed the resistance inherent in objects. It is my contention that the most fruitful way of thinking about this resistance is through what Bill Brown has done in his “Thing Theory” piece, where he posits that “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” (Brown 2001, 4)

We always exist, then, in a specific subject-object relation to our media and to a given work and most of the time we are perfectly aware of how to use and employ these objects, because they bring with them certain cultural practices to guide our understanding if them. As these practices are historically conditioned, we may lose them when a medium grows old or not have them at all when a medium is new. Alternatively, a work may require strange or old-fashioned practices as part of its configuration. It is in cases such as these that the materiality of the medium intrudes the most but we find a more common operation at work in our notion of transparency, which occurs when we completely forget the norms and standards involved in employing the medium. This is what Bolter and Grusin refer to as immediacy, when the medium retreats and allows immediate perception, “experience without mediation.” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 22-23) As they themselves establish, such an experience of immediacy is not located in the medium itself but in the practices which surround the medium, such as “linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 24) all of which are cultural practices employed through technologies to generate specific forms of representation. The most significant point we can take from Bolter and Grusin is their emphasis on perspective as “seeing through,” which is precisely what immediacy purports to do – see through the medium. However, just as with linear perspective, any use of a medium to represent reality depends on learned behavior. We may return to Branigan’s argument that the reality status of a medium is relative – a medium may obtain a high degree of realistic representation (such as the photograph) but it may lose it again (such as the photograph) when newer media generate new practices and uses which suggest that these forms are better at representing reality (such as 3D technologies).

This brings us to the protocols of media which are equally a matter of use, but in this case I take it to be on a macro level of society rather than the micro level of cultural and individual uses. As Gitelman points out, protocols are “a vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere like a nebulous array around a technological nucleus. Protocols express a huge variety of social, economic, and material relationships.” (Gitelman 2006, 7) While it is evident that cultural practices and social protocols blur together in the employment of media, I see protocols as more involved in organizing and reorganizing our relationship to the media and the media’s relationship with the world. Whether a medium remains in use or not is thereby a matter of protocols and social change, more than a matter of cultural practices. In this case, we can underline the social interactions that are in operation during our engagement with the medium, once again understood historically. Consider reading literature as a social practice. Not only do specific reading protocols control how we engage with literature – such as reading quietly rather than out loud – or how we interact with specific forms – our understanding of genres, for instance – or the cultural purpose of literature – meaning, entertainment and cultural integration – but also that we pay for books, that we find books in bookstores rather than grocery stores and that certain authors have a higher value than others. Any of these protocols may change over time, such as the move from reading out loud to reading quietly, or our potential move to ebooks rather than physical ones and the fact that books can be found in grocery stores and are increasingly pirated, something which will only increase with a move to ebooks. We can also see how specific institutions arise to solidify certain other protocols, such as schools and universities which control what literature is (meaning) and which authors carry the highest validity (the formations of canon), or fan communities (Horror Society), author organizations (Horror Writers Association) and evens (World Horror Convention) to police forms of literature.

With the concept of protocols, I also wish to suggest the means that the network of media is distributed along specific hierarchies according to the protocols employed by the media themselves. In other words, the authority of a given medium depends on its place within a hierarchy network of other media, where a given protocol at any moment holds supremacy. As we know, for our current historical moment the digital protocols reign and any medium which cannot be digitized or made to conform to the digital holds a lower authority. At the same time, insistence on a different protocol may disturb or disrupt the network. Consider the emergent insistence on vinyl albums as a refuge of audiophiles; this fetishization of an outmoded form does not fit within the larger network of a complete shift to digital means of production, distribution and consumption. Evidence of mainstream resistance to this old-fashioned protocol is evident in the way that no mainstream artists release their music on vinyl. Yet audiophiles maintain that sound fidelity is in fact higher on vinyl than their digital counterparts, which means that they consider the mediation of the vinyl album and the turntable gramophone superior to that of digital audio players.

This brings us to the concept of mediation. As I have already argued, I consider mediation a force. What this force does is transform experience into new forms. In saying this, I follow McLuhan’s argument of media as translators (McLuhan 2003, 85) through which we access reality. In order to discuss the process of mediation as a transformation of experience in more detail, I wish to suggest that there are two broad strategies of mediation, the one being representation and the other sensation. The first strategy of representation is inherently bound up with the force of signification and is inherently interested in presencing, in making the absent present. Representation, then, is always interested in some form of power over the world, and in this manner it connects strongly to the transparency side of mediation – we gain access to the world through representations. The strategy of sensation, however, is less concerned with truth and meaning instead arguing that mediation cannot be reduced to representation but always includes something below the threshold of representation. (Hansen 2000, 4) Rather than presencing, the sensation strategy is interested in affectivity, in taking power over the perceiving subject and generating specific sensations. These sensations are often experienced as bodily and perceptual shocks and fall under the category of mediality, where we feel the presence of the medium rather than the presence of reality.

I do not wish to separate the two strategies too much, for I do believe that both representation and sensation are integral parts of every mediation and that we generally engage with cultural works with a desire for both strategies to be present; we both want to be affected by the work as well as understand the work. I do believe, also, that there has been attached a certain charge of obscenity against works which mostly attempt to affect us, as well as a charge of intellectualism against works which mostly attempt to challenge our understanding. In either case, what we are discussing is the power of media, encapsulated in my earlier guiding question about what media do. This power of mediation should be understood as a relation we enter into and therefore is part of the entire concept of media as phenomena; media help translate/mediate our relation to the world, either by way of representational understanding (this is how the world is) or sensational affect (this is how the world feels). As such, and very simplistically put, representations tend to do cultural work while sensations tend to do bodily work. Of course, things are never this clear-cut and we can easily find examples of representations which do bodily work (images of death, for instance) or sensations which do cultural work (the transgressive effects of carnival, for instance).

If we take representation as an attempt to take power over the world, we immediately see how the cultural work of mediation becomes apparent. We are already familiar with the ways in which forms participate in structures and techniques of power and how works become fields of struggle for different ideological convictions, even opposed and conflicting views within one work. The configuration of a work’s semiotic and material resources thus become actively engaged in the process of culture, which is why representation has become such a problematic, yet important term. I feel that the most useful definition of representation is W.J.T. Mitchell’s in Picture Theory, where he argues for an understanding of representation which encapsulates “the totality of cultural activity,” where representation is

understood, then, as relationship, as process, as the relay mechanism in exchanges of power, value, and publicity: nothing in this model guarantees the directionality of the structure. On the contrary, it suggests an inherently unstable, reversible, and dialectical structure. (Mitchell 1994, 420)

I am satisfied with this definition of representation because it almost substitutes “cultural work” for representation; every representational act is somehow engaged in the cultural field and the aesthetic deployment of form is simply one attempt at negotiating power, value and publicity. That is why presencing is so significant an operation of representational forms, in that they make the world present in specific, concrete ways for reasons of power, value and publicity.

This leaves us with the place of sensation as bodily work. As perceptual categories go, we tend to argue that we feel things before we understand them, which squares well with the previous argument that the strategy of sensation deals with what is below the threshold of representation – it comes prior to our understanding and before we can place it in an operation of power, value and publicity. Instead, sensation relates to a more material level of response, one which Michael Taussig designates as an operation of mimesis which implies both replication and material transfer. (Taussig 1992, 145) We are brought into perceptual contact with the material presented by the medium, which is what engages and at times overwhelms our senses. This is why many people have argued for a tactile dimension to mediation; our bodies respond to the sensations of media, which is why McLuhan argued that the medium is the massage, not just the message. (McLuhan 1967) It is through media that we engage with the world, and when media change they “evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world.” (McLuhan 1967, 41) As we know from Benjamin, our perception is structured according to the dominant mode of production, which first of all means that it is historically conditioned and so changes with the forms of technological reproduction available to a given culture. I have continually argued that there is no endpoint to this process and that no media ever retains a fixed position within its cultural mode of production, so that while photographs and the cinema imploded human perception in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these two media no longer hold the same position now that digital networks reveal new aspects of our world.

We may say, then, with a combined argument from McLuhan and Raymond Williams that media reconfigure our perceptions. While it may seem peculiar to combine McLuhan and Williams’ arguments, due to to Williams’ polemical disagreement with McLuhan, I believe that Williams’ structure of feeling is in fact an accurate assessment of what McLuhan was trying to articulate; that material practices (which includes media as we have seen) historically actualize culture. Media as extensions of our senses then precisely describe a reconfiguration of our perceptions, which also follows from Benjamin’s argument about media impacting our perceptions. This should not surprise us, as I have argued throughout that the way we understand and relate to the world is constantly bound up with the double logic of mediation as moving between transparency and mediality, itself understood as part of cultural practice. As such, if a certain medium at one point in its cultural history, such as film, obtains transparency then we understand the media simulation as identical with reality, and we get “reality at 24 frames per second” as Jean-Luc Godard put in Le Petit Soldat (1963) prefigured of course by both Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin. Conversely, if we foreground the operation of the medium – the thickening of the medium into mediality – we get an attention to the sensations produced by the cinematic medium, as argued by Dziga Vertov.

Today, we would be content to say that cinema may do both and that films tend to employ both strategies of mediation. While I have no intention of discarding the insights gained by the study of representations, my concern in this book is with the study of sensations and one sensation in particular – the sensation of the uncanny. The uncanny has a long critical history and obviously, no discussion of the uncanny can be complete without reference to Freud’s “The Uncanny.” However, it still seems prudent to look at the precursor to Freud’s essay, namely Ernst Jentsch’s “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906) which is explicitly the essay Freud reacted to in writing his own essay. Jentsch’s essay is brief but interesting in the way it posits the uncanny as a sensation of doubt and uncertainty, particularly in relation to whether something is in fact alive or not:

Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate – and more precisely, when this doubt only makes itself felt obscurely in one’s consciousness. (Jentsch 2008, 221)

As we see here, Jentsch locates what is the most powerful cause for the uncanny but as is also evident any form of uncertainty leads to an uncanny experience. It is this uncertainty which frustrates Freud to the point of writing his own essay, in which he distances himself from Jentsch’s argument and instead locates the uncanny in the heart of the familiar. For Freud, then, the uncanny is in a sense a displacement – what is known becomes strangely unknown.

It is here that I wish to draw more on the phenomenology of the uncanny as suggested by Dylan Trigg in his Memory of Place (2012), in which he argues that one of the major strengths of phenomenology is precisely is ability to make things strange. (26) Trigg goes on to argue for a connection between aesthetic experience and ontological disruption as one of the effects of the uncanny and at the same time suggests that the uncanny is precisely that – an effect which must be experienced. At the same time, Trigg also suggests that this effect leads not just to experiential anxiety but also to conceptual doubt, (Trigg 2012, 27) thereby neatly encapsulating and accommodating both Freud’s and Jentsch’s concepts of the uncanny within one framework. It should also be evident that Trigg’s positioning of the uncanny as both experiential anxiety and conceptual doubt lead straight to my concern for mediation’s primary strategies of sensation and representation, respectively. Conceptual doubt leads us to representation’s force of signification and meaning, where we cannot determine how to interpret and understand the uncanny event or object. With experiential anxiety, we suffer the sensations of having a familiar media object become unfamiliar before us. This is how we may define uncanny media, when mediation turns into an uncertainty of what exactly we are experiencing.

Uncanny media are hardly a new phenomenon and as many scholars have shown, there is a long history of representations of the uncanny in emergent media. Consider Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria (2006) for its genealogy of uncanny presences in a wide variety of visual media or Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media (2000) for a more media archaeological approach to uncanny and fantastic fictions in new media through the late 19th and 20th century. What these and other works acknowledge, is a concern with presencing through new media technologies. Whether we are talking about the phantasmagoria and the flickering ghosts projected onto a screen or smoke, or the anxious-ridden television screen, all these new media seem to attempt to come to term with this new form of technological reproduction by investigating how this medium achieves presence. Possibly paradoxically, this is achieved through a flurry of uncanny and fantastic images and narratives, presumably generated from an anxiety over the new medium’s ability to work through a process of becoming transparent. Yet while the medium is working through its reality status, it is experienced as uncanny and cannot hold a proper reality status. At the same time, of course, old media regain their uncanny status as they fall into disuse and we suddenly encounter their unfamiliar operations in what we thought was familiar. Remediation may thus often be experienced as uncanny, in the way that something obsolete returns with renewed force. The inscribed pastness of the medium reinvigorated thus brushes uncannily against the new medium, creating an effect which is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

For my media phenomenology, media become uncanny precisely at the moment when we become unsure of their being-in-the-world, in other words when we become unsure of their ontology. It is here that I wish to turn to Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology as a way of articulating what happens when the ontology of a medium is disrupted. First of all, as we know from Derrida’s many writings, his larger project is to undo the metaphysics of presence which may also be seen as a way of forgetting the mediation which is always already occurring, as Joost van Loon points out. (van Loon 2008, 53) For Derrida, ultimately, the concept of hauntology indicates that “no signification can be unproblematically sutured to the originary context of its production, as the sign is haunted by a chain of overdetermined readings, misreadings, slips and accretions that will always go beyond the event itself” (Buse & Stott 1999, 12). This is what Derrida means when he argues that “it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology” (Derrida 2006, 202). We see how, for Derrida, even the sign becomes a space, a space between signifier and signified. This is a concept that we encounter other places in Derrida’s writing (especially in his Writing and Difference), such as the trace; how presence is best understood as constantly deferred. However, as Steven Shaviro points out,

In his earlier writings Derrida tends to emphasize differance or the trace as a sort of negativity, an infinite mediation disrupting any claim to presence. But in Specters of Marx (as in much of his later work) Derrida (more radically, I think – and in line with Blanchot’s formulations) shifts his emphasis to the way that this trace is a radical non-negativity, a kind of residual, quasi-material insistence, that disrupts and ruins every movement of negation or negativity. (Shaviro 2006)

Hauntology, then, is a positive version of the trace which significantly has a materiality at its core. For me, this means that hauntology for Derrida includes a consideration of materiality, even if it is a left-over trace. One the one hand, hauntology undoes representation but at the same time emphasizes the sensation which is left over. The ghostly trace is therefore an absent presence, wavering between presence and absence but never reducible to either. When media begin to waver in the same manner, they become what I call uncanny media; the force of their mediation makes their ontology unstable and generates a range of hauntological shocks. In this manner, I follow Benjamin’s argument about mediation resulting in experiences of shock. Furthermore, it seems evident to me that the hauntology of mediation may be located either in modes of representation or modes of sensation; any work which puts the absence-presence dichotomy into positive play will partake in the hauntological, brushing them against the grain, as it were, deforming and dislocating them and in the process creating a space in which the absent and the present uncannily converge. Both representation and sensation are mechanisms of space, in the sense that they structure and guide our experience and for hauntology this space always become the space of a haunting, of an undoing of absence-presence with the insistence that we need a third, interstitial term which we may then call spectrality – a term Julian Wolfreys says

appears in a gap between the limits of two ontological categories. The definition escapes any positivist or constructivist logic by emerging between, and yet not as part of, two negations: neither, nor. A third term, the spectral, speaks of the limits of determination, while arriving beyond the terminal both in and of identification in either case (alive/dead) and not as an oppositional or dialectical term itself defined as part of some logical economy. (Wolfreys 2002, x, italics in original)

Wolfreys notion of spectrality and the ghostly has become a powerful tool in representational analyses of forgotten histories, suppressed relations and the problems of the present as rooted in an unresting past, expressed most clearly by Jeffrey Weinstock in his introduction to the collection Spectral America:

The ghost is that which interrupts the presentness of the present, and its haunting indicates that, beneath the surface of received history, there lurks another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the authorized version of events. As such, the contemporary fascination with ghosts is reflective of an awareness of the narrativity of history. (Weinstock 2004, 5)

For reasons that are perhaps then obvious, the figure of the ghost now has a massive presence in both the cultural and critical production surrounding African American history (one should say histories, I suppose), exhibited in fictions such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but also in critical practice with books such as Kathleen Brogan’s Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature and Marisha Parham’s Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture. Such haunting need not only be located in problematics of race and ethnicity, but may also reveal other cultural struggles which is what Julian Wolfreys does in his book Victorian Hauntings.

However, I believe that there is more to spectrality than simply being an intellectual uncertainty. Wolfreys describes well the conceptual doubt of the uncanny as conceived by Trigg, but lacks a framework for the experiential anxiety, which is expressed more clearly by Shaviro when he claims that the ghost is “something that is gone, or dead, but that refuses to be altogether absent; something that is not here, not now, but that continues to stain or contaminate or affect or impinge upon the here and now.” (Shaviro 2006) In other words, spectrality as an experience may be understood as a lingering which is not absent and not present but still affects us. This is the sensation of the uncanny as disruptive of our experience of the work itself, something which goes beyond the modes of representation employed by the work. Trigg discusses hauntology and criticizes the appropriation of the term into contemporary cultural theory, claiming that the term is used too easily

to describe a certain mode of cultural effect and production. As such, it retains the limits of being a concept imposed upon experience, rather than giving credence to experience itself. Indeed, one of the results of a concept such as “hauntology” is that it too readily becomes an aestheticized idea, bearing minimal relation to the phenomena it purports to face. (Trigg 2012, 285)

Instead, Trigg claims, it becomes an index rather than an experience. I agree that all the counterhistories written by ghosts perform exactly such an operation; reading the absent presence of the ghost as the absent presence of something else, something which should be part of cultural history or which can never be part of cultural history because of the limits and norms established by a culture. But I believe that the sensation of something lingering may be our guide to understand how sensations of the uncanny are generated. When we feel the presence of something which is not there, then we feel experiential anxiety because we do not understand how to relate to this absent presence. Anything which fulfills this category is what Trigg would call displacing and estranging. (Trigg 2012, 291) We are then experiencing something immaterial through something material, which is the uncanny mediation of a work; our body is engaged with the ambiguous presence of the work, aware of the mediation taking place but not sure which experiential category to place our experience in. Form and matter collide to generate an effect for which we have no practices or protocols; this experience, this sensation of the uncanny is below the threshold of representation, it is the immaterial manifestation of something material. K-punk (Mark Fisher) has shown us that,

The spectres are textural. The surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we are listening to is a phonographic revenant, and second, ontologically, by introducing the technical frame, the unheard material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content. (k-punk, 2006)

While k-punk is discussing music here, we can recognize his argument as what Hayles has termed a material metaphor, “a term that foregrounds the traffic between words and physical artifacts.” (Hayles 2002, 22) The materiality of the work is thus very significant in the discussion of sensations of the uncanny, because it is the material conditions of the work which engages our senses and our body and by reconfiguring the materiality of a medium, our senses and bodily reactions to the work are also reconfigured. In other words, when our relations to the work is changed by introducing ambiguous practices, the work becomes an uncanny thing and is displaced from its usual cultural history. This is what Bill Brown describes as “the very ontological instability expressed by the artifact itself, the oscillation between animate and inanimate, subject and object, human and thing.” (Brown 2006, 199) A medium performing uncanny mediation, therefore retraces its mediatic articulation at work within the boundaries of the work and so calls attention to the material processes inherent in the work, revealing that what was previously “considered to be accessory and intermediary – the program, its transmission, reception, storage, recycling, retransmission, etc. – infiltrates the inner integrity of the work, revealing it to be inscribed in, and as, a network.” (Weber 1996, 2-3) The mediation thereby transforms our experience into something uncanny, turning a docile media object into a volatile media thing; this sensation is both displacing and estranging, allowing the work to protrude as spectral and haunting, our experience not certain or ontologically stable.

All the works that I deal with here are in this way uncanny media; their phenomenal status is uncanny in the way they not only allow their materiality to protrude but also in the way they employ the protocols and practices of old media in conjunction with that of new media practices. It is by allowing old and dead media to brush against the new, and vice versa, that these works gain part of their hauntological status and part of why our experience of them is uncanny – we do not fully understand how to interact with them and are unsure as to how to consume them. These works resist, in other words, and it is this resistance which becomes uncanny; at times aesthetic but always disturbing.

It appears undeniable that the zombie has returned as one of the most prominent monsters of the 21st century after having suffered the indignity of being interred mostly in underground films and dedicated fan circles. It also appears undeniable that the zombie of the new millennium is different from its cousins from the 70s and 80s, just as they in turn were different from their cousins from the 30s onward. If we want to look beyond the unpredictable fluctuations of popular culture which may unaccountably turn certain fads into merchandise cycles, what is that the zombie visualizes which has taken such hold of us?

It is my contention that that the new zombie articulate new and different concerns. Concerns for which the zombie is the perfect image. What about this new zombie, the zombie perhaps not of late capitalism but of global network capitalism, for lack of a better word. In his chapter “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction” W.J.T. Mitchell (What Do Pictures Want?) argues that we have moved into a new mode of image production better conceived of as biocybernetic reproduction, a period where our concern is not so much the old concerns if things fall apart. (Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 335) After all, a network is defined as something which does not fall apart, even if one or more nodes collapse. Instead, our primary concern and fear is the ominous proposition that things come alive.

The things that come alive, for Mitchell, are two interrelated images – the clone and the terrorist. In fact, these two images are the mutually constitutive figures for our current period, something Mitchell goes to great lengths to show in his book Cloning Terror. I propose a different image than Mitchell as emblematic for our time, an image which is a synthesis of his two – the zombie. The zombie of the 21st century is both terrorist and clone at the same time; literally and not figuratively, as is the case for Mitchell’s terrorist clone. On the one hand, zombies are clones because they are identical and identity-less; there is nothing special about an individual zombie, instead they are better conceived of as swarms or hordes – or, in the phrase used in The Walking Dead, zombies are a herd. Such a conception of the zombie as a swarm is significant because it emphasizes a form of self-organization without intelligence. On the other hand, zombies are terrorists in the way they threaten stable societies and exploit the networks of global circulation so endemic to our age.

What I want to show here, then, is composed of three points. First, that the new zombies are viral terrorists. Second, that these new zombies are uncanny things best understood as swarms. And third, that the zombies infect and exploit the global networks so endemic to our current moment. In this way, I will point out not just how the new zombies differ from their younger cousins but also show how these zombies, like all monsters, reveal the anxieties of their time. In this case, pandemics, epidemics and terrorist attacks are the immediate, visible symptoms of a deeper lying fear of the results of being connected and living in the network society. The flow of information in a network is by design uncontrollable, so any information will spread and potentially “go viral” as the saying goes. This lack of control while being enmeshed in a global network is terrifying because it makes us vulnerable at all levels. No wonder, then, that nations attempt to create gatekeepers to regulate flow, in an attempt to turn fully distributed networks into decentralized networks. National control is an attempt at creating what Alexander R. Galloway has called a chain of triumph, which is linear, efficient, functional and additive as opposed to the web of ruin which is a solvent, rather than a directional chain of command. (Galloway, “Networks,” 281)

Viral Zombies

But let us start first with the notion of the viral zombie. A very brief survey of the zombie’s history reveals to us that Romero’s zombies changed the genre forever because he posited the zombie as ourselves and gave no explanation for why the dead rise. An explanation such as a plague is proposed in his original trilogy, as are a curse from God and the most colorful reason: because there is no more room in Hell. This inexplicability is one of the powerful forces of his zombies but this changes with the resurgence of zombie films in the 2000s, particularly following Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002). A long list of zombie films since then have used a variety of contagious diseases as the cause of zombiehood: Resident Evil (Paul W.S. Anderson 2002 and its sequels), House of the Dead II: Dead Aim (Michael Hurst 2005), Severed: Forest of the Dead (Carl Bessai 2005), The Zombie Diaries (Kevin Gates & Michael Bartlett 2006), I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence 2007), Awaken the Dead (Jeff Brookshire 2007), Deadgirl (Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel 2008), Quarantine (John Erick Dowdle 2008), Zombie Strippers (Jay Lee 2008), Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! (Jason M. Murphy 2008), Plaguers (Brad Sykes 2008), Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer 2009), Doghouse (Jake West 2009), Carriers (Àlex Pastor and David Pastor 2009), Pontypool (Bruce McDonald 2009), The Walking Dead (Frank Darabont, et.al. 2010, based on a comic book series started in 2003), The Crazies (Breck Eisner 2010), Devil’s Playground (Marc McQueen 2010) and Quarantine 2: Terminal (John Pogue 2011).#

Not only do we see from these films a turn towards the zombie as virus but we also see that in many of the same cases, the zombie virus is associated with biotechnology. Again, the precedent is 28 Days Later, where a military laboratory is experimenting with a so-called rage serum for use in warfare, making soldiers indifferent to pain and extra aggressive. Of course, there is another precedent of this type of zombie which is Resident Evil, where the zombie virus is also the result of genetic experimentation. These images of DNA sequences then come alive “by means of technoscience and information,” in other words in what we might call biomedia, where the separation between the living and the nonliving breaks down. Indeed, zombie are of course often referred to as undead, something clearly evident in the re-animated corpses of Romero’s films. But the division for the new runner zombies is not so much between living and dead with zombiehood lying somewhere in-between. Rather, the runner zombie is the intermediate of the living of biology and the nonliving of technology; the runner zombie is the product of biotechnology, in other words.

If the runner zombie is a product of biomedia, it is because it infects and destabilizes not just the factual bodies of humans which turn into zombies, but because it also infects the body politic. Our docile bodies reared to a life of production and consumption are suddenly rendered far too active and volatile; hence the new zombie is precisely a runner zombie – constantly in movement, faster than a human and sometimes capable of acrobatic feats undreamed of when still alive, such as the parkour zombies of Devil’s Playground or the frame-fucked zombies in 28 Days Later. These volatile bodies are far too difficult to discipline for our control societies, so instead attempts are made at containing them and keeping them outside of the body politic. Yet the very foundation of biomedia is the breakdown of boundaries and no matter how much we attempt to keep out the zombies, they keep breaching our defenses.

The zombie as virus is an updating of the old modernist fear of the crowd and the masses; our individual identities are washed away when we join the zombie horde, the plurality of the masses become the singular of the horde. There is no escape from the zombie masses, there is no way to regain our identity and even the identity of the living become binarized into survivors. But zombies are not identical in terms of the way they look; there is no easy profiling for zombies, no easy manner to separate who can become a zombie and who are safe: everyone can become a zombie and a zombie looks as much like you and me as they look like dangerous outsiders. Only on a deep genetic level may we find that the difference between a zombie and ourselves: in Quarantine 2: Terminal we cannot see the spread of the zombie virus until it is too late; only with the help of a FLIR camera does the zombie virus reveal itself immediately by radiating unnatural heat from the bite, a heat which slowly spreads through the body and turning it volatile as the body reaches zombiehood.

Things and Swarms

I have mentioned the idea of zombiehood before, so let me unpack it more now. For me, zombiehood is to subjecthood what the thing is to objectedhood. Objecthood, of course, is the status conferred upon the wealth of objects which are required for the notion of empire to become conceivable. Empire here is understood as,

a name for the total domination of material things and people, linked (potentially) with totalitarianism, with “absolute dominion,” the utopian unification of the human species of the world it inhabits; or the dystopian spectacle of total domination, the oppression and suffering of vast populations, the reduction of human life to a “bare life” for the great masses of people. (Mitchell, What Do Images Want? 154)

All objects are then to be categorized and taxonomized and put into the correct order, so that empire may assert its control and dominance. There are, however, ‘bad objects’ which are objects that for different reasons refuse to be categorized – these objects are what we call things. In our quest for epistemological order and control, for certainty and exact knowledge, we name things and so they become objects under our control, but things are different. They “hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable” (Brown, “Thing Theory” 5) and so become things are uncanny objects which flicker and distort to become Other in front of us.

Such is also the case of zombiehood, it is the instance of the bad subject which refuses to be speciated into a proper category and transformed into a docile body. Instead, the zombie flickers and distorts and becomes Other in front of us. But for the runner zombie this is not the old colonialist metaphor of the zombie being the uncanny postcolonial Other. Nor is it the domestic metaphor of Romero’s zombies of the uncanny structures of US society. Instead, the runner zombie is what happens when we become Other to ourselves. This is the fear of creating terror in our own image, of our own actions being the causes of the terror in the first place. Consider the again 28 Days Later, where the zombie horde is unleashed as the result of military genetic experiments. Or, perhaps even more significantly because of the departure from the original versions, Quarantine 2: Terminal. If Quarantine was almost a shot-by-shot remake of REC (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza 2007), this is certainly not the case with Quarantine 2: Terminal. Whereas REC 2 (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza 2009) continues the story of the first film directly and reveals that the zombie virus has demonic origins, Quaratine 2: Terminal completely alters the origin of the virus and substitutes it with the biological weapon of a doomsday cult.

This is the way that the viral zombie is coded as a terrorist. Not only is the zombie a volatile body which refuses to comply with the structures of empire, it actively rejects and breaks down these very structures by infecting others with its volatility and undisciplined behavior. Many zombie films explicitly engage with this configuration of the zombie, not only 28 Days Later and Quarantine 2: Terminal but also instances such as House of the Dead II: Dead Aim, The Zombie Diaries, Zombie Strippers, The Crazies and Devil’s Playground. These films also all locate the origin of the zombie virus in military experiments and military presence, something which is rare in the earlier shambler zombie films. It appears that the military and zombie have become part and parcel of the genre, which to my mind further connects the association of the viral zombie with the terrorist. The only solution to the volatile zombie body is military action, yet inevitably this same military action is revealed to be insufficient.

Significantly, despite all the cultural coding of the runner zombie as terrorist, it is never cast as an outsider or as cultural Other. Indeed, these new films all unswervingly locate the zombie as ourselves, changed by military experiments. The blame for the runner zombie terrorist is thereby not placed on some radical fundamentalist outside the order of our empire. Instead, we are the cause of the zombies and so the cause of the terrorists. At the very least, then, these films suggest that our military interventions are what causes the zombie terrorist outbreaks, or more radically I believe, that our configuration of empire is what causes zombie terrorist outbreaks.

Just as the actual terrorists of 9/11 targeted not only a sovereign body politic, they also targeted the global world system of capitalist empire. In the same fashion, the runner zombie as flickering entity disrupts this global world system by questioning and overreaching the “limits, border, boundaries of the body (politic),” and its “relations to inside/outside, friend/enemy, native/alien, literal/figurative” (Mitchell, Cloning Terror 46) in what Jacques Derrida has suggested is parallel to an autoimmune reaction of the immune system. This image of the immune system is interesting becase, as Donna Haraway reminds us, the immune system itself is best understood as a network (Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 218) and so we find a pregnant metaphor for conflating the individual body with that of the body politic. The human body is infected by the zombie virus, thus moving from subjecthood to zombiehood, just as the body politic is infected with the fear of outside invasion and so attacks supposed infected areas inside itself. But as Steven Shaviro has argued, in the network society there is no difference between the inside and the outside: “The network is the great Outside that always surrounds and envelops me. But it is also the Inside: its alien circuitry is what I find when I look deep within myself.” (Shaviro, Connected 12) This is not such a new idea as it may at first seem, for already with Plato we find the argument that the greatest threat to the body politic always comes from within. Eugene Thacker even goes so far as to suggest that,

we can begin to identify a specific type of ‘life itself’ taking shape, a life (bios) that is always undone from within by a disease (nosos) that threatens order and law (nomos), be it in the shape of an actual epidemic, or the diseases caused by the imperfect societies of democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. (Thacker, “Nomos, Nosos and Bios”)

Although the image of the runner zombie is new, it seems that the concern it pictures is as old as the hills. What is new with the image of the zombie, is the loss of individuality which happens in the transformation into zombiehood. The zombies are not individuals, they have no intelligence or intellectual capacity, yet at the same time it is evident that they are capable of functioning in groups and exhibit some form of communication and powers of distinction, since they never mistake each other for humans. It is my argument, then, that we should understand zombies not as individual entities but rather as swarms, defined by Eugene Thacker as

a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, but it is also a heterogeneous whole. This is not to identify a unified, homogeneous group that serves the heterogeneous needs and desires of individuals. Rather, the principles of self-organization require that the group only arises from the localized, singular, heterogeneous actions of individual units. (Thacker, “Networks, Swarms, Multitudes, Part Two”)

The relevance of a swarm has to do with pattern and purpose. We may identify a certain pattern in the movement and behavior of zombies – they tend to follow and chase the living – but we are unsure as to what purpose. It may seem that zombies generally simply want to stay alive and sustain themselves. Yet with the exception of 28 Days Later, it is rare to ever encounter a zombie who will die from starvation. Indeed, most of the runner zombies will in fact not eat the bodies they kill, unlike Romero’s zombies who seemed to dine on the brains of humans to ease the pain of being dead. The purpose of the runner zombies, instead, may be to spread the virus. Proliferation is the key, contagion is their sole purpose and it is through contagion and dissemination that we recognize also the pattern of the runner zombie.

What is more, the runner zombie infects the networked body politic of our current historical moment and it does so it ways that run counter to the logic of the network. The immediate definition of a network is a “self-generating, self-organizing, self-sustaining system,” (Shaviro, Connected, 10) but this definition seems echoed in that of the swarm. However, Thacker points out the difference between networks and swarms: “networks can form a collectivity, through connectivity, while swarms can initiate a connectivity, but only through collectivity.” (Thacker, “Networks, Swarms, Multitudes, Part Two”) Zombies, then, are connected because they are a collective. We humans, however, may become a collective but if we do so it is through connectivity and it is a choice which we believe we make ourselves. In reality, of course, there is no choice in being connected, it is utterly impossible to not be somehow connected in the network society and this is why the image of the runner zombie terrorist is so frightening – we are all, at any moment, capable of being transformed into a zombie through our connected collectivity. In fact, as we have seen, this is how the zombies spread: they exploit our networks against us. This is why, I believe, that every zombie narrative attempts to contain the zombie threat, in other words, to contain the contagion.

Networks and Containment

I have already briefly sketched a definition of what a network is, but it might be useful to extend it slightly here. The most useful definition for my use, comes from Andrew R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker in their book The Exploit, where they tackle the issue of a networks as protocol-based systems, attempting to move beyond an understanding of networks as necessarily human. For them, a network is

any system of interrelationality, whether biological or informatic, organic or inorganic, technical or natural—with the ultimate goal of undoing the polar restrictiveness of these pairings. (Galloway & Thacker, The Exploit, 28)

They also associate the condition of empire with that of a specific configuration of the network, following Hardt and Negri in understanding the political network of empire as something which does not “follow an architecture of pyramidal hierarchy,” but is instead “fluid, flexible, dynamic, and far-reaching.” (27) Our current condition of empire is then one of the network, understood as endlessly reconfiguring relationality from which it is not possible to escape or disconnect. The origin of the runner zombies appear inextricably connected to this very notion of connection and network dynamics, seeing that the attacks generally target either large metropolitan areas or other massive nodes along the network. 28 Days Later, The Zombie Diaries and Devil’s Playground all take place in London, while Quarantine and Quarantine 2: Terminal take place or originate in Los Angeles. As can be gathered from the title of Quarantine 2, the zombie virus spreads via an airplane, something we also find in 28 Weeks Later. The global flows of airlines is thus one major way of spreading the infection, but what is just as significant is the way that attempts are made at containing the virus from spreading.

We find the motif of containment in most of these new zombie films, including of course  28 Days Later, and 28 Weeks Later but also in Quarantine, Quarantine 2: Terminal, House of the Dead II: Dead Aim, Severed: Forest of the Dead and The Crazies. Unlike earlier zombie films, where the protagonists were usually the ones to be trapped in confined areas surrounded by the hordes of walking dead, we now instead find that the protagonists are caught inside the containment area with the zombies. The plot structure has also changed from one of escape and fortification against the shamblers, to one of attempts at containing and eradicating the runners. Needless to say, perhaps, either strategy never truly works and the traditional horror film structure where the monster escapes unnoticed in order to spawn infinite sequels is typical of these new zombie films. While 28 Days Later is the exception to the rule here, with clear signs of the protagonists having survived the zombie plague and the infected having starved to death, this did not prevent the creation of a sequel, perhaps only proving that viruses may lie dormant and suddenly be reactivated when a fresh host is presented.

In all these instances, then, we find that there is a tension between containment and the relationality of the network. On the one hand, the network permeates everything in these narratives and inevitably is what spreads the virus but at the same time, the idea and desire for containment is what drives the strategies for exterminating the zombies. The very network flows which we set up to help us survive nuclear disaster becomes the very means by which we are now attacked in the global network flow we ourselves praise. The containment always fails, revealing that the global flows are unstoppable because they have become definitive and insurmountable. The logic of the network is then revealed to be double; on the one hand, we live under the desire of a connecting network, which adds value to the constantly circulation of capital and images. At the same time, we live in fear of the ensnarement of the network, the inevitable attack on the network which dissolves all the nodes of the network and thrusts us into a state of bare life. The zombies, like the terrorists we fear, exploit this vulnerability of our networks; they use our circulation against us and in this way the image of the zombie becomes a symbol of the weaknesses in our network society.

It is here, I suppose, that it makes sense to finally mention Romero’s presence in the new zombie genre field. While his zombies have not changed from the shamblers of his first trilogy, he keeps on commenting on current political culture in the US through the image of the zombie. Significantly, in Land of the Dead (George A. Romero 2005) Pittsburgh has been turned into a sort of free haven for the living, protected from the outside world infested by shambler zombies by an electric fence, as well as other military installations. With Romero’s usual sly irony, he casts the containment narrative in reverse, revealing how the humans turn against each other inside the supposedly safe area. Indeed, as many commentators noted, Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) seems a thinly veiled parody of George W. Bush, attempting to ignore the ravages of the outside world as the settlement he controls becomes more and more divided.

Many of the other new zombie films reveal a similar deep mistrust against military intervention, considering the way that containment is typically handled by eradicating the infected area, which we see in House of the Dead II: Dead Aim, The Crazies and Quarantine 2: Terminal. Extermination and destruction of the nodes is then regarded to be the best way to handle the contagious outbreak of zombies, yet the problem persists and the containment fails despite this strategy and that is precisely because of network logic; the connectivity established by the network refuses to distinguish information – all information is passed along the network and this goes equally for the circulation of capital, bodies, images as well as viruses. What may be considered contagious noise on one level of the network is simply information on another level and so there are no means to distinguish between subjecthood or zombiehood. Despite all the uncanny qualities we recognize as differences between human and zombie, for the network there are no differences in information and so it is passed along. In other words, we have created the networks which will lead to our own dissolution and that is the final fear which the image of the runner zombie pictures.

The connectivity of our networks foster a certain kind collectivity and we believe, as I mentioned, that we may choose what kind of collectivity and when to step out of it. Yet the very logic of network connectivity insists that we cannot choose to not be connected, which inevitably means that we cannot choose to disconnect from collectivity. We are doomed to be collective, just as we are doomed to be connected. I say doomed because this notion of collectivity is anathema in many ways to the individualistic project of Enlightenment and the thought of being a small cog in a larger machine has been one of the things which liberal ideology has combated for centuries. This is why the zombie is such a potent and frightening image, for it reveals that we ourselves generate the systems which lead to our (individual) demise – all that is individual melts into multitudes and swarms. The fractal nature of networks has revealed that not only are networks the same all the way up, they are also the same all the way down, into each and every one of us where the network is embedded within us.

This fear of the network and the virus swarms which will overtake us should not surprise us, though, as it is a fear which is built into the very system of the network. The network has been likened many times to the state of globalization and the emergence of empire, an argument I have also made use of here. However, if we look at the history of globalization and the global network, it is becoming increasingly obvious that globalization did not begin in the 1970s or 1980s with the emergence of finance capitalsim, nor did it begin in the 1960s with the emergence of the ARPANET which grew into the Internet of today. Rather, as Nicolas Mirzoeff has suggested, it began with the birth of the modern age located temporally quiet specifically in 1492 with the exile of Muslims and Jews from Spain and the invasion of the Americas. (Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture) In other words, the modern age and the emergence of a global network are the same event. It begins with the circulation of bodies because of slavery but it becomes the circulation of capital and images and now we have seen that it also includes the circulation of viruses which exploit the network itself.

The significance of the invasion of the Americas in the context should be clear; while on the one hand the invasion was facilitated militarily and culturally, we should not ignore the fact that a host of viruses laid waste as much as 95% percent of the indigenous peoples: smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles were all responsible for epidemics across the Americas. The birth of the network was the invasion of the Americas, the weapons were in large part biological and the white European was the first viral zombie. The global network was built in part on viral epidemics, so little wonder then that we fear that the collapse of our own network society should come by means of another strain of virus.

In this paper, then, I have argued for the runner zombie as one configuration of a contemporary monster; a monster which expresses the fear that the future will be monstrous just as our past has been monstrous. I have traced the legacy of the new millennial runner zombie as the image of the terrorist born from viruses spread throughout the network by exploiting this very same network. In this way, I have argued that not only is the zombie an image of the fear of terrorism in an age of war on terror, but also the even more insidious fear that we will be swallowed up the networks we ourselves have created, just as we swallowed up others on our path to empire.

In this paper, I will discuss the presence of what I will call screen spectrality in Chris Cunningham’s audiovisual remix of Gil Scott-Heron’s “New York Is Killing Me.” My emphasis will be on the way that the spatial construction of the screen diegesis is collapsed in Cunningham’s work, underlining a certain anxiety of the presence and meaning of the screen in current visual culture. For this reason, I do not find it to be an accident that ghost films have undergone a popular renaissance since the turn of the millennium, nor do I believe it is an accident that very often these cinematic ghosts are tied to screens or screen technologies. We can of course invoke the Spielberg/Hooper collaboration Poltergeist as one genesis for this anxiety, yet we should at the same time keep in mind that there are at least two shows which predate Poltergeist and our anxieties over the sudden presence of an animated screen in the midst of our home: The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Jeffrey Sconce has already shown in his Haunted Media how these shows and many other films reveal a fear over the presence of new media and the strangeness they bring with them. Viewed in this manner, Poltergeist is simply one example in a long line of screen anxieties, so far culminating the in the invasion of J-horror beginning with Ringu/The Ring and so far continuing in its own American way with not just the inevitable remakes but also original films such as White Noise 1 and 2 and others such as Dark Mirror.

Yet while gothic horror genre is a highly pregnant field for these anxieties, it is not the only place where we see a reaction against the invasion and proliferation against screens. This is where Chris Cunningham’s video art becomes significant, for the questions it raises and the way it complicates screen/space relations. For one thing, there is no literal ghost in Cunningham’s video – whatever a literal ghost would look like. My contribution to the ghostly is instead my discussion of spectrality as a result of the visual strategies employed in the video. Clarifying what Cunningham’s visual work is seems relevant, then, if only because it is a rather unusual work. While it is based on Gil Scott-Heron’s song “New York Is Killing Me” it extends the original work by adding a visual dimension to it, while at the same time remixing the song. Yet Cunningham’s work is not a music video in the traditional sense, nor has it received any circulation on MTV or other music television channels, online or not. Rather, it is a piece of video art and an installation piece, since the full work requires three screens for full display. The piece originally premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on September 26th, 2010. (“PopRally Presents New York Is Killing Me”), but was also streamed on Cunningham’s own website, complete with a view of all three screens simultaneously. It is here that we find the first hint of what the installation video tries to do, while also revealing some of the spectral problematics of the screen; clearly, an aesthetic space is opened up, quite literally, by the juxtaposition of the three screens. As audience, we need to decide which screen we focus on while the two other ones remain in the periphery of our vision. It is my contention, then, that this spatial construction of the artwork renders visual space ambiguous and spectral. It is also my contention that one of the best ways to open up this spectral visual screen space is to examine this screen phenomenon through the lens of architecture theory and urban space theory, while keeping a peripheral focus on the visual theory of the screen, primarily as recently developed by Kaja Silverman and others.

Let us turn then to the actual artwork created by Chris Cunningham, based on Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word piece “New York Is Killing Me.” As already mentioned, the artwork has been called an audiovisual reworking of Scott-Heron’s song employing three screens placed next to each other. These three screens generally show different images, although as we shall see there is a certain overlap between the left and right screens at times. Briefly, then, the central screen is occupied by Scott-Heron singing the song and a number of video images of New York City, particularly the back and front end of subway trains. The left and right screens are dedicated mainly to the view from subway trains and later on cars driving along bridges and streets in New York. We immediately find a number of narrative contradictions and instabilities, not least of which is to organize visual space into a coherent whole, something which has been the hallmark of narrative cinema since its inception, to the extent where is has become the dominant mode of visual image production.

My argument is that Cunningham’s installation generates an uncanny tension between the visual images and the viewing subject. We are forced realize that we are looking at several layers that all collapse uncannily onto each other, allowing a feeling of spectrality to emerge. I will argue that we encounter four different collapses in the artwork: 1) the collapse of narrative space, 2) the collapse of diegetic and non-diegetic sound, 3) the collapse of human and screen, and finally 4) the collapse of space between screen and viewing subject.

To begin with the construction of narrative space, which is generated as we know by visual and aural cues ordered in a system of conventional continuity, emphasizing lines of sight, the 180-degree rule, sound bridges and so forth – all things which amount to what Bolter and Grusin have referred to as transparency in the service of an experience of immediacy, easily re-dubbed as an experience of presence. In Cunningham’s video, however, there is no such easy construction of narrative space, because all the typical conventions are broken. The most obvious example is that the different screens present us with different views of recognizable New York City landmarks, most prominently Empire State Building.
Not only are we confronted with a form of uncanny urban geography in the way that we get no clear access to the views of New York, but we find the same inherent instability in the spaces between the screens because the relation between them is never fully established or fully stable. The left and right screens end up destabilizing the middle screen, because they distract of from the action there but also because their internal relationship is destabilized through a variety of strategies. The most disruptive strategy is the mirroring of images on left and right screens; we see the same subway station being passed by but in different directions on left and right. Which image is the original and which is the mirrored copy – the question hardly even makes sense but obviously questions the ontological stability of these images. Much the same happens with the brief pulses of light on an otherwise black screen, where we inevitably try to decode this almost-instantaneous image, generating a proliferation of various interpretations, ghosts of what might actually be present on the screen. Again, the screen becomes the site for an instability and an ambiguity which we are not allowed to settle comfortably. Instead, we see more and more ghost images of New York flickering by with way to locate them securely on any ontological level. Rather than generating any kind of continuous relationship between on-screen space and off-screen space, the instability of the two screens collapse the notion of screen space completely. We know from Benjamin that the cinematic camera plunges us deeply into the same space as the actors, erasing the difference between the represented and the viewer, while at the same time the use of editing cuts pushes us away from the cinematic space. For “New York is Killing Me” there is no stable cinematic space into which we can be pulled or pushed away from; there is only a flickering of the screen.

Screen spectrality occurs when we as viewing subjects experience an overlay between that of presence and absence at the same time; when we are unsure of where the experience is located. This creates a threshold, an opening into screen space where we somehow cross over and are still kept separate, since it is not possible to be completely inside an image because the screen inherently ‘gazes back’ in the form of a cultural imposition. We are caught in the gaze of the screen as much as we gaze on it. This argument is significant because it reveals that the screen is a highly potent site, because it simultaneously brings us closer to the cinematic events while at the same time separating us from them; this is the spectral, unmarked space of the screen.

Secondly, if we turn to the sound on-screen, so to speak, we encounter yet another conflation. If we contrast Cunningham’s version with the original song released on I’m New Here, we find that the rhythm is very different. The album version has a fast-paced rhythm with hand claps and minimal percussion. In contrast to this, Cunningham’s version is slow-paced and there is no discrete rhythm immediately noticeable, as the only rhythm we hear come from the train tracks of the subway trains. This generates a spatial tension in terms of where the train rhythms belong. Since Scott-Heron is superimposed on the images of the moving trains, they clearly do not belong to the same narrative level and as such neither can the sound. It seems that the rhythms must belong to the level of the trains, yet it is also clear that Scott-Heron performs in sync with the rhythm, which means that the space between these two diegetic levels collapses. Furthermore, there is clearly more than one train yet only one train rhythm is audible – which one? One proposed answer might be to argue that the rhythm is a non-diegetic soundtrack to the visuals, yet here we still encounter a collapse between the diegetic level of Scott-Heron and the non-diegetic level of the soundtrack, as his performance still depends on the rhythm of the non-diegetic level.

The sound, then, as Michel Chion would say, is neither inside nor outside the image and we cannot decide which ontological level the train rhythms belong to and instead this sound belongs to the spectrally unmarked space which is at once inside and outside the cinematic frame. The sound is instead a sound from nowhere. We are accustomed to the effect of music and sound in audiovisual images typically acting as bridges which heighten continuity. But in this case, with the sound of the train rhythms not belonging to any of the ontological, diegetic levels but also at the same time not belonging to the non-diegetic level of the musical score or even the ontological level of the original song, we are confronted with a sound which moves across and between all of the levels and so both belongs and does not belong to these levels at the same time. Much like Hans Belting’s argument that images perform the presence of an absence, so too does this acousmatic sound perform the absence of its own distinct ontology, a move which only acts further to tear away the ground of the image because the sound is meant to secure the ontological stability of the image. The relevance of this collapse is made clear by K.J. Donnelly when he argues of recent films that we are experiencing a development in audiovisual image production where certain works attempt to move beyond representational functions in their use of the sonic dimension, thus exploring and challenging the ways in which the viewing subject’s mental space is constructed in relation to the screen. In this way, the soundscape is configured in psychogeographic ways to provide new configurations of experiential and emotional space; what Anthony Vidler has dubbed warped space. (Vidler 2001) Sound thus moves out of its typical place as a mainly temporal art as one which also generates space, something which is also emphasized by the fact that the train rhythms reverberate, underlining a distinctive spatial dimension of the soundtrack which follows the already unmarked space of the screen.

Thirdly, I want to return to the issue of the superimposing of shots on the screens, especially on the middle screen. It is unclear if Scott-Heron’s image is superimposed on the images of trains and bridges, or if it is vice-versa. One might argue that it makes little difference, yet much like the diegetic levels of sounds are confused and spectralized so too must we consider the levels of Scott-Heron and the trains as confused and spectralized. We might want to consider Scott-Heron as the ‘ground’ of the image simply because he is human and so immediately attracts more attention, yet we only see his face and it constantly fades away, while the shots of the trains moving remain constant and are furthermore emphasized by the fact that the two other screens contain similar images, thus we might argue that the trains and their passing is what is the focus. Yet we might resolve some of the tension by opening up for another tension, which is the uncanny tension of the machinic blurring with the human. There is an emblematic image which lasts only a few seconds but encapsulates much, I will argue, of the artwork’s effect. The image is the red, receding lights of a train taking the place of Scott-Heron’s eyes, fusing the two diegetic levels into one if only for a few seconds.
I do not intend to claim that this short overlap is simply a fortuitous moment which allows us to unravel all the rest of the artwork; instead, I believe it is an emblematic moment which encapsulates the rest of the work in a single frame. What happens in this moment is that the question of which ontological layer is primary becomes irrelevant. What is significant about the overlap is precisely the uncanny spatial moment where the two layers are recognizably distinct yet also the same. We thus experience a conflation of the human with the technological, an encounter which takes place only in screen space, thus configuring the screen as a space of reconfiguration. Both Scott-Heron and the trains are therefore spectralized in their ontological flickering, with the hybrid instance of the fusion bleeding into the post-cinematic and posthuman. The human is spectralized in this process as it is configured along the axis of the screen, rather than as separate from it. Yet it is not only Scott-Heron who is spectralized in this hybrid extension into the screen; the screen also extends into us and reconfigures our relation to the screen.

Fourthly, considering the physical space of the video installation we are confronted with the instability of the actual space between the screens and the fact that we cannot focus equally on all three screens at the same time. This is not even possible for the YouTube version, where the screens are placed as split-screen versions. However, the busy organization of the screen prevents a full focus and instead we have to choose which side to privilege. It is also not clear which screen would be the privileged one, since there is usually different images projected and while it is clear that the center screen seems like the most obviously privileged screen, especially because it is the only screen in which we see Scott-Heron, it is also the least interesting screen since it is the screen which most often turns completely black. As viewers, then, we are positioned so as to have to make up our own mind as to where we are to focus on our attention but always with the knowledge that there are things that we lose in our peripheral vision; not only the screen is problematized in this artwork but also the issue of vision.

While film and cinema studies have done relatively work on the physical positioning of the spectator to the screen, always assuming a more or less ideal and direct relation to it, there is one field of study which has dealt extensively with physical relation to the viewed image and this is the field of architecture and urban studies. Considered together, Cunningham’s three screens work as one environmental image – that is, a form of image which is mediated not just through the assemblage of the screen but also through physical space. Kevin Lynch’s argument in The Image of the City then underscores the point that I have already been making that we need to consider the three screens as one, while at the same time being aware that there will constantly be “more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view to be explored.” (Lynch 247) The installation thus problematizes the experiential space of our limited capacity to see all that there is to see; no matter where we look we miss part of the work. Yet it is my contention that this is precisely what the artwork is trying to do. The focus on the images on passing; the subway trains, driving across bridges, seeing New York pass by, the flickering presence of Scott-Heron, the lyrics emphasizing that he must get out of New York to Tennessee all these images both visual and verbal insist that things are passing us by, underlined by the epitaph to this paper: “It’s 24 frames in every second of a movie / Can’t see frame change but it’s always moving.” Although cinema only works due to the persistence of vision, there is always something we miss, something which is not visible to us and it is this invisibility which Cunningham tries to make visible.

Cunningham, then, attempts to reconfigure the screen assemblage in order to question and problematize the construction of the modern visual subject. Cunningham’s project is not limited to just this one work but rather it is something we find across all of his visual fictions, from his early work for Aphex Twin with “Come to Daddy,” Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” and also Rubber Johnny, the disturbing short about a human (?) confined to a wheelchair. Cunningham’s work typically draws heavily on horror and science fiction tropes, something not immediately apparent in “NewYork is Killing Me” but which I have tried to make present in the reconfiguration of the human as continuous with the screen and so bleeding into the posthuman. Certainly Cunningham’s work is generally filled with disturbing posthuman visions, whether it is the uncanny doubles of Aphex Twin, the love robots of Björk or the spectrally diffused presence of Scott-Heron as somewhere between a screen specter and a ghost train leaving the station.

Cunningham’s artwork here and other instances is thus an anxious vision of the modern subject caught in the spatial system of the screen, and his works may be seen as ways of representing this unstable relation to the screen, visualized most fully in the metamorphosing bodies which we are continually confronted with in his works. The screen is the location of the posthuman specter for Cunningham because that liminal space is the perfect place for representing the continuous reconfigurations which we are undergoing, it is a way to warp the normal to express the pathological of the avant-garde zeitgeist to paraphrase Vidler. (Vidler 1) It is this aesthetic movement which I have titled screen spectrality and which describes a particular relation between the viewing subject and the screen; this relation has part of its origins in the horror and science fiction genre, where a variety of anxieties have been visualized in order to give representation to the pathological and alternate human configurations. New screen media, what is sometimes also referred to as post-cinema, not only provides us with new representations of these different and developing pathologies, but also themselves represents, following medium theory, the site of these new pathologies. The screen is the uncanny liminal threshold for this spectralizing activity and serves precisely as a spectral space.

Agrippa is a highly unusual work of art, which one will probably only know about if one is either a die-hard William Gibson fan or deeply interested in the history of old electronic literature. Agrippa is a huge book volume printed with untreated ink containing strings of DNA code alongside old print ads. At the end of the book is an old 3½” floppy disk, containing a poem written by William Gibson. Once the poem is executed, since it is stored as a program rather than a text file, it becomes encrypted and can no longer be accessed. There are only three known physical copies accounted for, plus two page proofs which for curatorial reasons remain significant. Because of the highly unusual nature of the work, wonderful bibliographic work has been done by The Agrippa Files at University of California, from whom I draw some of my facts and most of my images.

Agrippa is interesting precisely because of the tension generated between the materiality of book and poem. Both book and poem were meant to disappear over time, the first intention of its three creators – Kevin Begos, Jr., Denis Ashbaugh and William Gibson – being to print the book in disappearing ink, which unfortunately did not exist at the time of printing. The compromise was to print the book with untreated ink, resulting in a book which smears and wears off on the reader and opposing pages, degrading over time if not exactly disappearing as effectively as the poem held on the floppy disk at the end of the volume. The poem is Gibson’s contribution to the project and is the reason for Agrippa’s fame, such as it is. The poem is titled “Agrippa: a book of the dead,” a born-digital text which Gibson sent to Kevin Begos on a diskette. “Agrippa” was then coded into a small electronic text, consisting only of the 300-line poem scrolling up the screen as the program is executed, after which the letters fall apart and scramble together in an unreadable jumble. This is the point where the poem-program becomes encrypted beyond recovery and the poem is essentially lost.

Thematically, the poem is about loss, death and memory. The poem is structured around the discovery of an album of photos taken by William Gibson’s father when the father was a child. As Gibson’s father died when William was six years old, William never knew his father and have very few memories of him. Much of the poem consists of reading the photographer through the photographs in an attempt to understand and remember his father better, thus establishing death and the memory of one’s loved one as a central concern of the poem. As the poem progresses, it turns more autobiographical, tracking various events of Gibson’s adult life, discovering his father’s handgun (an object of death) and dodging the draft of the Vietnam War (a death event) by escaping to Canada.

These events are described metaphorically through the use of mechanisms, be it a handgun or a photographic shutter. We should keep William Gibson’s literary pedigree as a science fiction writer in mind here, because it enables us to recognize the naturalness with which he juxtaposes the human mind, identity and memory with mechanisms and technologies; his willingness to understand the human in technological terms and the technological in human terms. Understanding material objects in terms of the human, even as human, is certainly nothing new. As Jan-Dirk Müller has shown, books in manuscript culture (the medieval period) were seen as continuous with the bodies of the original author (not the scribe) (Müller 147) and it took some time before early print culture was willing to let go of the this association, and we might argue that the view of a book as an author’s enunciation is still prominent in our post-literacy age.

It is via this path that we come to the question of materiality and its significance for literature, even though it may seem as a roundabout way to get at the position of literature in our contemporary mediascape via medieval manuscripts. Yet the reason is the material construction of the book of Agrippa. As already mentioned, it is a huge volume measuring 11?” by 15 ?”, placed in a dented metal coffin and wrapped in a shroud. The Deluxe Edition which I examined in New York Public Library,

contains 63 viewable pages with ragged, sometimes scorched edges, including copperplate aquatint etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh alluding to DNA gel patterns and body text pages consisting of dual, 42-line columns excerpting a DNA sequence from the bicoid maternal morphogen gene of the fruitfly. Page 63 (and another underlying 20 pages glued together) has a hollowed-out cavity holding the diskette with William Gibson’s poem. (“Deluxe Edition”)

These strings of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts are of course not readable by a human as being the DNA sequence of a fruitfly, yet their arrangement into 42 lines is hardly coincidental but instead meant to echo the first book ever printed on Johannes Gutenburg’s movable type printing press – the Bible (also referred to as the Gutenberg Bible or the 42-line Bible).1 The visual design of Agrippa is thus a concrete aesthetic strategy meant to connect one huge shift in writing and textuality – the shift from manuscript culture to print culture – with another huge shift – the shift from print culture to digital culture.

Here, we need to take a slight step back and consider the materiality of the book as participating in the act of mediation, most fundamentally the mediation identified by Hans Belting as the replacement of the bodies of the dead by the image, transmitted through a specific medium. (Belting 307) The book of Agrippa constitutes an image only through the most abstract sense of representation through the scientific discourse of genetics. In that concrete sense, the book is a scientific image of a dead fruitfly, but it seems more appropriate to me to read the DNA sequences as an evocation of Gibson’s lost father, making the floppy disk the metaphoric book of life for Gibson’s father; not encoded as DNA sequences but encoded as poetic sequences.

It is here that Belting’s argument takes on another turn, for as he argues “[t]he image of the dead, in the place of the missing body, the artificial body of the image (the medium), and the looking body of the living interacted in creating iconic presence as against bodily presence.” (Belting 307-308) In the case of Agrippa, then, we have Gibson’s poem which generates verbal images of his father in the medium of language stored on the medium of the floppy disk, readable only through a computer. Yet here it is also relevant to keep in mind that the photographs Gibson uses to reconstruct his father are not of his father but by his father. Gibson thus tries to read his father through the father’s mediation of scenes, events and people through the medium of the camera. A precession of media and images, if ever there was one, so let us attempt to make this slightly less confusing via a diagram:

Gibson’s father
|
Photographs
|
Gibson
|
( Agrippa )
|
“Agrippa”
|
Floppy disk
|
Computer
|
Reader

Gibson’s father is placed under erasure, because there is no access to him, either as a person or as photographer. All Gibson has access to are the photographs, and all we have access to as readers are the verbal images that Gibson has constructed. The book Agrippa is put in parenthesis because while I regard it as highly constitutive of the aesthetic process, it is evident that most readers of the poem “Agrippa” will never have seen even a reproduction of the book Agrippa. As should be evident, the process of mediation is rather complicated because we are constantly dealing with mediations of a later order, even more so than is the case with typical poetry. Now let me throw another wrench into the process of mediation, because we should not forget that the poem on the floppy disk can only be read once before it becomes unreadable, even by a computer. As such, we are dealing with another transmission and transformation into another medium – that of the reader’s memory. Adding to the layers of transmission, we end up with this diagram:

Gibson’s father
|
Photographs
|
Gibson
|
( Agrippa )
|
“Agrippa”
|
Floppy disk
|
Computer
|
Reader
|
Reader’s memory

It is important to add the final layer of memory as a medium, because with most literary texts we will re-read them, double-check specific wordings, etc, something which is impossible for the original version of Agrippa. It is also significant because of the poem’s thematic dealings with memory and the fact that Gibson appears to fictionally generate memories of his father without actually having such memories and because the transmission from material images to mental images mirrors Gibson’s aesthetics of decay in the poem and the physical book. The poetic images are mediated via the magnetic tracks of the floppy disk and the silicone-based circuitry in the computer to mental images in our brain, where the images must remain, subject as they are to decay and memory loss. In one sense, then, we become the material on which Gibson has inscribed his memory images of his father and himself; we are the medium which now contains Gibson’s poem and Gibson’s father lives once again in the books of life that are our bodies.

Let us refocus then on the notion of mediation as part of the aesthetic process. The book is smeared with coal as if charred; torn, scraped and damaged in every imaginable way yet it holds an irreducible materiality and texture which makes the book quite memorable. The decay and sense of destruction which one cannot help but associate with the book becomes part of its attraction – in addition to its status as a rare book, the fact that it appears as a survived relic makes the book a very sensuous object precisely because it is damaged.

This perfect imperfection of the book – imperfect, because the book is damaged; perfect, because the imperfection is intentional and part of the work’s aesthetic – places the work within a certain temporal frame and so opens up the work to two temporal interpretations; one that the book evokes a historical object, rediscovered. The other interpretation has been the more typical and invoked by William Gibson, that the book was meant to resemble a recovered relic from a future apocalypse. While this may at first seem a counterintuitive reading, there are valid reasons for just such a reading. Firstly, we know that Gibson remains fascinated with dead futures – the futures that we once imagined, but that never came to pass. Gibson has referred to these instances as “semiotic ghosts” (Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum”) and “future fossils” (Gibson, “‘Hawk’ Ashtray”), which seems telling when we are dealing with an artwork which is both so insistently paperbound and at the same time inevitably digital.

In this fashion, the artwork can be read as the death of the book, with the book being damaged and dying and the poem being located at the end of the book rather than at the beginning. With Gibson often being hailed as the prophet of all things futuristic, one might argue that he especially becomes the node for the transition from paper literature to electronic literature. Yet there are two reasons, at least, why such an argument seems insufficient. Firstly, the very materiality of the book, its careful design, the signatures on the inside cover and the extreme aura which the book carries with it, this is not the death of the book even as reborn in electronic format. Instead, Agrippa is much closer to a bibliophile’s wet dream, an ultimate collectible which invokes the physical design of earlier volumes whose materiality is immense. Secondly, the poem is designed to be just as fallible as the book – the poem disappears, after all, once read, which is far less stable than any book. Gibson’s poem, then, despite being born-digital is not an immaterial object but rather adamantly material, because part of its aesthetic effect depends on the fact that the text can decay. Decay and disappearance is thus part of what Hayles would call a material metaphor (Hayles 22), foregrounding the traffic between material (the floppy disk and the poem-program) and the theme of photographs as material memories established by the text.

Instead, it seems that the intention of the artwork is more to question the notion of storage in itself and the memories that such storage draw upon. Death and obsolescence is built into the artwork itself by choosing the floppy disk as the medium for transmission in 1992, a technology which was already on the way out. Had the authors (for lack of a clearer designation) wanted to invoke futuristic technology, one would assume that they had opted for a digital CD which was the emergent computer storage medium at the time. In fact, their planned obsolescence happened sooner than they expected, when Apple discontinued the floppy disk drive only six months after Agrippa’s release. Text, materiality and technology thus combine to generate a very effective aesthetic effect underlining the decay and loss of information which is part of any transmission. What the artwork is trying to do, then, could be said to bring the materiality of the past into the present, in the way that Gibson’s father’s photographs are material objects through which Gibson attempts to access his father; in this way, it becomes obvious that the book and the poem must disappear, just as the father disappeared.

The whole artwork is therefore framed by a discussion and anxiety over transmission and the hope that these transmissions will reach their receiver. If we turn to the book, we find that while we cannot read the DNA sequence there are a number of old advertisement reproductions printed on a few pages, generally referred to as the ‘overprints.’ Significantly, these overprints are all focused on media as means of transmission. Most evidently, we have a Bell Telephone System ad with the potent tagline “Tell Daddy we miss him” as well as a DuMont television ad, a magnesium pistol for nighttime photography and Cooper’s Universal Enlarging Lantern for projecting images. There is also an ad for Daisy Permanent Starch Paste for textile printing. The last two ads are less directly media, yet still involve technology and transmission: the First National Bank of Poughkeepsie’s bill payment by check and a DNA dipstick. All of these ads are old, some older than Gibson’s father even and certainly no younger than Gibson himself. Yet these images reproduce a sense of media as aging and mortal very much in the way that Bruce Sterling has discussed dead media. (Sterling 1999) For our current discussion, Sterling’s definition of media will suffice and be illuminating at the same time, for according to Sterling we can “define media as a device that transfers a message between human beings.” (Sterling 1999)

It is here that we come full circle and return to Belting’s argument that images are replacement idols for the dead and here we are not looking for the photographic image, but the image behind the photographic image. Through this exercise, Gibson attempts to keep present his father’s memory and make visible the marks of the person who transmitted the photograph. However, what is significant here is the process of mediality which takes place; the process where materiality, technology and symbolic technique concretizes a specific text, which is then filled with our personal meaning and experience. This is Belting’s view of mediality and the transmission of media, (306) a process which Agrippa partakes in but which it also complicates by its regression and decay of materiality.

Agrippa and “Agrippa” attempts to suture time and space along one axis in the way that the spatial organization of the poem-program is only temporally accessible once, before the magnetic layout of the floppy disk becomes inaccessible because of a temporal process. The same is the case for the overprinted ads in the book, where their spatial position on the page changes every time the leaves of the book are turned. The argument made by Agrippa is that time and space are always configured in particular and specific ways in the process of mediation. The same argument goes for the process of the poem, where what divides one moment from another is precisely a mechanism; we need devices in order to structure time but in this process time is also spatialized through its measurement by technology. In this sense, we humans are no different from media in that our memories serve equally as mechanisms to divide, structure and measure time.

Agrippa insists that media die, that transmissions change not just the addressee but also the sender and the device itself. Mediation partakes in death, in both directions. Gibson remediates and resurrects his dead father through the creative generation of memories in the form of a poem, while at the same time inscribing the death of his father into the very materiality of the two media employed in Agrippa – the book and the floppy disk. As readers of Agrippa we also partake in this process of ghostly mediation, such as when we execute the poem-program or when we allow our fingers to smear off the overprints, carrying parts of the artwork with us when we leave, much as I did after having visited New York Public Library; I left not just with the impression of the book in my mind but literally left with the book’s presence still on my fingers.

Wherever we find media, we find ghosts. These ghosts are articulations and absent presence of the mediation process, an intensification of the materiality of the text which leads us to see that the hauntological is textural; aesthetics are gleaned from the interface between text, medium and reader because of the foregrounding of what is usually transparent background. Bolter and Grusin have already showed us how our “culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 5). Yet as we have now seen there is a range of texts and artists that go against this grain of our culture by instead making mediation visible and even more than that; part of the text’s aesthetic expression, which means that it becomes impossible for us to disregard the materiality and medium-specific ontology of the text. Such an effect is hauntological because the textures of the media only emerge subtly, and because in paying attention to mediation, we are searching for what is normally excluded and what we otherwise take for granted – that media representations are meant to bring us into the very presence of the thing represented.

Such a concern with mediation is a response to how we are affected by media and technology and reveals a certain concern and even anxiety over these processes which constantly seem to indicate a further and further blurring of the boundaries between the human and the non-human entities of media and media texts. With this proliferation only intensifying in recent decades with no signs of slowing down, artists inevitably begin to engage critically and creatively with media as a resource rather than simple storage and transmission technologies. Part of the self-reflexive movement it is clear that these hauntological texts engage with layers in order to bring to the fore issues of the technological and media frame used in producing the text in question.

Far from being a technophobic reaction, it is evident that most of the texts discussed here are intensely interested in and fascinated with the presence of media and what aesthetic affordances media provide us with. Much of what has been dealt with here has been a dismantling of a rather unexamined assumption; that a text’s medium is something that can get in the way of the text. There is no way to reduce the presence of a text’s medium and we must constantly pay attention to the textural ghosts that are conjured up in this assemblage between aesthetics and media materiality. This argument, however, is a form of meta-argument because we are used to arguing that the more transparent a medium becomes, the closer it is to achieving its primary function. However, hauntological texts set up different standards than the typical art function of emotional response and instead interrogate and investigate the meaning potentials inherent in allowing the media frame to intrude upon content. In a mediasphere of vanishing mediators and a rhetoric of transparency, we can see how hauntological texts reconfigure the position of the reader by emphasizing a multistability between form and content. Aesthetic objects thus become uncanny as they intensify their own media status and employ media processes for aesthetic effects; this is the hauntological effect.

We are now at a point where we can identify the main strategies which structure hauntological text aesthetics. These strategies are what unifies what are otherwise quite separate and distinct texts and so begins to give us an idea of the hauntological in the arts

Textural – Hauntological texts are textural in the way they depend on several layers of aesthetic modes, particularly the tension between the frame of media materiality and the frame of content. It is this ontological instability which gives power to the expression hauntology, because we cannot reduce the media text to either materiality or content but must accept the ontological violation of blurring the boundaries between the two. In many ways, this harkens back to an older argument about the inseparability of content and form, only here form is not just the poetical construction of the text but rather its full expressive material form as well, giving us three levels to work with – form, content and medium. The textural is thus one example of what N. Katherine Hayles has called a material metaphor (Hayles 2002, 22), and by productively interrogating the inscription technology the medium of transmission, the hauntological text generates a textural aesthetic, emerging from the network of form, content, medium. These three dimensions inevitably fold back on each other, shaping and re-shaping the dynamics of our interaction with the text. The hauntological effect is thus one emerging from the intersection of a text’s semiotic resources (verbal, visual, etc) and its media-specific materiality of the full range of physical properties which engage with the text.

Layering is therefore the main strategy employed by hauntological texts, precisely to engage with all three aspects of a text’s existence. We must pay special attention to the productive interplay between form, content and medium and not assume that there is any specific, stable relationship for every hauntological text. Each text allows for different forms and kinds of interaction, hence there is no single, unified hauntological effect, only specific, concrete hauntological effects, even as we can gather all these different strategies under the common name of textural layering. This layering in essence reveals a gap between two ontological categories – content and medium – which is exploited by hauntological text to initiate a swirl of resonances between these two categories. This form of textural layering brings us to the second strategy which hauntological texts employ, poetics of the apparatus.

Apparatus poetics – By employing textural layers, hauntological texts also bring the materiality of the medium into the foreground, which is in opposition to most media production in the past decades. Hauntological texts may thus be seen as a reaction against the notion of transparent mediation and immediacy in recent media culture. The rhetorics of transparency which have emerged as our cultural dominant stand in opposition to hauntology which emphasizes the productive interplay between form, content and medium and so are engaged in how the apparatus – that is, any form of inscription technology or container technology – may generate new aesthetic forms. In other words, the argument of hauntological texts is that new media technologies engender new aesthetic forms. One might wonder at the slightly clumsy phrase ‘poetics of the apparatus,’ but it is chosen for two reasons. First, it resonates specifically with Vilém Flusser’s black box apparatus analysis and so enables us to engage with the structural complexity of any given medium and the technological assemblage which said medium depends upon. Second, the word apparatus itself has lost current critical usage, which makes it sound appropriately out of joint while still carrying on connotations of a certain form of the mechanics of representation with its associated meanings of semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism. All in all, a useful temporal disjuncture to keep the complexities of the hauntological effect in mind.

Rather than focusing on the mechanics of representation, however, hauntological texts emphasize the mechanisms of representation which underlines the more active engagement with the technological aspects of the media apparatus. As we have seen, the mechanisms of transmission are also mechanisms of transformation, since any transmission that does not change the text in fact does nothing at all. Hence we must pay particular attention to how these mechanisms work and intersect with the other layers of textural aesthetics. In this way, hauntological texts make clear through their poetics of the apparatus, that these effects are not in the medium but rather off the medium. There is no way to separate the expressive dimension into one of content effect and medium effect – they are one and the same, emerging as a process of textural layers. Hauntological texts thus intensify and make thick the mediation process itself, again resisting a cultural dominant of medium transparency. Instead, we are dealing the resonances which emerge from the bringing together the materiality of the medium with the poetics of the text. This is hauntological because this process makes the absent present, making the stable divisions between content and medium vacillate. This opens up for the third strategy of hauntological texts – displacement.

Displacement – Hauntological texts are inherently both displaced and displacing. They are displaced because their ontological integrity and stability is undermined. We have seen how these different texts all have unstable origins, either diffused across several releases: Dark Night of the Soul with its double release date and its blank CD; a release that was cut short and only partly transmitted: Agrippa where the print runs were stopped and the primary text has only circulated on the Internet with no real official release until 2004; or self-reflexively playing with the text’s own ontological status as object: Shadow of the Vampire with its playful remake of Nosferatu and its blurring of Murnau, Schreck, vampire and film. House of Leaves with its unstable editions and deft eluding of the authorial subject and playful enacting of its primary text being a found manuscript. This displacement of ontological stability is either very deliberately crafted or becomes an inseparable part of the text’s broader circulation and continued existence. In either case, we find a text which is inherently unstable and which exploits this instability for aesthetic effect.

It is this instability which makes the texts displacing because their effect is always in process and in transition. By locating its aesthetic effects across three layers, hauntological texts displace the stable division of the inside and outside of its textual frame. It is precisely in the displacing of this boundary that the hauntological effect takes place. All the texts dealt with here are deeply ambiguous about any form of closure. Instead, these texts introduce disruptive elements into their very core, in the process dislodging any clear sense of representation. As we have seen, the introduction of the technological frame is the typical effect which displaces the text, yet each text employs different strategies. Therefore, every text is filled with hesitations, often both in terms of Todorov’s fantastic hesitation but equally prominent is the ontological hesitation about the status of the text itself. The mediation process is registered on the text as grain, strain, tain and even stain – the hauntological stain which cannot be removed. Hauntological texts thus depend on this structural dislocation of form, content and medium. Every text here reveals a productive anxiety over the presence of media and so dislocates and displaces the coherence of the text by the uncanny co-presence of the medium.

Lastly, hauntological texts are displacing because they, as we especially saw with House of Leaves, turn stable, familiar places into uncanny spaces. This is an extension and continuation of the stain of mediation where the disruptive intrusion of the media upon the frame of content turns the stable place of the text into the uncanny space of the hauntological text and reveals that hauntological texts are in essence phantasmatic and generate in Julian Wolfrey’s words “a space in which representation is fragmented” (Wolfreys 2002, 6). Such intensification of the mediation process becomes uncanny because of the way that these texts employ spatialization as a technique. Writing is spatialized in page layout and typography, time in film and photography and music is spatialized through duration but also through the inherently spatial strategy of echoes and reverberation. This realization reveals how the different forms of spatialization which the different hauntological texts all employ in essence function as a form of destabilization of the text’s ontological fixity.

Liminal – Hauntological texts are liminal texts, exploiting the in-between gap between medium and content. This liminal space is the uncanny space of mediation, the ‘third place’ of mediation (van Elferen 2009, 124) which adds a layer of the technological uncanny to these hauntological texts. The liminal state is a liberating in-between state where the texts are engaged on a complex and ambiguous process of projection and introjection. By hovering ambiguously in-between, we are confronted with an uncanny void which we cannot help but try to fill, yet which inevitably also fills us – hence the uncanny doubling of the mediation process as the lines between human and media are blurred into a liminal network of protruding hypermediation, encapsulated in the blurring of subjectivities between Murnau and Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire; they blur into each other through the technological apparatus of the cinema camera, engendering a liminal state of connection between them. Much the same can be said for the echoes of Dark Night of the Soul, which come from a liminal space between the container technologies, the dead media reinvigorated in the recording and the production itself. Motion blurs make the human liminal in Lynch’s photographs; these liminal spaces proliferate all over hauntological texts and so reconfigure our relationship with them. In other words, in engaging with these liminal spaces we perform a spectralizing extension of ourselves into the medium and back.

Spectralizing – Hauntological text employ and generate a particular configuration of the subject to the text, an extension and an uncanny feedback loop as lines are made ambiguous and spaces blur and mutate. As our perceptions are engaged in the mediation process, we are refigured as parts of the mediation process – we become a continuation of the medium much as the medium is a continuation of us. The Gothic body of the ghost and the abhuman becomes the posthuman specter as we align ourselves with the interfaces of our media and project into them while they introject us. We fall along a sliding scale – the humanization of the medium is the mediatization of the human (Kochhar-Lindgren 2005, 90). Hauntological texts employ external signs which in turn disrupt the subject internally, as the reconfiguration reveals that the inside/outside dichotomy is outdated a mode as the inside/outside separation of content and medium. The hauntological texts become interfaces as we engage with their textural layers, displaced ontologies and liminal spaces.

This spectralizing process is a result of the fact that these hauntological texts rejects and refuses to provide us with a stable location from which to engage with them. Rather than accepting introjection and projection as any kind if stable place, we see it as an inherently unstable process, engendering liminal spaces and forcing us to acquire a certain and distinctive media sensibility and sensitivity where we accept and realize that we are always-already deeply implicated in the textural layers and liminal spaces of media. This spectralizing process simply underscores the fact that media are spaces, we must continue to examine what they contain and how they configure us.

The home as domestic place is torn apart when unregulated and irrational spatial supplements are introduced (Curtis 2008, 13). In Ellis’ novel, these spatial supplements take the form of scratchings on doors, flickering light sconces, rearranging furniture, ashen footprints and children’s toys coming to life. It is precisely the broad range of domestic objects which take on monstrous aspects, because it reveals to us the horror which Ellis feels at his new suburban life.

Ellis house on Elsinore Lane then becomes the outward materialization of his internal instability; we are constantly hesitating between accepting the events as legitimate parts of a horror novel or regarding them as the imagination of an unstable and unreliable narrator (something Ellis even explicitly discusses). The architecture of the house is thus parallel to the ‘architecture’ the fictional Ellis’ mental life, the haunted domestic objects are projections of his unstable psyche, overflowing the narrative with textual ghosts from Ellis’ previous works. Such parallelism between house and fiction is a typical use of the house as metaphor in fiction, as Anthony Vidler argues in his book The Architectural Uncanny, stating that:

The house provided an especially favored site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits.” (Vidler 1992, 17)

In other words, Lunar Park becomes a haunted structure, riven with textual ghosts and spatial instabilities in terms of the line between fiction and reality. The further Ellis falls into paranoia, the more the house exacts its vengeance, which is simply a stand-in for how domestic life intrudes upon Ellis. The domestic life itself is revealed to be filled with its own ghosts and anxieties; children full of anti-depressants, parents fanatically pacing their children intent on “getting a return on their investment” (Ellis 2005, 133) and the ever-encroaching terrorist bombings all over the US, requiring the schools to have bodyguards for parent/teacher nights.

This satirical maelstrom of US suburbia is hardly new, yet by interspersing a novel of interiority with ghosts and monsters from the horror genre, Ellis reveals quite clearly how what Ann Kaplan has referred to as the manifest domesticity has become haunted by the ghosts of its own anxieties (Kaplan 1998). Kaplan defines manifest domesticity as a “bounded and rigidly ordered interior (…) [existing in opposition] to the boundless and undifferentiated space of an infinitely expanding nation.” (Kaplan 1998, 583).

Lunar Park, however, insists that this opposition has become blurred and unstable and that the ghosts from the outside have come home to nest a long time ago, displacing and shattering forms that we have mistakenly believed to be whole and undifferentiated – the novel, the house and the suburb. This coming-back of our own insecurities is made explicit in for instance the constant references to Hamlet (Elsinore Lane, Ophelia Lane, Horatio Park) but also simply through the architecture of Ellis’ home, referred to as a McMansion. As China Miéville points out,

In thinking through thinking about society through buildings, we turn to the cultural conception of architecture, ‘architecture once removed’. In being reflected upon, the culture that is embedded in the architecture is brought to the forefront of social consciousness, made malleable. (Miéville 1998, 17)

The vapidity of the house on Elsinore Lane turns uncanny as furniture moves seemingly on its own, ashen footprints track across the carpet and lights start to flicker, yet although these effects and occurrences are more explicitly scary and directly horrific, in the end they seem no more terrifying than the vacuity of life in an affluent neighborhood, where everything repeats itself with an alarming flatness of affect. The domesticity is thus torn apart by the unregulated and irrational spatial displacements of contemporary life; video games, mall film matinées and the undesired intrusion of real life in the form of terrorist bombings and child abductions. The cultural architecture of the modern suburbia is thus an architecture of anxiety.

A significant aspect of House of Leaves is its dependency on frames and the way that these frames collide and intermingle. At the core of the narrative is the so-called the Navidson Record, a documentary film about the Navidsons and their life in the house on Ash Tree Lane. The film is then the first fictional frame, yet we never have direct access to the film as it has only survived in fragments, primarily a fragment known as the “Five and a Half Minute Hallway” but also “Exploration #4.” Our access to this film fragment comes only from a manuscript written by one Zampanò. This manuscript contains one of the main narratives of House of Leaves and is also the one which contains most of the horror genre conventions. There is a subframe, so to speak, to Zampanò’s narrative in his use of footnotes and references, all adding authority and authenticity to his narrative voice – these are not simply his observations but verifiable through the books he references.

Adding to Zampanò’s manuscript is the frame of Johnny Truant, a tattoo parlor worker who came across the manuscript and took it upon himself to collect it into a coherent whole and annotate as much of it as possible. He contacts many of the people referenced in Zampanò’s manuscript to validate their comments and translates as much of the non-English text as possible, but throughout the book Johnny ends up adding another narrative of his own life and experiences with the manuscript. Johhny’s frame then has the unidentified “Editors” comment on some of Johnny’s work, correcting or adding to his translations, but also adding the passages that Johnny was unable to translate. This frame is no story discourse, only indicating what was added for the second edition.

The outermost frame consists of Mark Z. Danielewski as the actual author of the book, along with the actual paratext added by the publishers (either Pantheon or Doubleday). Between this factual frame and that of the fictionalized “Editors,” we have three frames where the narrative level remains in doubt. These three floating narrative levels establish what is a constitutive part of the book’s aesthetics – the disruption of borders and boundaries. There is nothing to suggest that these three levels are in any way connected – different typefaces would in fact seem to indicate the opposite – and so we cannot assign them to any one narrative voice. Instead, we may connect them thematically to the rest of the book, since they seem to generate an ambiguous response.

The first floating narrative level we encounter is the (anti-)dedication of the book “This is not for you.” which could conceivably be by Danielewski directed at the actual reader, yet for me it seems to be more a part of the playful nature of the book. Also, the dedication is written in Courier typeface, which generally indicates a different narrative frame – most typically Johnny Truant’s. What this dedication also does, is to immediately destabilize our reception of the book and question who exactly the intended audience might be. The most immediate and most playful reading of the dedication is to attribute it to Danielewski, teasingly letting the reader know that this book was not written with him or her in mind, but instead someone else – one could easily imagine the trite cliché of the author only writing to please himself, here. Another, slightly more unsettling reading, is that it is not a dedication but a warning; that we are reading something we were not meant to read – as if we had come upon the manuscript much like Johnny Truant, maybe even that the book contains something dangerous or frightening. Certainly this reading leans more towards the Gothic connection of the found manuscript tradition which House of Leaves explicitly draws on. In either case, we are confronted with uncertainty and ambiguity right from the start, leaving us with a degree of hesitation as we move further into the book.

The second floating narrative level is the epigraph “Muss es sein?” between Johnny’s introduction and The Navidson Record. Again, the narrative voice is unknown – the typeface is italicized Times New Roman, which would indicate that it belongs to Zampanò, yet it is placed outside his frame and it is unclear to what extent he spoke German. So, the epigraph remains ambiguous as to the narrative voice and also in terms of its meaning. A literal reading of the epigraph seems to indicate the same slightly ominous tone as when we read the dedication as a warning – must this thing (the book, the story, the house – again, the meaning of ‘it’ remains unclear) be, or would it not be better if it never existed? However, ‘muss es sein’ may also be seen as referring to Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16, where Beethoven noted “Muß es sein?” under the opening chords of the last movement, while responding “Es muß sein!” later in the movement. This entire movement is named “Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß,” which once again generates ambiguity – what is this resolution and why is it difficult. The intertextual reference thus folds this uncertainty back into the epigraph of the book, indicating that the book might in itself be a difficult resolution. Finally, it seems peculiar that in a book obsessed with typography, the German ‘ß’ is not used. Again, uncertainty proliferates as we find it impossible to attribute this mistake or deliberate use to either Danielewski, the publisher or a narrative voice. We have, in other words, no stable ground from which we may proceed into the main body of the book; everything is cast into doubt and left open for the reader.

The final floating narrative level comes at the book’s very end, after the index and credits. There is a large black dot and the text:

Yggdrasil / What miracle is this? This giant tree. / It stands ten thousand feet high / But doesn’t reach the ground. Still it stands. / Its roots must hold the sky. (Danielewski 2000, 709)

which is followed by a large, bold ‘O’ the interior of which does not entirely match the black dot above. The typography of this page is far more unusual than the two first floating narrative levels; in this case the word ‘Yggdrasil’ is bold and divided: ‘Ygg’ is written horizontally with ‘drasil’ written vertically, centered on the page. The prose poem is also centered on the page with the line breaks noted in the quotation above. The final ‘O’ has a larger, bold typeface than the rest of the words and can be seen as the final end of the book, which indicates a form of looping back or infinity, taking the mythological implications of Yggdrasil into account. In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the World Ash from which extends the Nine Worlds and at the roots of Yggdrasil lies the dragon Nidhug, eating away at the roots.

This playful engagement with the world of publishing is then our first immediate clue that the book engages in a poetics of materiality. House of Leaves plays around with the concept of its physical origin – the edition(s) available claim to be the second edition, with a Foreword by “The Editors” stating that the first edition was privately distributed and did not include Chapter 21, Appendices II and III or the index, and that there may be errors of translations and the accreditation of the sources (Danielewski 2000, vii).

Of course, there is no self-published first edition and the second edition is the actual first edition and the Foreword from the editors is simply a playful element along with the inclusion of fake sources alongside real sources, an index, the title page stating that the book is written by Zampanò, with an introduction (and notes) by Johnny Truant. This fictional paratext is meant (playfully) to add to the authenticity of the novel as a found object and so it inscribes itself into the Gothic tradition of fictions posing as long-lost manuscripts recently discovered. And yet there are reasons why one might not immediately realize that there is no lost first edition; the novel was actually published in three different versions (called editions): a full color, a 2-color and black & white edition. Which edition the reader has is mentioned at the bottom of the copyright page, where four editions are in fact mentioned – an incomplete edition is also noted, which could conceivably be the lost first edition, since it misses appendices and index. However, in the full color version published by Pantheon Books, the words ‘First Edition’ are printed with a line going through them, thus undermining the authenticity of this as being the first edition.

In other words, the stability of the editions is placed under erasure and so become ambiguous and uncertain; how much can we trust this paratext and if that paratext is unreliable, then how much may we trust of the fiction inside the paratext? We might even go so far as to propose the concept of the unreliable publisher, since we are clearly being deceived (although obviously not maliciously) by the publisher, even if it is at the behest of the author. Yet due to the unusual nature of this unreliability, it is likely that many readers will never notice these small signs of instability, even as they proliferate throughout the book, with references to non-existing books, false references and many other smaller ontological slips. There is even more slippage between the different versions, an invisible touch which has faded away unnoticed. In the Doubleday Black & White version and in the Pantheon Books 2-Color version, the Full Color version is referenced as having braille (“Braille and color plates”), while all the other versions are listed by the laconic “No Braille”. However, the Pantheon Books Full Color version is listed as having “Xxxxxxx and color plates.” Something has slipped away from the Full Color version, an alteration has taken place without making itself felt. It is of course unclear why the braille script has been removed from the Full Color version, yet it does play into the whole concept of the materiality of the book, since this flickering stability of the editions and the different versions of the book is an aesthetic effect, what we may term a material metaphor after Hayles, “a term that foregrounds the traffic between words and physical artifacts” (Hayles 2002, 22).

What does this metaphor of the slipping and fading editions and versions implicate for House of Leaves, then? First of all, maybe paradoxically, it foregrounds the materiality of the book at the same time as actual editions and braille script fade away. Yet for those who pay attention, it becomes evident that the construction of the book is extremely deliberate and significant; the absences (of the first edition and of the braille) reveal an interest in what can be done with the book as a physical object. Our flickering hesitation as to whether or not there might be an actual first edition or if perhaps another version exists with the braille script precedes much of the hesitation we will encounter throughout the book, and this paratext will haunt us and inform our reading, as much as any other structures we bring with us. In this way, the technology of the book informs House of Leaves; it is clear that Danielewski (whether deliberately or not) proceeds from Walter Ong’s observation that writing restructures consciousness and that print culture encapsulates the word in very specific ways (Ong 1995), ways that are challenged and investigated in Danielewski’s book.

This should not surprise us, since fiction – especially supernatural fiction – has often narrativized the impact of various technologies and machines and mechanisms take on uncanny meanings, as Fred Botting has shown (Botting 2005). What House of Leaves does, then (among other things), is to investigate how technological and media-specific strategies inform and change our experience of the book. Much of the aesthetic appeal of the book comes precisely from its engagement with its own materiality and as much as the narrative of the book is contingent on this materiality, it is already in the paratext that we are alerted to the book’s unusual nature. Of course, as has been noted, the entire book could be considered one large paratext to a text which does not exist (Sørensen 2007). Still, what remains fascinating about the book is the way that it engages and structures our understanding of the book as a medium, which is certainly also why Hayles has used it as much as she has, to discuss issues of media-specific analysis.

As a haunted house story, we might proceed from Maurice Blanchot’s argument that all literature carves its own space in which it (dis)places its aesthetic concerns and that this space is of one constant deferral, because it is a void introduced “in place of the place it takes” (Blanchot 11); indicating that our experience of the literary work is always located somewhere else than in the physical object we hold in our hands. Such a view is consistent with what Walter Ong has discussed about the book being considered at first as an enunciation rather than a material object and is also consistent with Mark Rose’s intricate history of literary copyright, where he shows how the author is granted the rights to the ideas and concepts in the book, but not to the physical layout of the book, which became the property of the publisher (Rose 1995).

House of Leaves, along with a number of other literary texts, wishes to give the lie to the immateriality of the book and instead revels in a broad variety of typographical play, iconic prose arrangement and insertions of visual materials (primarily in the appendices). While certainly playful, all of these material devices are significant parts of the aesthetics of the book and often mirror, represent visually or engage with the narrative(s). We know that Danielewski himself took part in typesetting and designing the book, which is unusual for the publishing industry but also indicates that the visual layout is not simply an afterthought or left to an in-house designer. We need to pay attention to the design, then, in order to see how the book’s materiality impacts our reading of the novel.

The cover of the Pantheon edition has a fold-over flap containing on the inside of the flap a mock blurb meant to indicate that the book is in fact a collection of a lost manuscript by Zampanó with added material by Johnny Truant. The inside cover is a color plate collage consisting of a confused design of notes, a compass, tape measures, a shell, pills, thread, stamps, comic book pages, drawings and most disturbingly what appears to be smears of blood. While not immediately decipherable, this color plate does indicate a lot of what is part of the book’s narratives, yet without revealing anything for the first-time reader. What is, however, immediately clear is the obsession with measurements and hence space. This spatial obsession is further visible in the way that the fold-over flap is a ½ inch gap between the cover and the pages of the book. This missing ½ inch is mirrored in the narrative of the Navidson Record, where the Navidson’s house is discovered to be larger on the inside than on the outside. The exact dimensions of this extra space changes constantly from practically nothing to what appears to be almost infinite. It is uncanny space which The Navidson Record focuses on – how can this house defy the laws of physics and what happens when hallways and spaces suddenly open up?

The book has the same anxious preoccupation with space in its layout, not simply mirroring it in the missing ½ inch flap, but constantly throughout the entire book typographic space takes on visual meaning, reproducing or commenting in its own way on the narrative levels. Most notably is the use of different typeface fonts: The Navidson Record by Zampanò is in Times New Roman whereas Johnny Truant’s notes are in Courier. This change may seem innocent and irrelevant, yet inevitably it tells us something of the character of Zampanò and Truant. The materiality of these typefaces is significant and triggers meaning in us as readers; I believe that Zampanò’s soft, curved Times New Roman reproduce a sense of quiet elegance and authority, both because it is very often the typeface of academic works and thus reproduce that sense of knowledge and respect, but also because there is a calmness to the serif typefaces which slowly leads us on to the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph.

Zampanò and his writing thus exude calmness and continuity. With epigraphs for every chapter and obsessive referencing and footnotes, Zampanò reassures us of his competence, knowledge and authority. By contrast, Truant’s Courier typeface is jarring and confusing – in an age of computers, Truant’s writing seems an oddly archaic throwback to the typewriter. Along with his ranting style, bad grammar and spelling and constant use of expletives, Truant appears extremely intrusive, further enhanced by his writing sometimes spatially overtaking Zampanò’s prose – Truant’s prose is located as footnotes but as Truant becomes more verbose, his words take up more and more space on the page until it completely blocks out Zampanò and fills up the entire page. This happens first on pages 12 and 13, where Truant feels compelled to tell us about the lack of hot water for his morning shower and continues to provide more details about his day. Seemingly completely irrelevant for the story about the house and Zampanò’s narrative, it is difficult not to feel frustrated with the ugly smear of the Courier typeface across the page, blocking our access to what we at this point believe is the main story.

So much more is the shock when in Chapter IX, Zampanò suddenly introduces not simply struck-through text but also red text, footnotes placed in boxes rather than the bottom of the page and these boxes appear on both recto and verso of the pageleaf, mirrored on the verso side as if one can see through the page. Upside-down, italicized text appears on the right side of recto pages, while the verso pages has a regular typeface footnote along its left side. Footnote 148 is located along the inside margin; left on a recto page, almost obscured (121). Footnotes 166, 167 and 168 spread over two pages, turning first sideways and then upside-down. A black box appears along with a white box and peculiar uses of indents or whitespace. Suddenly, all of Zampanò’s hard-earned authority is questioned and starts falling apart, just as the typographical unity falls apart. Chapter X continues this use of spatialized typography with little text per page, ordered according to what is happening in the narrative of the film fragment “Exploration #4.”

Significantly, this explosion of typographic space comes as part of the description and discussion of “Exploration #4,” which is concerned with the shifting space of the Navidson house and the labyrinthine nature of this unstable space. Chapter IX contains a discussion of the nature and etymology of labyrinths and certainly the shifting between epigraph, footnote, Truant’s comments and the main text becomes extremely labyrinthine in this chapter, to the point where it is all but impossible to navigate the book. One needs to physically turn the book to read the upside-down text and the sideways text, and find a mirror to see the reversed text. Also, it becomes necessary for the reader to decide whether s/he wants to read the main narrative or the footnotes first; everything becomes so intermingled that one cannot easily locate a direction for reading, and the spatial disorder inevitably afflicts the reading which becomes confusing and multi-directional, again much like a labyrinth. The fragmented typography thus informs the narrative just as the narrative informs the typography, yet we cannot decide where the labyrinth originated first – the poetics of content and form haunt each other.

The book itself suggests that a labyrinth “is a required effort to keep from slipping or falling; in other words stopping. We cannot relax within those walls, we have to struggle pat them” (Danielewski 2000, 114), yet this seems to suggest that the walls we are struggling against are in fact the ‘walls’ of text swirling on the page. We – as readers – have to work to keep from slipping or falling in our reading; slip into the footnotes or fall out of the frame of reference. Of course, the book makes sure that this is impossible by destroying the calm typographic space as well as the order of reading. The footnotes become all jumbled and no longer simply lead us to look down the page or to pages further ahead. We have to flip back, for instance, to find note K, which is referenced on page 114 but located on page 109. By breaking up our direction of reading, the typographic space begins to take on uncanny features as the book becomes a strange thing, suddenly alive in our hands instead of the inert object it usually is. Of course, in this way the book simply, yet again, mirrors the house which similarly does not remain inert and stable. Zampanò’s authority recedes as we no longer fully trust the book we hold before us. The specter of typography suddenly peaks forth and becomes visible, thus alienating our reading. Even the footnotes, usually markers of stability and authority in any text, become unstable and lose their anchoring effect through their displacement on the page.

The significant point here is that the textual instability occurs at the introduction of the film fragment and the visual breakdown of the page visualizes the spatial breakdown which Holloway and his team experience. This visual representation of the literary content is of course in itself unusual; although there are a number of precedents, most books do not visually resemble their narratives. Instead, this is one place where Danielewski’s book turns uncanny as an object, as a thing. House of Leaves is no longer a literary experience where the materiality of the pages, covers, etc recede until we no longer notice them because they are ‘transparent’. The pages glare back at us in all their visual glory and disturbing ‘aliveness’ because the book must now move for us to make sense of it (to read it we would normally say, yet that seems too easy for House of Leaves). As Ong has pointed out, visual surface is

charged with imposed meaning and because print controlled not only what words were put down to form a text but also the exact situation of the words on the page and their spatial relationship to one another, the space itself on a printed sheet – ‘white space’ as it is called – took on high significance (Ong 1995, 128)

which House of Leaves is certainly an example of, but only because such experiments are not typical. In fact, most books attempt at making their pages transparent in order for the reader to become immersed in the narrative. Although Bolter and Grusin only discuss visual media in their Remediation: Understanding New Media, it seems evident to me that the history of printing and the history of the novel have created a form of immediacy for its readers: we accept the trivial effort of turning over a page and regard verbal representation as close to visual representation, in order for the immersion to work. In other words, for the reader a book is a transparent medium in most cases. What House of Leaves achieves is precisely to hypermediate its language and its material construction. The spatial construction of the typographic page generates an interest in the medium and materiality of the book and suddenly the book emerges as a visual medium. No longer do we simply ‘see through’ the pages, words and sentences but see the page in its entirety – with whitespace, typeface and color.

In this way, House of Leaves is a product of a visual media-age since the book’s visual layout attempts to remediate cinema. House of Leaves is as much a visual object as a literary. The visual impact is immense, especially because we are not used to it, yet it adapts much from cinematic storytelling in the way that the words become almost animated and move around on the ‘frame’ of the page. The spatial constriction or expansion of the words influences our reading. Sometimes we read faster because there are only a few words on each page and we leaf through the pages much faster than normal. At other times, the page frame is so dense that our reading slows to a crawl, as we check footnotes, twist the book, decide which order to read the sections in, skip back or forth to find the proper references and so forth. Constantly, we are made aware of the material nature of the book as a piece of technology as we come across different typefaces and different colors, or even iconic images – all this without going into the photos, comic book pages and prints which appear in the appendices.

All of these spacings turn the book into a monster and a monstrous object, simultaneously inert as any book but also uncannily alive in our hands as we turn it and flip it around. The book transforms itself into a visual object instead of a verbal object readily containable in a conventional book; House of Leaves thus oscillates between being a work of verbal and visual representation and so transgresses our easy conception of the book as a stable (verbal) unit. Let us remember that the etymology of monster is derived from the Latin monstrare, which means to show or display (Huet 1993, 6), and in this sense House of Leaves is monstrous. And as Huet goes on to show, monster is also derived from monere, which means to warn, especially associated with prophetic visions of impending disaster (Huet 1993, 6). Certainly also in this way, House of Leaves is monstrous, as it constantly filled with danger and uncertainty. The monstrosity of the book goes even further in its transgressions, as the narrative frames which we establish in order to have at least some sense of control over the book, constantly collapse.

The narrative frames collapse for different reasons, some for diegetic reasons others for non-diegetic ones. The two most significant diegetic ones are revealed early on, before we ever arrive at that narrative frame. In the introduction, Johnny Truant relates to us how he found Zampanò’s manuscript when Johnny moved into Zampanò’s apartment after Zampanò died. Johnny reads the manuscript and annotates it, which is what we get after the introduction. However, before this Johnny reveals two things – the manuscript is about a film which does not exist and Zampanò was blind (Danielewski 2000, xix, xxi). These two revelations effectively render the entire book void, since it is all fabrication, even on a diegetic level. One must even wonder why the publishers would even release a book which is so evidently fake. It seems that we must take this framing as an ironic and playful engagement with the Gothic tradition of found manuscripts, but also a certain satire of the academic world – Zampanò’s blindness did not, after all, prevent him from writing an academic treatise on a fictitious film; one might argue that this is a satire of academia in general on how film critics (and presumably literary critics) do not properly ‘see’ the work in question, being too preoccupied with theories and academic argument. Such a reading would anchor this framing with reference to Danielewski himself, as a satirist of academia, a field he himself has occupied.

Yet these frames also explode outwards. Consider how the word ‘house’ in any language is always colored blue in Pantheon’s Two-Color and Full Color versions. At first, we might assume that this coloring is done by Zampanò but the coloring is also present in Truant’s commentary, even when it is not in English. We know that Truant only speaks English and would have had problems coloring the non-English words for house, so perhaps we must locate the action of coloring the words with the Editors, since they at times correct Truant’s mistranslations or provide translations Truant never made. However, ‘house’ is colored blue even in the copyright section, the review blurbs and even on the front and back cover of the book (Patheon editions). So, again we are forced to anchor this decision with the publishers and Danielewski. It is unusual to have the need for so much recourse to the author as the anchoring frame, since authors are generally absent from their own works or at least only playfully present. In the case of House of Leaves, however, we are constantly confronted with the need to consider Danielewski as part of his work, thus establishing an implied author. This implied author continually haunts our reading of the book, since we must consistently turn to this construct in order to explain certain features of the book. However, the implied author wavers between being a fictional construction made by the reader and the factual author we know exists. This flickering becomes simply another device of instability for House of Leaves as we are never fully aware of where to locate authority and stability.

A further example is that of Appendix III: Contrary Evidence, which is a collection of images referred to in Zampanò’s and Truant’s frames. This appendix is added by the Editors, yet why would the Editors feel the need to present contrary evidence? And why are we never told the identity of these editors? Again, uncertainty proliferates and once more we are forced to locate the final decision with Danielewski or accept that there is no final authority which can anchor the meaning of the book. As such, we as readers are drawn into the oscillating narrative frames and confronted with a series of shifting and transforming relationships between these frames and this in itself leads to a proliferation of meanings. More than simply this tendency towards indeterminacy, however, the book also breaches the usually established boundaries between diegetic levels, in the case of the unknown entity which begins to come after Truant.

Truant, of course, has never been near the Navidson house (if that house even exists, since the film does not) and so has only been confronted with the so-called monster of the house via Zampanò’s writings. However, he does encounter a monster one night in the tattoo parlor where he is building needles:

Worse, I’m no longer alone. Impossible. Not impossible. This time it’s human. Maybe not. Extremely long fingers. A sucking sound too. Sucking on teeth, teeth already torn from the gums. […] And then behind me, the door closes. The rest is in pieces. A scream, a howl, a roar. All’s warping, or splintering. That makes no sense. […] Everything falls apart. (Danielewski 2000, 70-71)

Even in this compressed quote, we see how everything is confused for Truant and while the encounter clearly terrifies him, it is difficult to determine whether or not it is actually caused by the presence of something monstrous. Truant himself claims that he was no longer under the influence of alcohol or marijuana, yet it seems to me that we are here confronted with a case of Todorov’s fantastic – we may chose to believe Truant’s encounter as supernatural (thereby making it marvelous) or to read it as the confused after-effects of drugs and alcohol (in which case the encounter would be uncanny). Much of Danielewski’s book wavers between these two poles, allowing for plenty of hesitation for the reader but what is interesting for me is how Truant describes the encounter, which is terrifying but not exactly bodily or visible. Instead, his description is much more literary:

Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp. Cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad perhaps even irreparable way. Known. Some. Call. Is. Air. Am? Incoherent – yes. Without meaning – I’m afraid not. (Danielewski 2000, 71)

This hardly sounds like a typical description of an encounter with a monster and certainly not coming from Truant. The emphasis on words and the power of words and syllables is, however, interesting considering the nature of the book itself. One could argue that what Truant encounters and fears so much that he has constant nightmares about it (Danielewski 2000, xi) is simply the book – in this case, Zampanò’s manuscript with its fragmented and monstrous layout. Truant has simply succumbed to the Haven-Slocum’s Theory of post-exposure to the house. In this case, however, the house is not the Navidson house or any other physical house – it is the house referenced in the title; the book itself as a house. This argument is not unusual for as Mark Wigley has argued, a house is a system of representation just as a system of representation can be considered a structure akin to a house. So, let us change our emphasis to that of the haunted house of House of Leaves.

With the encroachment of Enlightenment thought, it became necessary for the Age of Reason to explain away these supernatural beings in the world, since rational and scientific thought could not entertain entities that were inexplicable and irreproducible. A major paradigmatic shift took thus took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth century; ghosts and specters were suppressed and denied access to the rational, scientific universe which was constructed. Yet, ghosts always return since that is the constitutive part of being a ghost. Someone who dies is left in the past, but someone who dies and leaves a ghost will always come back in the future; that is the nature of ghosts. And so did the ghosts of pre-Enlightenment indeed come back to haunt the Age of Reason, in the most unwelcome form they could take – unreason.

The Gothic was (and is, but that is another story) a mode of writing which insisted that one might very well banish ghosts from dominant cultural discourse, but that this would never make them truly disappear. Instead, the past and all its transgressions, repressions and crimes would always come back to haunt those who tried to bury them.

Ghosts did indeed come back to haunt Enlightenment thought, apart from their manifestations in Gothic fiction; indeed, they came back in two separate fields. The most typical example is the field of psychology which developed especially during the nineteenth century alongside philosophy. Prior to the Age of Reason, there was no such thing as an immaterial mind; people’s moods and mental states were controlled by the four humors – substances inside the body: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood. For a healthy person, the humors would be in balance, while a melancholy person, for instance, was considered to have too much black bile in them. Enlightenment philosophy discarded the notion of the four humors and instead theorized the four temperaments. Slowly, the field of psychology grew to explain human behavior as an immaterial process in the minds of people.

Ghosts, then, found a new home in this immaterial house and were often considered to be projections of mentally unstable people, but even today the metaphors of ghosts exists in our vocabulary of our mind: we often speak of being haunted by a piece of music, or a distinctive memory.

However, this was not the only field in which ghosts took occupancy: the growth of new, especially visual, media such as magic lantern shows, phantasmagorias, kaleidoscopes, photography and the cinema were all used to project ghost and other horrifying images. Furthermore, it must be noted that these new technologies always lived a double life: on the one hand, their emergence always increased scientific authority, because these wondrous inventions were based on scientific and technological progress. In other words, they represented the epitome(s) of rationalism and so exuded scientific authority. Perhaps naturally, nineteenth century spiritualists immediately adopted these new technologies to prove contact with the spirit world. Simply consider all the spiritualist photography which exists – the scientific authority of these new technologies was thus meant to lend authority to the spiritualists.

It is also significant that when a new technological medium emerges, it has no real social history and people are unsure of its use; historically, however, new media have always attracted ghosts and ghosts are found in early photography, early cinema and today we still speak of the ghost in the machine regarding computers. New media always seem occult, because people never truly understand them, while we (think we) understand old media. Even new technologies, then, may be considered uncanny: the iPhone’s touchscreen with its slide activation and finger-activated zoom seems more like magic to me than any kind of technology I can truly explain. Arthur C. Clarke already saw this, of course, when he stated that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Yet, the dead are restless and never stay put in one place for long. While Freud was busy extending Jentsch’s thoughts on the uncanny in early twentieth century psychology, art was moving in its own uncanny ways and demanded that true art (what we might call the avant-garde) must be estranging, defamiliarizing and alienating in order to properly engage with a world which was increasingly alienating, strange and unfamiliar – in other words, uncanny. From Kafka to Brecht, Verfremdungseffekts have become part and parcel of avant-garde art and has certainly shown no signs of slowing down in postmodern art, even to the point of critics only having to offhandedly refer to a text’s ‘V-effects’ for others to nod sagely at the radical nature of said text. Art must be uncanny, must be haunted, because the world in which we live is uncanny and haunted; ghosts have now become an aesthetic effect and not simply as actual ghosts in ghost stories, but instead unsettling, boundary-crossing aesthetics (and consider the overlap in Henry James’ works).

As one last turn of the screw, for now, we may consider how ghosts (what we, after Freud, might also refer to as the uncanny) have entered the fields of philosophy and critical theory. Certainly Derrida’s deconstruction is a way of revealing the uncanny nature of the sign, with the ghostly trace existing between signifier and signified. And what is Baudrillard’s simulacrum, if not an uncanny double with no proper origin? Hauntology is therefore an attempt to draw all these different forms of the uncanny manifestations (medial, technological, artistic and critical) together and say that in order to live, we have to live with ghosts instead of trying to suppress them.

Today, the dead live.