What do media do? Not simply what do media mean but what operations do media perform on us and how do we understand the function and purpose of mediation in these operations? While there are many different operations which media perform on us, distinct for each specific medium, what concerns me here is when our encounters with media turn uncanny; when the media themselves become strange or behave strangely. The reason for this focus is to suggest that one way of understanding the workings of media on us is best analyzed in liminal cases, when the medium protrudes and becomes noticeable. This argument comes from the fact that so often the desire of media is to be invisible, to retreat into the background and run its operations on us unnoticed. This is what Bolter and Grusin dubbed immediacy in their book Remediation and what a host of others since then have also referred to as transparency. The flip side to immediacy is hypermediacy, when the medium thickens and its operations and presence becomes noticeable and sometimes this thickening becomes uncanny. To investigate such uncanny operations, I have chosen to focus on five different media here: electronic writing, film, the novel, music and photography; all chosen because they perform a number of different operations both inherent to their medium and at the same time foregrounding that very medium as a material object. In this context, I understand media to be

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.