Some notes on the Spectralities Workshop
in the Jon Berndt Thought Space
PHOTO: ROSEMARY LOMBARD
Anette Hoffmann
The Spectralities Workshop hosted by Archive & Public Culture in August included a number of prominent scholars: Achille Mbembe (Wits) spoke of animism, and what can be called 'New Animism' in the art world and in theory; Sarah Nuttall (Wits) presented a paper on materiality and immateriality; Esther Peeren (ASCA and Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies) spoke to notions of spectrality as a concept that can accommodate our thinking on and speaking of those who are in-visible, or appear to be 'immaterial in current debates.
In a move to re-position the debate on spectrality, Hylton White (Wits), Carolyn Hamilton (APC) and Anette Hoffmann (APC) presented their work on cultural practices and debates connected to ancestors in southern Africa, while PhD candidate in Literature (APC) Alex Dodd explored contemporary South African artistic practices she describes as 'post-Victorian' and which she conceptualises as functioning in the mode of a 'secular séance'.
The workshop was designed around Peeren's work, and her presentation the previous day (see August Gazette) that complicates ideas in which 'ghosts are expected to act as powerful figures of disturbance, whose appearance causes mayhem'.
'In most ghost stories, unsettling questions are raised about the status of reality, and the borders between life and death, secrets from the past are revealed, revenge is exacted, bloodlines and inheritances put in question, and only decisive action on the part of the living can exorcise the apparition. Ghosts tend to function as unwelcome reminders of past transgressions, causing personal or historical traumas to rise to the surface and pursuing those they hold responsible,' she writes.
She asks 'what it means to live as a ghost, especially when the spectral metaphor designates a status of dispossession?' Peeren's notion of living ghosts - undocumented migrants, domestic workers, missing persons, mediums - is related to the figure of the ghost/spectre and social but also physical invisibility - or perhaps half-visibility, but also to an uncertain status within societies.
Repositioning the ghost/spectre as a useful figure to think from here, means to ask what happens if visibility is not so much an issue, or at least of less importance than being heard - by a third ear perhaps, in the case of the voice of ancestral spirits? What if the ghost or spirit hears - or wants to hear the living? How does haunting feature, if ancestral spirits are an element of 'normality' and not necessarily a cause of concern? What if they (the spirits) live among people, and their appearance does not disturb the existing order, but re-instates it? What if they function as agents to verify bloodlines, genealogies and the right to heritage? What if they do not remind - or not in all cases - of past traumas, but of an order of things that is desirable?
What of the political and ethical responsibility towards what may appear ghostly yet perhaps speaks of an ancestral realm? Or, perhaps, one should ask, what if incommensurable notions of ghosts and spirits exist simultaneously? How do we come to a situated knowledge of ghosts/spectres from here - where perhaps ghosts are not to be exorcised, but lived with in a conscious ways? What if the ghost is not a figure of return, but rather of the longue durée that extends the existence of social coherence and practices into the past, perhaps antedating the colonial encounter?
How do we, or are we to metaphor the ghost from here? From which starting points and to which ends? Which genres form the basis of our theorising the ghost/spectre? Do these genres theorize themselves? How? What difference does it make, if we are debating the appearance of ghosts from novels and movies, or mediated by our reading of archive, performance, perhaps cultural practices?
The workshop's often heated debates marked a beginning to think spectrality from here, and perhaps the need to come to concepts that accommodate recalcitrant spirits that do not visually appear - no apparitions - and which also demands to include the theorizing around ancestral presences (and absences) that reverberate in specifically local debates.