cursosmel2

Les dejo mis notas sobre el libro Ghosly Matters, de Avery Gordon, del que les he hablado en varias ocasiones.

Avery F. Gordon. Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, London: Minnesota University Press, 2008.

Haunting- Haunting was the language and the experiential modality by which I tried to reach an understanding of the meeting of force and meaning, because haunting is one way by which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied (as a free labor or national security). Haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed, although it usually involves these experiences or is produced by them. What’s distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes, more directly, sometimes more obliquely. I used haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. (xvi)

haunting and social violence- Haunting is a frightening experience. It always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present. xvi

reunion de vivos y muertos- I was trying to develop a vocabulary that registered and evoked the lived and living meeting, in their historical time, of the organized forces of order and violence and the aggrieved person when consciousness of that meeting was arising, haunting, forcing a confrontation, forking the future and the past. (xvii)

method of knowledge production- Ghostly Matters was thus also motivated by my desire to find a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives and thus richly conjure, describe, narrate, and explain the lies, the costs, the forfeits, and the losses of modern systems of abusive power in their immediacy and worldly significance. xvii

ghosts hate new things- The reason why is because ghosts are characteristically attached to the events, things, and places that produced them in the first place; by nature they are haunting reminders of lingering trouble. Ghosts hate new things precisely because once the conditions that call them up and keep them alive have been removed, their reason for being and their power to haunt are severely restricted. xix

Cap. 1 Her Shape and his Hand

Complex personhood- “Complex personhood means that even those who haunt our dominant institutions and their systems of value are haunted too by things they sometimes have names for and sometimes not. At the very least, complex personhood is about conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning. (5)

hunting- Ghosly Matters is about haunting, a paradigmatic way in which life is more complicated than those of us who study it have usually granted. Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. (7)

lost of narratives of legitimation- Whether the post- 1945 period is conceived as the loss of the West’s eminent metanarratives of legitimation or as a series of sign-posts announcing the arrival of significant reconfigurations of our dominant Western organizational and theoretical frames—poststructuralism, postcolonialism, post-Marxism, postindustrialism, postmodernism, postfeminism, --many scholars across various disciplinary fields now are grappling with the social, political, and epistemological confrontations that have increasingly come to characterize it. (9)

otro paisaje- “It is also arguably the case that the strong sense of living in “a strange new landscape… the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone though a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization” (Jameson 1991:xxi) so pervasive in many quarters is an influential and itself motivating social and cultural fact. (12)

tecnologías de hipervisibilidad- Hypervisibility is a kind of obscenity of accuracy that abolishes the distinction between permission and prohibition, presence and absence.” No shadows, no ghosts. In a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are led to believe not only that everything can be seen, but also that everything is available and accessible for our consumption. In a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of the hypervisibility, we are led to believe that neither repression nor the return of the repressed, in the form of either improperly buried bodies of countervailing systems of value or difference, occurs with any meaningful result. (16)

voices in your head, to remember exclusions- It would be like having voices in your head because a postmodern social format is still haunted by the symptomatic traces of its productions and exclusions. (17)

fantasmas objetivos- To impute a kind of objectivity to ghosts implies that, from certain standpoints, the dialectics of visibility involve a constant negotiation between what can be seen and what is in the shadows. (17)

los fantasmas según Horkheimer and Adorno- It was such a spirit like that Horkheimer and Adorno([1944] 1987) wrote a tow-page note, appended to The Dialectic of Enlightenment, entitled “On The Theory of Ghosts.” Despairing at the loss of historical perspective, at our “disturbed relationship with the dead—forgotten and embalmed,” they believed we need some kind of theory of ghosts, or at least a way of both mourning modernity’s “wound in civilization” (216) and elimination the destructive forces that open it up over and over again: “Only the conscious horror of destruction creates the correct relationship with the dead: unity with them because we, like [19] them, are the victims of the same condition and the same disappointed hope” (215). (20)

hablar con fantasmas- Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look. It is sometimes about writing ghosts stories, stories that not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future. (22)

territorio encantado- Haunting occurs on the terrain situated between our ability to conclusively describe the logic of Capitalism or State Terror, for example, and the various experiences of this logic, experiences that are more often than not partial, coded, symptomatic, contradictory, ambiguous. (24)

2 Distractions

el incosciente y los fantasmas- Freud’s mature unconscious replaces the origins of haunting in the worldly contact between self and other, in what Michael Taussig calls the dialectic of “mimesis and alterity” (1993a), with what Adorno calls an “ontological property” (1968:80). Freud will try to demystify our holdover beliefs in the power of the world at large, hoping to convince us that everything that seems to be coming at us from the outside is really coming from this now shrunken inside, tormented by its own immortality. Maybe Freud’s unconscious is a brilliant description of “the subjective conditions of objective irrationality” (Adorno 1967:68). Maybe the separation of society and psyche is the consciousness of a modern capitalist society “whose unity resides not in being unified” (ibid:69). But is not enough. And Freud almost knows this too since uncanny experiences are where the unconscious rejoins its animistic and social roots, where we are reminded that what lies between society and psyche is hardly an inert empty space. (49)

lo ominoso se siente- We learn that uncanny experiences are “qualities of feeling”, something like what Raymond Williams called a structure of feeling. Uncanny experiences are hunting experiences. There is something there and you “feel” it strongly. It has a shape, an electric empiricity, but the evidence is barely visible, or highly symbolized. The investigation of these qualities of feelings is, according to Freud, a more properly aesthetic than psychoanalytic topic of inquiry (U 219) since Freud, drawing on Kant, associates aesthetic judgement with a “critical… ‘primitive’ mentality” (Pietz 1993:139).

lo reprimido regresa, según el propio Freud- Having admitted a form of haunting that does not track itself back to the individual’s personal psychic life, Freud is ready to minimize its significance before the discussion even begins. Where psychoanalysis, as a mode of thought or analysis, considers itself capable of identifying the visible and the disquieting symptoms of repression and bringing their origins and nature to light, “reality-testing” simply refutes the reality of haunting by treating it as a matter of lingering superstition. But it is precisely the experience of being haunted in the “world of common reality,” the unexpected arrival of ghosts or wolves or eerie photographs, that troubles or even ruins our ability to distinguish reality and fiction, magic and science, savage and civilized, self and other, and in those ways gives to reality a different coloring. The “reality-testing” that we might want to perform in the face of hauntings must first of all admit those hauntings as real. (53) Yo: Well, at least its effects…

the uncanny is the social- Freud might have called the primitive or the archaic the social and thereby have supplemented the Marxist notion of estrangement. The social is ultimately what the uncanny is about: being haunted in the world of common reality. To be haunted is not a contest between ani[54]mism and a discrediting reality test, nor a contest between the unconscious and the conscious faculties. It is an enchanted encounter in a disenchanted world between familiarity and strangeness. The uncanny is the return, in psychoanalytic terms, of what the concept of the unconscious represses: the reality of being haunted by worldly contacts (55). …

hay que hablar con el fantasma- There is a Small opening in Spielrein’s experience of selfsameness and frightening otherness and it is all because, despite her fear, she talks to the wolf, listens to its answer, and believes in the transformative power of the encounter. It is just a small opening, but very critical nonetheless. (55)

Freud forgets about Spielrein’s role and the nature of her role in all his thinking about repetition, death, and the decline of civilization. (55)

Follow ghosts- The willingness to follow ghosts, neither to memorialize nor to slay, but to follow where they lead, in the present, head turned backwards and forwards at the same time. To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. (57)

significados del fantasma- Thus far, I have considered there characteristic features of haunting. We have seen that the ghost imports a charged strangeness into the place or sphere it is haunting, thus unsettling the propriety and property lines that delimit a zone of activity or knowledge. I have also emphasized that the ghost is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it rep- [63]resents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken. From certain vantage point the ghost also simultaneously represent a future possibility, a hope. Finally, I have suggested that the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice. Out of a concern for justice would be the only reason one would bother. (64)

Liboy- la historia de Valenzuela se titula Puerta abierta y trata sobre la relación entre la locura personal y la social. 66. Su estructura es alegórica, fragmentada, narrativamente incoherente, y difícil de entender de cualquier modo directo que hiciera las preguntas que los lectores se hacen normalmente: Quién habla, qué pasa, dónde, cómo, qué significa? (67)

Fe en disfraz- (68) hay un academic que trata de entender fríamente a través de la razón.

grabación para recordar Palacio Sergio (68).

desaparecidos= undead- The disappeared have lost all social and political identity: no bureaucratic records, no funerals, no memorials, no bodies, nobody, “All societies live by fictions taken as real. What distinguishes cultures of terror is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise philosophical problem of representation—reality and illusion, certainty and boubt—becomes infinitely more than a `merely’ philosophical problem of epistemology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction.” (80)

saber- “Knowledge is also a medium of resistance, as the invaluable work the human rights reports accomplish attests.

proceso histórico latinoamericano es una danza de fantasmas- “Valenzuela gets us further than the reports not only because the medium she employs is more suited to the task but also because she uses it to captures the haunting elements of disappearance, the way it is “a kind of ghost dance…around the dead of war that began with the conquest and goes on today” (Franco 1986:7) (81)

historicidad- Nothing of what haunts her of what her haunting existence means can be broached when the past and the present, the public and the private have been so artificially segregated, when so much energy must be expended to remain alert to “my work” and to be distracted by what seems “beside the point”. 87

haunting vs. razón marxista- Haunting, however, is precisely what prevents rational detachment, prevents your willful control, prevents the disaggregation of class struggle and your feelings, motivations, blind spots, craziness, and desires. A haunted society is full of ghosts, and the ghost always carries the message—albeit not in the form of the academic treatise, or the clinical study, or the polemical broadside, or the mind-numbing factual report—that the gap between personal and social, public and private, objective and subjective is misleading in the first place. That is to say, it is leading you elsewhere, it is making you see things you did not see before, it is making an impact on you; your relation top things that seemed separate or invisible is changing. (98)

fotos- 102-111 The evidence of the ghostly matter is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there. (énfasis en el original, 108)

111-116 desaparecidos son fantasmas. El gobierno manufactura fantasmas.

Lo mismo se puede decir de muertes violentas en PR.

la batalla más importante es la que implica las narrativas—Se refiere a la novela Como en la guerra de Luisa Valenzuela. precisely my point- “Rather than satisfying clarity of indubitable political analysis , AZ is confounded by myths and dreams and the reversibility of symbols and action. Why? Because the real action involves not only a violent struggle for control over the country’s economic and political infrastructure. The real action includes, at its core and undissociably from what we think of as the more sociologically and politically significant bathe over capitalism and democracy, a lethal contest for the mastery of people’s passions, their taughts, their dreams and nightmares, and their very capacity ot imagine within, against, and beyond the constrict-[123]ing strangehold of a militarized, patriarchal, Christian, oddly feudal, modern capitalist polity. (124)

Para eliminar la amenaza de la subersión que entendían los militares estaba por todas partes, trataron de cambiar un grupo de fantasmas por otros (125).

Para cambiar el poder del estado hay que contar la historia de los espectros porque es una historia espectral. 131

Lo que argumenta en el capítulo que habla de Beloved es que la violencia traumatica en sí es un fantasma que acosa y está él también acosado por fantasmas anteriores. (140-141)

hunting mediates between institution and person. (142)

lo que Morisson representa es el rechazo de la alfabetización como medida del ser humano. 147

“If the slave narrative had to struggle to manage such a crisis of representation, Beloved, by contrast, gives individual voices and faces to those who lacked public ones, but does son within a decentered structure of storytelling that deploys the sounds and rhythms of call and response.

to engage the ghost—Whatever can be said definitively about the long and varied traditions o African-American thought, writing, and radicalism, the social reality of haunting and the presence of ghosts are prominent features. The capacity not only to live with specters, in order to determine what sort of people they were and could be, but also to engage the ghost, heterogeneously but cooperatively, as metaphor, as weapon, as salve, as a fundamental epistemology for living in the vortex of North America. (151A).

memoria social- para Morison la memoria social no es solo historia sino también hunting.165

relaciones sociales son fantasmales-“they are prepared in advance and they linger well beyond our individual tiem, creating that shadowy basis for the production of material life”. 166

lo fantasmagórico te reclama- And therein lies the frightening aspect of haunting: you can be grasped and hurtled into the maelstrom of the powerful and material forces that lay claim to you whether you claim them as yours or not. 166

capitalism es esclavitud moderna porque somos parte de una máquina-- The replacement of situated human decision making about the production and reproduction of social life (with all the messiness any self-government entails) with an impersonal, unquestionable, uncontrollable thing called the market is modern enslavement in the general sense. 168

los muertos nos traen tareas- When the living take the dead or the past back to a symbolic place, it is connected to the labor aimed at creating in the present a something that must be done. 175

Tenemos que hablarle. (179)

hunting: 1) no se puede rastrear hasta un trauma individual sino que se trata de las condiciones de posibilidad de ese trauma. Lo que hay que hacer con el fantasma es asumir lo que implica su represión en el presente. 183 (2) historia: History, Morrison suggests, is that ghostly (abstract in the Marxist sense) totality that articulates and disarticulates itself and the subjects who inhabit it” (184).

la pregunta: Como podemos ser responsables (accountable) por personas que no han contado en el récord público?

En la conclusión argumenta que el ghostly matter es un “structure of feeling”.

Structure of feeling según Raymond Williams- A structure of felling defines not only, then, “a social experience that is still in process,” but also social experiences that are often not “recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating” (132). A structure of feeling gives notice to the necessarily social nature of what we call the subjective; it gives notices to the texture and skin of the this, here, now, alive, active contemporaneity of our lives. 199…. “A structure of feeling “articulates presence” (135) as the tangled exchange of noisy silences and seething absences. 200

se trata de conocimiento que se adquiere a través de los sentidos- This mode of apprehension that notices and comprehends the ghostly matter of the sunken couch, the hat, the photograph, the reflection in the mirror, the open door is a sensuous knowledge. Sensuous knowledge is a different kind of materialism, neither idealistic nor alienated, but an active practice or passion for the lived reality of ghostly magical invented matters. 205

cursosmel2

viernes, 1 de mayo de 2015

nos vemos en el bori

viernes, 17 de abril de 2015

loco afán

martes, 7 de abril de 2015

La amortajada y Pedro Páramo

jueves, 26 de marzo de 2015

Ghosly Matters

Cities of the Dead

lunes, 9 de marzo de 2015

Cuentos Malévolos de Clemente Palma

viernes, 13 de febrero de 2015

13 de febrero de 2015