Spectral Spaces and Hauntings [1 ed.] 9781138856820, 1138856827

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Spectral Spaces and Hauntings

A timely and important collection of incisive and insightful essays which address some of the most urgent and important issues which concern scholars working in memory studies, and humanities more generally. —Anindya Raychaudhuri, University of St Andrews, UK How might contact with geographies of absence shift our taken-forgranted understandings of space and time? In this timely intervention, a range of scholars and artists explore how the memories, experiences and material environments of particular places have the power to haunt the social imaginary and our individual psyches. By reanimating the realities of abandoned places, ruins and the disappeared, the authors of Spectral Spaces and Hauntings call us to attend to the ‘work that needs to be done to prevent future injustices’. —Karen E. Till, Maynooth University, Ireland

This anthology explores the spatial dimension and politics of haunting. It considers how the ‘appearance’ of absence, emptiness and the imperceptible can indicate an overwhelming presence of something that once was, and still is, (t)here. At its core, the book asks: how and why do certain places haunt us? Drawing from a diversity of mediums, forms and disciplinary approaches, the contributors to Spectral Spaces and Hauntings illustrate the complicated ways absent presences can manifest and be registered. The case studies range from the memory sites of a terrorist attack, the lost home, a vanished mining town and abandoned airports, to the post-apocalyptic wastelands in literary fiction, the photographic and filmic surfaces where spectres materialise, and the body as a site for re-corporealising the disappeared and dead. In ruminating on the afteraffects of spectral spaces on human experience, the anthology importantly foregrounds the ethical and political imperative of engaging with ghosts and following their traces. Christina Lee is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Australia.

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

96 The Rise of Transtexts Challenges and Opportunities Edited by Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa 97 Explorations in Critical Studies of Advertising Edited by James F. Hamilton, Robert Bodle, and Ezequiel Korin 98 Popular Culture and the Austerity Myth Hard Times Today Edited by Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall 99 Historicising Transmedia Storytelling Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds Matthew Freeman 100 LGBTQs, Media and Culture in Europe Edited by Alexander Dhoest, Lukasz Szulc, and Bart Eeckhout 101 Matrix Activism Global Practices of Resistance Michela Ardizzoni 102 Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture Edited by László Munteán, Liedeke Plate, and Anneke Smelik 103 The Trauma Graphic Novel Andrés Romero-Jódar 104 Politics, Media and Democracy in Australia Public and Producer Perceptions of the Political Public Sphere Brian McNair, Terry Flew, Stephen Harrington, and Adam Swift 105 Spectral Spaces and Hauntings The Affects of Absence Edited by Christina Lee

Spectral Spaces and Hauntings The Affects of Absence

Edited by Christina Lee

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Christina Lee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lee, Christina (Lecturer in Communication and Cultural Studies), editor. Title: Spectral spaces and hauntings / edited by Christina Lee. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York: Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge research in cultural and media studies; 105 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016044954 Subjects: LCSH: Parapsychology—Psychological aspects. | Parapsychology and geography. | Haunted places. | Ghosts. Classification: LCC BF1040 .S64 2017 | DDC 133.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044954 ISBN: 978-1-138-85682-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-71911-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To my parents, Gerk Hong and Eng Guan, and to Goldsworthy

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements

ix xi

Introduction: Locating Spectres 1 C hristina L ee

Part I

Private Hauntings 1 The Haunted Spaces of 7/7: Memory, Mediatisation and Performance 19 J ohn T ulloch

2 Dream House 40 P ippa Tandy

3 Home Is Where the Hearth Was: Remembering and Place-Making a Vanished Town 51 C hristina L ee

4 Unsettling Space and Time: Journey to Purton Ships’ Graveyard 70 L isa H ill

5 ‘Popping Up to See Pat’: Attending Absence at Roadside Shrines 85 E lly B avidge

viii Contents Part II

Spectres of the Social 6 ‘Un aéroport-fantôme’: The Ghost of Mirabel International Airport 103 L i z M illward

7 Zombie South: Cormac McCarthy’s Architectures of the Undead 117 Daniel C ross T urner

8 Double Exposure: Rephotography and the Life of Place 133 L á s z l ó M unte á n

9 Ghosts on Screen: The Politics of Intertemporality 150 A lison L andsberg

10 ‘Our Monuments Shall Be the Maws of Kites’: Laura Oldfield Ford and the Ghosts of Psychogeography Past 165 C hristopher C ollier

11 From Spectres of Horror to ‘The Beautiful Death’: Re-Corporealising the Desaparecidos of Argentina 182 S onia M . Tasc ó n

List of Contributors Index

195 197

List of Figures

I.A Traces of trauma: Charlie Hebdo temporary memorial in Paris, France. © Christina Lee, 2015 3 1.1 and 1.2  Haunted space: John Tulloch visiting the 7/7 Memorial in Hyde Park, London. © Christina Lee, 201327 2.1 The wardrobe 47 2.2 Resting place 47 2.3 Empty spaces 48 2.4 The sickroom 48 2.5 Bathroom 49 2.6 Dream House 49 3.1 and 3.2 Black Rock Stakes: The Flying Fleas marathon team (1988) and The Final Run (2008). Goldsworthy oval, Western Australia. © Christina Lee, 1988, 200853 4.1 Gloucester Docks. © Lisa Hill, 2014 72 4.2 Opening Splatt Bridge. © Lisa Hill, 2014 78 4.3 The Dispatch. © Lisa Hill, 2014 82 5.1 The social reach of absence: A roadside memorial on Newcastle Road, Sunderland. © Elly Bavidge, 2009 93 8.1 Dear Photograph: Locating personal ghosts in rephotography. © Colleen and Taylor Jones, 2012 140 8.2 Window to the Past: Nostalgic re-imaginings of Budapest. © Zoltán Kerényi and Fortepan, 1900/2012 143 8.3 Link to the Past: Uncanny eruptions within present-day St ­Petersburg. © Sergey Larenkov, 1943/2011 145 9.1 Ghostly encounter: Hacker Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) with Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) in Mr. Robot. © Universal Cable Company, The Kobal Collection and David Giesbrecht, 2015 159 11.1 Spectres of violence: Alicia (Norma Aleandro) and Roberto ­(Héctor Alterio) in La Historia Oficial (The Official Story). © Historias/Progress and The Kobal Collection, 1985 189

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Acknowledgements

The genesis of this book was my hometown of Goldsworthy. It no longer exists on the map but I dream of it often, haunted by its over-presence. I am incredibly grateful to the contributors who joined my ghost hunt. This book would not have been possible without the sharp scholarship of Elly Bavidge, Christopher Collier, Lisa Hill, Alison Landsberg, Liz Millward, László Munteán, Pippa Tandy, Sonia Tascón, John Tulloch and Daniel Cross Turner. Thank you all. A special shout-out to Dan who helped me get over the finish line. To the team at Routledge – Felisa Salvago-Keyes, Andrew W ­ eckenmann and Christina Kowalski – I am immensely grateful for their ­guidance and patience throughout the editorial process; my thanks also to Philippa Freegard and Jen Hinchliffe for their precise copyediting skills, and to Assunta Petrone for seeing me through the final production stage. The School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts and the Australia-Asia-­ Pacific Institute at Curtin University provided collegial support and funding to assist completion of this book. My Reading the City students have, over the years, allowed me to test out ideas and inspired critical debates on the power of places for which I am thankful. There were many people along the way who provided invaluable critique, words of encouragement, and much needed distractions. In particular, thank you Suzy Galloway, Denise Woods, Serena Adam, Kirsten Hudson, Serena McClellan, Danielle O’Leary, Liz Byrski, ­Diane ­Hopkins, Damon Young, Helen Fordham, Thor Kerr, Anne Ryden, ­Susan Leong and Rachel Robertson. Thanks to the JLC – ­Melissa Loh, Sarah Soon and Caroline Ng – for your friendship and good cheer. I am grateful to Professors Steve Mickler, Baden Offord, Erik ­Champion and Graham Seal for their support of this research project. I was fortunate to cross paths with many former residents from Goldsworthy and Shay Gap as I worked on this book. While most do not appear in the pages here, I am indebted to them for opening their hearts and sharing their stories of vanished towns. To Ronnie Hubert, you were the walking encyclopaedia of our town and you so generously shared your knowledge.

xii Acknowledgements Thanks to my siblings, Jo and Jason, for indulging my brainstorming sessions. To my niece and nephew, Olivia and Elijah, you are the laughter and light. Finally, heartfelt thanks go to my parents, Gerk Hong and Eng Guan, for bringing our small family to Goldsworthy all those years ago. It was indeed our paradise.

Introduction Locating Spectres Christina Lee

… the absent is only ever moved along and is never fully gotten rid of. —Kevin Hetherington1

It was an overcast winter’s day. I stood amid an urban forest of flowers, burnt-out candles and scattered pencils. Photographs, hand-scrawled notes and posters climbed the walls of adjacent buildings. Others hung from an overcrowded metal barrier, held precariously in place by sticky tape that each gust of wind threatened to dislodge. The messages conveyed similar sentiments: ‘Tout est pardonné’, ‘Je suis humain’, ‘Our hearts are with you all’. The corner of Rue Nicolas Appert and Passage Sainte-Anne Popincourt in Paris’ 11th arrondissement had become the location of a temporary memorial, although the actual site of trauma was approximately one hundred metres down the road at 10 Rue Nicolas Appert, a nondescript building save for the erected barricade and the armed gendarme patrolling the entrance. One month earlier, on 7 January 2015, two assailants had stormed the headquarters of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and shot to death eleven people before then killing a police officer on the street. I was unprepared for how affected I was by the makeshift memorial and the sheer volume of intimate gestures. I spent an hour taking photographs and looking at the tributes as if I was trying to remember every detail of it – as testimony that this was here, that events happened. After all, soon it would be gone. In time the area would be reclaimed for its normal use and city cleaners would remove all the items that had not already deteriorated or been pilfered for private collections. Perhaps a commissioned memorial would take its place. But it would not be this ‘mess’, this disorderly gathering of things that was an immediate emotional response by the people. It was hard to imagine this site, so intensely charged and over-present now, emptied. Its reversion back to a street corner and pedestrian thoroughfare would help with the healing process, but it would also entail a certain forgetting. In my mind the site signified a double loss – the loss that had already happened, and the one that was yet to come. When I returned to Paris five months later I did not revisit this site, apprehensive of what would (not) be there.

2  Christina Lee

Haunted/Haunting Places In discussing the ties between place and memory, Michel de Certeau writes that ‘[t]here is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in’. 2 There are two main observations to which I wish to draw attention in this quote that are particularly pertinent to this anthology: the distinctive language of haunting employed and the pervasiveness of haunting as an experience. The ‘spirits’ and ‘hauntings’ of place to which de Certeau refers are effects of ‘inward-­ turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times’.3 There is a phantasmal quality to place that exceeds cognition and the senses, and challenges the quotidian understanding of time as linear. As María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren suggest, this is because places contain ‘the experience of the actual moment as well as the many times that have already transpired and become silent – though not necessarily imperceptible – to the present’.4 Returning to the opening anecdote, the memorial site was, at least for myself, a crossroad of ‘accumulated times’ between the past (the tragic event), the present (the immediacy of being at the locale), and the future (the memorial’s impending disappearance). I imagined my future-self standing at the street corner, haunted by my own memories and the prosthetic memories created by the media. The people passing by hurriedly on their way to work would never know of this ghostly encounter and the loneliness it engendered. This landscape would teem with traces that, in that private moment, only I could see. This leads to the second crucial point de Certeau makes about hauntings: they are ubiquitous, and not exclusive to events and sites of extraordinary trauma or violence. Standing in front of one’s former home that now belongs to someone else, or driving past a derelict factory or a neglected garden can just as easily have a haunting affect. The dialogic dynamic between presence and absence means that it is not possible to think of ‘what now is’ without ‘what once was’. As de Certeau contends, ‘the places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences. What can be seen designates what is no longer there’. 5 We might describe these absent presences as the spectral agents that haunt places that are always already loaded with meaning and narratives. By their very definition places are constituted of private knowledges (including memories), displacements and effects.6 This idea forms part of de Certeau’s broader argument that beneath the ‘clear text of the planned and readable city’ lies another ‘migrational, or metaphorical’ space.7 Walking and photo­ graphy, for instance, can activate these other spaces as demonstrated in Lisa Hill’s account of her journey along an old towpath where the past, memories and traces manifested (Chapter 4), and in László Munteán’s discussion of rephotography which summons ghosts and reveals the

Introduction  3

Figure I.A  Traces of trauma: Charlie Hebdo temporary memorial in Paris, France. © Christina Lee, 2015

haunted city (Chapter 8). More generally, the essays in this volume attend to how various media, forms and practices can evoke or animate in unique ways such buried spaces and times. The absent presences fundamental to de Certeau’s conceptualisation of place are the organising principle for Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absence. The anthology explores how the ‘appearance’ of absence, emptiness and the imperceptible can indicate an overwhelming presence of something that once was, and still is, (t)here. The chapters collectively contemplate what comes ‘after’ – post-industrialisation, post-capitalism, post-­modernity, post-apocalypse, post-trauma, post-life, post-mortem. I should qualify that the ‘post-’ prefix does not indicate a concern simply with outcomes, by-products and forsaken inevitabilities. The anthology is about the haunting afteraffects of events and time upon space that generate their own centrifugal forces and agencies.8 They show how the past has a palpable presence and impact upon the present in a range of spectral spaces: the memory sites of a terrorist attack, a vacated house, a decommissioned mining township, a graveyard of ships, roadside memorials, an abandoned airport futilely waiting for arrivals, a post-­apocalyptic landscape dominated by undead architecture, photographs and screens where ghosts materialise, the haunted cityscape in art, and the body as a

4  Christina Lee site for re-corporealising the disappeared and dead. At its core the book asks: how and why do certain places haunt us? As the title indicates, Spectral Spaces and Hauntings emphasises the spatial dimension and politics of haunting. This is not to say that it is the only aspect of haunting worth discussing, but it does identify the over-determination of temporality in studies of spectrality, for instance, in memory and trauma studies and in the works of Jacques Derrida.9 To separate the spatial and temporal is an impossibility, but in foregrounding spatiality this allows a closer study of haunting as a complex relation between our own materiality, the environment and the perceived absent presences that engage us physically, cognitively, emotionally and affectively. If haunting is an expression of the agency of the ghost, encountered as ‘the unexpected presence of absence’, we need to be able to take seriously those things that affect us that cannot be detected with our usual modalities or explained away with clear logic.10 Take, for example, a sumptuous fauteuil behind velvet rope at a grand chateau in Europe. Its unused-ness – the eternal ‘empty chair’ – in the cavernous room can move me as much as its intricate design. As a reproduction, the original destroyed long ago, the chair represents what is no longer there. Between my own self and the piece of furniture I perceive and interpret an unrepeatable history of wanton decadence and privilege. The rope barrier keeps me at a distance from the absent figures ‘on the other side’ and fortifies a sensation of loss and estrangement from this foreign past. The aforementioned example evinces a transformation of the self in space and the impact of space on the self, a sense of doing and being done to that registers the affective quality of haunting.11 According to Brian Massumi (citing Baruch Spinoza), affect precedes the articulation of emotion and is ‘all about intensities of feeling’ that incur change.12 He states: When you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment before. You have made a transition, however slight. You have stepped over a threshold. Affect is this passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of the change in capacity.13 Massumi and Spinoza are speaking in terms of the body’s capacity ‘for affecting or being affected’.14 Affect as potential moves us, compels us, it ‘directly carries a political valence’.15 It is, as Alison Landsberg writes, ‘a catalyst to new thought or to action, pressing the individual to process a particular experience intellectually, to grapple with that which has previously been unthought’.16 These descriptions, along with Landsberg’s conviction that affect is ‘profoundly social’, makes the concept especially apt in a discussion of both spatiality (the body as embedded in the social

Introduction  5 world) and haunting.17 After all, to come in contact with the ghost is to cross a threshold (past-present-future, here-there, absent-present) and undergo a transition; it is to open yourself up to other possibilities of being and existing in the world. While there is a degree of latitude being taken here in drawing connections between quite different concepts – and in no way do I wish to suggest that affect is one and the same with haunting – the experience of haunting is arguably always affective. Spectral Spaces and Hauntings reflects a wider cultural interest in ‘geographies of absence’. This can be seen in the flourishing dark tourism trade (sites of conflict, suffering, death), the increasing documentation and reportage of deserted sites (theme parks, buildings, entire cities), and representational and spatial practices that attempt to uncover those spaces beneath the ‘planned and readable city’ (psychogeography, urban exploration, freerunning, locative apps).18 While many of these fascinations have attracted criticism as being exploitative and as trivialising catastrophic events or romanticising urban decline, this fails to consider the motivations for seeking out spectral spaces and the powerful affects they generate. The anthology contributes to a burgeoning body of literature on ghostly topographies in modernity and the pronounced ‘spectral turn’ in cultural criticism.19 This can, in part at least, be attributed to a shared anxiety over amnesia that has led to what Andreas Huyssen describes as a ‘culture of memory’ that has become pervasive since the late 1970s; it manifests an urgency to secure and monumentalise local and national histories amid globalisation and dramatically shifting political landscapes. 20 The development of memory studies and ‘a new kind of articulation of subjectivity [that] emerged in the 1990s organised around the concept of trauma’ has shone light on the politics of memory and forgetting, and on the very real repercussions of ‘that which escapes the subject, on an absence or a gap’.21 They have provided new avenues for studying the psychosocial effects of individual and collective experiences of upheaval, tragedy and loss that linger as haunting traces, for instance, as post-traumatic stress disorder in the body. Jo Frances Maddern and Peter Adey go so far as to make the claim that ‘the twenty-first century has so far transpired as a century of haunting; of irregular, unexpected and (un)anticipated events that appear to be “beyond the real”’. 22 Whether their actual frequency has increased is debatable; however, the number of opportunities to connect and bring us closer to distant events has grown exponentially. We need only turn to the endless production and re-circulation of images on the internet to witness these irregularities, from natural disasters to acts of extreme brutality, from the massive migration of displaced persons to the downfall of entire economies and governments. New media, global interconnection and the rapid speed of change have contributed to emergent areas of concern and inquiry into what it means to haunt and be haunted in postmodernity. How do we deal with system-automated reappearances

6  Christina Lee of a deceased person’s profile in social media? In a culture of accelerated consumption and disposal, where do retired and dead things go? What does it mean to memorialise and mourn with an imagined international community? How do global crises surface as local disturbances? These questions require us to view hauntings through a certain ethical lens: hauntings implicate all of us.

The Work of the Spectral A discussion of the spectral inevitably conjures up Jacques Derrida’s re-reading of Karl Marx’s works in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. 23 This text is an important starting point as well as point of departure in this ­anthology. Derrida argues that despite the collapse of communism and the eschatological triumphalism that followed, the revenants of Marxist ideology still haunt contemporary society. Specters of Marx is a response to the overconfident postulations by those such as Francis Fukuyama who wrote in 1989 that the world was witnessing ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. 24 In light of the backlash against the war in Iraq, the abject failure of neoliberalism that precipitated the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and civil discord in the West, Fukuyama’s proclamations now seem not only grossly misguided but fate-tempting hubris.25 The spectres of bygone class wars and race conflicts doggedly reappear and agitate. The celebratory discourses of ‘the end’ have failed to lay ghosts to rest and safely contain them in the past. Referencing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, specifically the moment Hamlet speaks with the ghost of his murdered father, Derrida writes that, ‘“The time is out of joint”: time is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged … Time is off its hinges, time is off course, beside itself, disadjusted’. 26 Here, the spectre represents a ‘disjointed time’ that disrupts the seemingly hermetic boundaries separating past, present and future; alive and dead; visible and invisible. These disjointed temporalities ‘never coincide and remain multiple temporalities that are never co-present’.27 But it is in this respect that we diverge from Derrida. John Tulloch makes this gambit in the opening chapter, which is in part a deconstructive reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx. In her discussion of roadside memorials as heterotopic spaces, Elly Bavidge suggests a haunting that derives precisely from the co-presence of incompatible temporalities and spaces in memory sites (Chapter 5). For the purposes of this anthology, the most cogent line of argument presented by Derrida relates to the ethico-political responsibility with which he charges spectres. When one speaks ‘about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or

Introduction  7 outside us, it is in the name of justice’. 28 The spectre’s return signals that there is still work to be done to prevent future injustices. Alison Landsberg expands on this idea in relation to fictional representations of ghosts who come with missions that will alter the future (Chapter 9), while Sonia M. Tascón applies this thinking to the Argentine government’s historical denial of ‘the disappeared’ and the ethical responsibility to re-member and welcome these spectres back into the community (Chapter 11). As with Derrida, they propose spectrality as a form of radical politicisation that is oriented to the future. 29 In her seminal book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon echoes Derrida’s sentiment about the ethical imperative of ghosts. Ghosts are seething presences resulting from historical exclusion and invisibility in which absencing them is an attempt to render something into nothing. In one of her most vivid accounts she describes ‘the traces of a woman ghost’, the ghost being Sabina Spielrein. Spielrein was a pioneering figure in psychoanalysis whose work influenced the theories of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, yet her contributions have until recently been overlooked and forgotten. Her exclusion from the dominant narrative of the psychoanalytic institution is captured in the ‘photographic evidence of her absence’ from a group portrait at the Third Psychoanalytic Congress at Weimar, Germany.30 Later, Gordon draws attention to the ‘lingering inheritance of racial slavery’ in literary fiction (specifically Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved), which creates ‘a palimpsest, a document that has been inscribed several times, where the remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased scripting is still detectable’.31 Gordon’s ghost stories tell of spectres that refuse to vanish because there is still something at stake. Being haunted is an unavoidable aspect of lived experience that ­extends beyond the self. For Gordon, ‘subjectivity is always and inevitably haunted by the social and most especially by those repressions, disappearances, absences, and losses enforced by the conditions of modern life’.32 Throughout this anthology, identity and senses of place, belonging and alienation register the effects of greater external forces, from late capitalism and networks of terror to the intimacies of familial ties. Gordon writes: Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern 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. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production.33 Less so a repetition than a return, the remnants of ‘imperfectly erased scripting’ appear as a provocation for action (the ‘change in the way we

8  Christina Lee know and make knowledge’), or at the very least a call to attention. To cross paths with the ghost is to be aware and acknowledge that ‘life is complicated’; an expression that seems to state the obvious that we take it for granted and to our detriment.34 As with Gordon’s Ghostly Matters this anthology is an interdisciplinary project informed by fields including cultural studies, memory studies, cultural geography, literary and media studies. Given that ghosts impress on us in unpredictable ways and can materialise in the most startling, inexplicable and banal forms, this book attempts to capture the nuances of the sociopolitical-psychological state of being haunted through a diversity of mediums, forms and approaches. While ghosts often manifest as disturbances causing confusion, restlessness and grief because they destabilise what we believe to be truth and certainty, they can also be consoling, returning to us and returning us to that which we thought was gone. This spectrum is reflected in the case studies presented. For instance, Liz Millward’s study of an abandoned airport foregrounds the effects of disastrous future planning (Chapter 6), while Christopher Collier exposes the constant threat of the spectre’s intrusions in the neoliberal city (Chapter 10). The terrifying presence of the past reaches its apogee in Daniel Cross Turner’s essay that lays bare the dreadful undeadness of a wasteland that exceeds the limits of our control and knowledge (Chapter 7). On the other hand, Pippa Tandy and I welcome our brushes with the past that provide a place for fleeting moments and memories of home and relationships, and, above all, affirm that our ghostly matters mattered in the face of personal loss (Chapters 2 and 3 respectively). Beyond lofty aspirations of seeking justice or recognition, absent ­presences – those ghostly traces – offer us a pragmatic way of making sense of the everyday. Here, Kevin Hetherington’s work on s­ econdhandedness – ‘the dynamics of disposing of things’ – is particularly insightful.35 Hetherington considers absence not just in philosophical terms but furthermore in a distinctly sociological sense. He posits that disposal is never as final as is implied by the notion of ‘rubbish’. We discard things that do not belong any more because of their perceived lack of use value, defectiveness and/or abject status, for example, last week’s newspaper, food scraps that have begun to acquire a rancid odour, the deleted photographs of an ex-lover from the computer hard drive. But they always surface elsewhere, in landfill or an unwitting neighbour’s wheelie bin, a vintage shop trading in knick-knacks of yesteryear or in sudden recollections despite the material evisceration of an object. As Hetherington says, ‘the absent is only ever moved along and is never fully gotten rid of’.36 To discard, to clear away something, is an ongoing ‘practice of engaging with making and holding things in a state of absence’.37 It is a way of maintaining order by managing social relations and their representation around themes of movement, transformation, incompleteness

Introduction  9 and return. Continuing with Hetherington’s terminology, disposal is primarily about ‘placing’ the absent some place and some time else in an effort to jettison it from our presence/present. Things never disappear… without a trace.

The Chapters Spectral Spaces and Hauntings explores absent presences, and present absences, in spaces where the supposedly dead and buried persist with alarming, electrifying ‘aliveness’. They are encountered in places and through bodies, routines and objects; in landscapes of upheaval; in fragments of memories; in grand gestures to the nation and in daily practices. The contributors reveal an urgency to talk of absent presences because of the incursion of the past into our present/presence, the compulsion to remember, or simply because we are unable to forget. The anthology is divided into two parts: ‘Private Hauntings’ focuses on the idiosyncrasies of the contributors’ autobiographical ghostly encounters, while ‘Spectres of the Social’ focuses on hauntings of a collective nature. While this separation appears contradictory – as Gordon has already established, haunting is a social phenomenon – the intention is to distinguish between varying degrees of distance and emotionality from the haunting subject, and therefore the different experiences and ways of thinking through their meanings. In Chapter 1, John Tulloch remembers the spaces which have haunted his memory since 7 July 2005. On that day, he was aboard a Circle line train on the London Underground and sitting less than two metres away from Mohammad Sidique Khan when Khan detonated a bomb that killed seven people (including the bomber) and injured many more.38 Tulloch looks at three interconnected sites of memorialisation and mediatisation: the carriage of the Circle line train itself, the 7/7 Memorial in Hyde Park monumentalising the victims, and the chambers of the Royal Courts of Justice where the Coroner’s Inquest took place. While writing from a first-hand perspective of ‘7/7’ – of the moments before the attack to the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and then years that followed – the author offers an account that refuses a self/social binary that elucidates the inseparability of private trauma from very public spheres. Tulloch’s avowedly interdisciplinary project engages in the now of personal, cultural, commemorative and institutional mediations of 7/7 from which emerges a particular concept of past-present-future, and of public space acting as, in Tulloch’s words, ‘a place for performative and embodied agency’ in a time of global uncertainty and risk. Chapter 2 turns attention from the ‘macroscopic’ hauntings of a terrorist attack to the ‘microscopic’ hauntings of family life and the everyday. In 2012 photographer Pippa Tandy spent almost half a year living in an empty house that had been the home of her late parents for

10  Christina Lee more than three decades. Adapting to a strange and unrepeatable set of conditions, quotidian life continued for Tandy but in the context of an old weatherboard house whose emptiness and particular attributes turned it into a camera obscura of memory and desire, and stimulated ‘suddenly sensed relationalities with things and spaces that are often beyond ­representation’. 39 The material structure of 2 Alice Street in Bellevue, Western Australia was not the only thing bearing ghostly traces of intricate human relations. Routine duties and almost obsessive rituals became integral to the author’s experience of the house and connected her to its past in unexpected ways. Tandy’s photo essay reveals the fugitive presence of now-absent figures and charts impressions of a vacated building whose space and marks were loaded with memories and experiences, including those to do with death, sickness, dereliction and dreaming. Where Tandy contemplates the hauntings of an empty house, the following chapter ruminates on hauntings in the absence of that house. In Chapter 3, I explore the traces that persist where and when the physical landmarks of ‘home’ do not, focusing on the mining town of Goldsworthy in remote Western Australia that was demolished in 1993 after its iron ore supply was depleted. Instead of a ghost town it is now an expanse of re-vegetated scrubland. Yet the place still teems with traces that exemplify how removing something does not ‘necessarily get rid of its semiotic presence and the effects that are generated around that’.40 The site of the old township has become an affective space for former citizens who continue to perform and commemorate collective identity, revealing the powerful hold of home and its ghosts. The chapter addresses a double absence: an absent township, and the absencing of the workers and their families in academic debates and dominant state history. I argue that ‘the town that no longer exists’ continues to be an important place for memories and becoming, enabling ex-residents to write themselves back into an effaced landscape that many still call home. In Chapter 4, Lisa Hill reveals the complex temporalities that operate across space as she traverses through the post-industrial landscape of the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal in Gloucestershire, United Kingdom. While the canal is now used for recreation, it was once a major waterway for trade between the Severn Estuary and the city of Gloucester. Following the route of the old towpath, Hill’s bodily engagement with her surrounds summons spectres from the area’s industrial past as well as from her own childhood. The author’s impressions drift between temporalities, between historical events and imagination, and between emotions that capture fragments of memories and unforeseen moments of contact with the past. But it is perhaps Hill’s final destination, the Purton ships’ graveyard, where the spectres come forth most brazenly. Over eighty commercial vessels were beached on the eastern banks of the River Severn in the 1900s to protect the canal from bank erosion. These

Introduction  11 hulking structures once served a purpose, but now their obsolescence and varying states of ruin are ghostly reminders of the inevitable effects of progress and the passing of time. In Chapter 5, Elly Bavidge investigates the spectral qualities of roadside memorials and the performative power of memory sites to remember and maintain bonds with the dead through the use of tangible markers and rituals. These makeshift, temporary memorials have become a common sight in many countries, often located in public places that bring us into contact with death on a regular basis. As eruptions of intense emotion in otherwise unremarkable and functional settings, their presence forces us to rethink the dividing lines between private and public, sacred and profane, permanence and ephemerality. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and the absence-presence model, Bavidge seeks to understand how space, bodies and objects interact and impact on memory and the experience of absence. Roadside memorials refute claims of placelessness and amnesia in postmodernity by showing how ‘[l]oss and absence have a presence, and sites of death have agency’. Beyond the affective and embodied dimensions of these unsanctioned shrines, the chapter demonstrates how absence has a ‘social reach’ that can be clearly seen in shifts in memorial consciousness and practices that engage a wider community.41 In Chapter 6, Liz Millward navigates the eerie, windswept expanse of Mirabel International Airport in Montreal, Canada which ceased operations of commercial passenger flights less than two decades after its opening. As symbols of modernity and progress, airports represent the aspirations and capability of a nation to become a hub in the global economy. They are defined by movement and kinesis, literalising ‘the space between’ where matter is out of time and place with its displaced persons, cargo in transit, and internal body clocks asynchronous with international time zones. When completely devoid of people and movement, they become at once ‘pointless and poignant’. Today, Mirabel International Airport is defined by motionless baggage carousels, deserted parking lots, deafeningly silent terminals, and trolleys lined up waiting for passengers who will never arrive. If airports are ‘machines for mobility’, as Tim Cresswell suggests, there are ghosts in the Mirabel machine.42 It is a spectral space where the promise of the future that was held by the past persists in a tense permanent holding pattern. In Chapter 7, Daniel Cross Turner explores another kind of desolate landscape, this time the ruined world in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006). Charting a father and son’s journey across a post-­ apocalyptic America, the narrative erupts with undead presences and hauntings that are conveyed devastatingly in traumascapes that incorporate human cadavers and desecrated body parts into the built environment. Through grim guttings and renovations, familiar places become sublimely unheimlich. Meaning collapses between the prosaic and the

12  Christina Lee extraordinary, animate and inanimate, ancient and modern, and hope and horror. Turner offers a reading of McCarthy’s architectonics of undeadness as a mordant critique of issues of national identity in the wake of neocapitalism’s apocalyptic implosion. The violated bodies as fragmented ‘things’ unravel the myth of the nation-state as a cohesive political, economic and social body. Yet the undead presences that course throughout the novel do not function merely as worrying signs of things to come. They express forms of agency beyond our own that may stir a consciousness, a ‘resetting of our psychological investment in our physical environs’, as Turner writes, that indicate that it is not the end of the world, let alone the road. The final four chapters explore the power of visual mediums to haunt and to materialise spectres in photography, film, television and art. In Chapter 8, László Munteán discusses the practice of rephotography in which juxtaposing old and new pictures brings the past and present together in the same image. While these exercises often cater to nostalgic evocations of temps perdu, images of conflict have increasingly become incorporated in these photographic constructions that allow for the uncanny emergence of the ghosts of war amid the mundaneness of twenty-­first century urban life. Rephotography reveals the contemporary city as haunted by memories that can offer new ways of engaging with the past. Mobilising the notion of indexicality as an affective, rather than an ontological, quality of photography, Munteán looks at the rephotography projects of Taylor Jones, Zoltán Kerényi and Sergey Larenkov, whose works represent different purposes, techniques and affective registers of haunting, but also share the idea that urban spaces are temporally layered palimpsests where the past lies in wait. In Chapter 9, Alison Landsberg analyses the corporealisation of spectres on screen in two texts that were produced a century apart: Cecil B. DeMille’s film Joan the Woman (1916) and the television series ­Mr. ­Robot (2015–present). Landsberg proposes that ghosts in film and television work simultaneously on a diegetic and non-diegetic level, that is, upon the characters and on the audience by engaging us affectively and cognitively. Central to this argument is that the appearance of the ghost in a material form not only destabilises but furthermore compels us to action; the chapter itself is haunted by the spectres of Derrida’s and Gordon’s works. Joan the Woman and Mr. Robot manifest a politics of intertemporality where the intrusion of the past into the present comes with an injunction that will alter the course of the future. Where the former is a clarion call for the end of a world war, the latter appeals for a social and economic revolution to end the pandemic pathology of corporate greed and corruption. Chapter 10 expands further on the theme of haunted/haunting architectures, this time in relation to visceral illustrations in art. C ­ hristopher Collier examines the works of contemporary English artist Laura Oldfield

Introduction  13 Ford whose representations of crumbling, utopian architectures in landscapes of urban decay reanimate a dead future. Punk nihilism and ‘insurrectionary atmospherics’ confront and undermine the hegemony of the capitalist dream. Collier applies the terms hauntology and psychogeography to Oldfield Ford’s artwork, asking whether renewed thinking of these concepts together can lead us back (and forward) to a radical potential they have to ignite the ontological spectrality of space. Oldfield Ford’s work is full of ghostly resonances that are an affront to the neoliberal aspiration to expunge the past; the old industrial order and symbols of mysticism seep into the canvas of a modern cityscape. Collier makes the argument that, rather than Derrida’s détournements of Hamlet, Oldfield Ford’s space of haunting is that of Macbeth – of vengeance and redemption – that exposes the incessant possibility of violent eruption that haunts the neoliberal city. The final chapter of Spectral Spaces and Hauntings considers how space can be mobilised to materialise spectres in the pursuit of justice. Sonia M. Tascón investigates the desaparecidos (‘the disappeared’) of Argentina who were systematically extracted, tortured, killed and made to vanish by the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Removed from place, history and social relations, and denied materiality in life and death, they became spectres of horror relegated to the tenebrous realm of terrible anticipation and the unknown. The author extends her discussion to the ongoing work of the Madres/Abuelas (Mothers/­Grandmothers) of Plaza de Mayo to reinstate and remember the desaparecidos. Every Thursday since 1977, the group has converged upon Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to march and protest – it is a literal weekly return of the repressed. The women’s performances in a public space are intended to produce a corporeal continuity between those who are absent and those who stand in for them. Their embodied politics of love  transform the spectres into memories of beauty that return them to the nation. This important work of seeking justice also occurs in Argentine cinema which Tascón broaches. As the bookend of the anthology this chapter crystallises how the past continues to have a potent influence upon the present, reinforcing how those things that are disappeared, deceased, disposed of are never really gone.

Notes 1 Kevin Hetherington, ‘Secondhandedness: Consumption, Disposal, and Absent Presence’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1 (2004): 162. 2 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 108. 3 Ibid. 4 María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, ‘Possessions: Spectral Places/Introduction’, in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary

14  Christina Lee Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 395. 5 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 108. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 93. 8 I am grateful to Susan Leong for helping me arrive at the idea of the afteraffect. 9 María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, ‘Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities’, in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 20. 10 Hetherington, ‘Secondhandedness’, 170. 11 This idea is consonant with aspects of object-oriented ontology that theorises how objects and the environment impact upon human feelings and actions. For instance, Jane Bennett’s notion of thing-power ‘draws attention to an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve’ (20). She is interested in ‘what they can do’, the ‘notquite-­human capaciousness (vibrant matter)’ (3). The haunting traces in this anthology similarly function as affective, nonhuman vitalities. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). See also Timothy Morton, ‘An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry’, New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 205–224; Jane Bennett, ‘Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton’, New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 225–233. 12 Brian Massumi, ‘Preface’, in Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), x. 13 Brian Massumi quoted in Mary Zournazi, ‘Navigating Movements: Interview by Mary Zournazi’, in Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 4. 14 Ibid., 3. 15 Massumi, ‘Preface’, vii. 16 Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 18. 17 Ibid. 18 Detroit is indicative of this curiosity in spectral geographies, featuring prominently in the media and scholarly debate. It is a popular subject of ruins photography (‘ruin porn’) and ruins tourism. The photographic anthology The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre has arguably, and for many problematically, become the definitive impression of the city, with its representation of overwhelmingly empty spaces and dearth of ­human inhabitants. According to The New York Times, in the United States, ‘Detroit is the epicentre of ruin porn’. The New York Times, ‘Tourism’s Fascination for Abandoned, Decaying Buildings: Is “Ruin Porn” the Next Chic Tourist Fad?’, Traveller (13 October 2015), accessed 6 August 2016, . See Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2014). 19 This ‘spectral turn’ largely refers to the scholarly interest in the supernatural and the uncanny. Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the “Spectral Turn”’, Textual Practice 16, no. 3 (2002): 528. 20 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 15. 21 Roger Luckhurst, ‘Traumaculture’, New Formations 50 (2003): 28. 22 Jo Frances Maddern and Peter Adey, ‘Editorial: Spectro-Geographies’, cultural geographies 15, no. 3 (2008): 291.

Introduction  15 23 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 24 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History? After the Battle of Jena’, Quadrant 33, no. 8 (1989): 15. 25 In the United States this recent civil discord includes the riots and protests sparked by deaths of African-American men in police custody, and the 2013 federal government shutdown. In the United Kingdom it includes the student riots of 2010 in London, riots in several cities in England caused by the police shooting of Mark Duggan in 2011, and the political and economic unrest caused by Great Britain’s vote, in 2016, to exit the European Union. 26 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 20. 27 Nchamah Miller, ‘Hauntology and History in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx’, lecture notes (Canada: York University, 2003), 3, accessed 5 August 2016, . 28 Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii. 29 Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 60. 30 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 32. 31 Ibid., 139, 146. 32 Janice Radway, ‘Foreword’, in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), x–xi. 33 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 7. 34 Ibid., 3. 35 Hetherington, ‘Secondhandedness’, 160. 36 Ibid., 162. 37 Ibid., 159. 38 The bombing was one of four co-ordinated terrorist attacks on the city’s public transport system that morning in which there were fifty-two victims. 39 Tim Edensor, ‘Mundane Hauntings: Commuting Through the Phantasmagoric Working-Class Spaces of Manchester, England’, cultural geographies 15, no. 3 (2008): 327. 40 Hetherington, ‘Secondhandedness’, 159. 41 Avril Maddrell, ‘Living with the Deceased: Absence, Presence and Absence-­ Presence’, cultural geographies 20, no. 4 (2013): 510. 42 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 237.

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Part I

Private Hauntings

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1 The Haunted Spaces of 7/7 Memory, Mediatisation and Performance John Tulloch

At a time when a new world disorder is attempting to install its neo-­ capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts. Hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony. —Jacques Derrida1

I write this chapter in the spirit of Jacques Derrida in his Specters of Marx, where he lambasts the triumphalism of neoliberal democracies after the collapse of the Berlin Wall: Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the “end of ideologies” and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. 2 Derrida performs a textualist analysis of key writings like Manifesto of the Communist Party and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, stripping away Karl Marx’s core commitments to what Derrida calls ‘Marxism as ontology, philosophical or metaphysical system’ which is premised on historical materialism as method, and is ‘incorporated in the apparatuses of party, State, or workers’ International’.3 What is left of Marx for Derrida is the ‘radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique’.4 But it is Derrida who performs that critique in Specters of Marx. This alternative Marxist spirit ‘is heir to a spirit of the Enlightenment which must not be renounced’ and is to be distinguished from those other spirits of Marx evident in Marxist doctrine, and readily apparent on the surface of his texts that are elaborated in terms of labour, modes of

20  John Tulloch production, social class and a foreclosing ‘history of its apparatuses’.5 The ‘guiding thread’ in Derrida’s deconstruction of Marx will be the question ‘of the ghost, the specter or revenant’.6 His method will be to discern how Marx treated the topos of ‘ghost’, and then how he bound and foreclosed it ‘through so many tensions and contradictions, to an ontology’.7 Thus Derrida wants to liberate the Marx who is ‘haunted by what it attempted to foreclose’.8 As Jack Reynolds says of Derrida’s method, ‘[d]econstruction contends that in any text, there are inevitably points of equivocation and “undecidability” that betray any stable meaning that an author might seek to impose upon his or her text’.9 The ‘undecidable’ in Specters of Marx is the ghost. The ghost adheres to neither side of the binary language of present/absent; rather it is a trope of analysis challenging the dichotomies that disfigure Marx and the whole of Western philosophy. As Reynolds puts it, Derrida’s deconstruction: is committed to the rigorous analysis of the literal meaning of a text, and yet also to finding within that meaning, perhaps in the neglected corners of the text (including the footnotes), internal problems that actually point towards alternative meanings … the merit of a deconstructive reading consists in this creative contact with another text that cannot be characterised as either mere fidelity or as an absolute transgression, but rather which oscillates between these dual demands.10 For Derrida, Marx’s ghost is to be discovered in those ‘many tensions’ in his texts before foreclosure within his messianic ontology. For me writing here, Derrida’s ghost is to be discovered in his own tensions between presence and absence when discussing the current era of neoliberalism, which he also sees as messianic. The spirit of Derrida I seek within Specters of Marx is not a footnote but central to the ethical passion of his text, and is embodied in Derrida’s description of neoliberalism and the ten ‘plagues’ of our time – the exclusion and expulsion of homeless citizens (such as immigrants), economic war, underemployment, contradictions of the ‘free market’, foreign debt, the arms trade, the spread of nuclear weapons, inter-ethnic wars, phantom states and the hypocrisy of international law.11 It was in the spirit of opposition to those ‘plagues’ that I attended the huge rally against the Iraq War in Sydney, Australia on 15 February 2003. Beyond that it was in the context of Derrida’s ‘new world disorder’ that my recent writing (with Andrew Hoskins) is about many of those ‘plagues’ within what Derrida calls the haunting of a new hegemony. There are significant similarities between Hoskins’ and my method in Risk and Hyperconnectivity and Derrida’s, not least our detailed textual reading of pivotal newspapers that promoted neoliberalism at

The Haunted Spaces of 7/7  21 the moment of its greatest trauma, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008–2009.12 But our methodology and theory also diverge in key aspects. We draw on the paradigm of memory, mediatisation and connectivity studies to explore how the ‘iterations and dynamics of the remembering and forgetting of terrorist events operate continually through personal recollection, commemorative rituals and events, cultural objects and markers, and the various and ongoing means through which these are mediatized’.13 We also employ a neoliberalism critique and recent risk theory to emphasise the emergence of a new (yet old) sphere of public space that acts as a place for performative and embodied agency in the face of the risk events of the twenty-first century such as war, terror and global financial breakdown. It is the task of this chapter to suggest those differences as well as our common ‘haunted’ basis in the world disorder of neoliberalism. Most importantly, while my intention is in part the deconstruction of Derrida’s ghost in Specters of Marx, it is explicitly interdisciplinary, and in this respect my ‘spirit’ is closer to Judith Butler than to Derrida.

Torn Up Time and Subjective Time Derrida speaks much about time, as do we in Risk and Hyperconnectivity, and as does Butler. In ‘Tracking the Mechanisms of the Psychosocial’, Butler challenges the binary thinking which Derrida likewise rejects in Specters of Marx. But she does so in an interesting interdisciplinary way. In a practical response to any transdisciplinary university department seeking research and teaching resources among the rampant single-­discipline departments struggling within a neoliberal audit culture, Butler poses a ‘what if’ set of questions: If a department is transdisciplinary … how does the value of all that intellectual crossing over become communicated and persuasive? What if the key intellectual problem that a group of people seeks to address can only be understood through several lenses? And what if the tension among those various ways of seeing is actually crucial for the elaboration of the object itself? Indeed, what if matters are actually slightly worse: the object looks differently depending on how it is regarded, and so several different ways of considering the object will invariably disagree on what the object is.14 Here we find Derrida’s ‘tensions’ within the authorship of research and writing, but considered in another way from his deconstruction method. Certainly the different ‘lenses’ that Derrida and a Marxist reviewer of Specters of Marx use will lead to disagreement on what their object of attention (Marx) is, and this will create precisely the binary opposition which Derrida is so keen to subvert.15

22  John Tulloch But subversion of a text is not Butler’s way. Rather she looks for the values of ‘overlapping’, and makes her case by comparing two disciplines which have been in contestation in the social sciences, media and cultural studies over the last five decades: sociology and psychoanalysis. Discussing the various ways that the theory of the subject – ‘whether social and/or phantasmatic’ – was held to converge or diverge by Marx, Foucault, Lacan, Marcuse and others, Butler argues that by allowing for the ‘semantic excess’ of the terms it might be possible to understand how the social and psychic ‘are permeated by one another’.16 Butler takes the apparent binary of ‘self’ and ‘society’ as the focus for her consideration of ‘psychic’ or ‘social’ thinking. Rather than making the sequential claim that, as separate terms, one implies or causes the other, she prefers to ponder: Even if we for the moment treat them as distinct spheres, it may be that they are spheres that always impinge upon, and overlap with, one another, without exactly collapsing into one another. And the analysis of their relation is one that tracks forms and effects of permeability, impingement, resonance, phantasmatic excess, the covert or implicit operations of psychic investments in the organization of social life, the way that organization falters or fails by virtue of the psychic forces it cannot fully organize, the psychic registers in which social forms of power take hold?17 To illustrate her emphasis on considering the social and psychic together without the illusion of a romantic synthesis, Butler chooses to focus on neoliberalism, the structural haunting that both Derrida and Hoskins/ Tulloch challenge: One could, or should, analyse the temporality of work under neo-­ liberal conditions, especially the work of women that spans domestic space and other workplaces, or is torn between them. What is this “torn up” time which becomes the subjective time of work? And what does it mean that just as neo-liberalism opens up a phantasmatic sphere of infinite self-invention, it also forecloses the very agency it figures, since it decimates those social and economic supports that enable agency at all. Indeed, neo-liberalism contracts the temporal horizon within which anyone can imagine the future of democratic social transformation. Especially under conditions in which debts become unpayable within a lifetime, the time of living becomes the time of an unexpiable guilt, a time punctuated by a vain effort to pay off the unpayable.… And for anyone who wishes to track the conflicting and ambivalent conditions in which migrant women come to “belong” to different spaces and times, it would seem important to realize that the desire to belong implies an unacceptable loss, and that the desire not to belong engenders an unbearable estrangement.18

The Haunted Spaces of 7/7  23 This is a revealing passage in which Butler powerfully illustrates her claim that ‘each sphere permeates the other in ways that are not fully predictable’.19 Butler’s thinking in this instance pertains to the now of the migrant woman’s ‘debt to be paid’ (even if the context includes past exclusion and future emotional haunting). This present is a focus that Derrida can never employ because of his textualist-deconstructive rhetorical play between present/non-present. Butler’s interdisciplinarity is important to me in this chapter: substantively (focusing on the experiential present of the poor, marginalised, starving and oppressed of Derrida’s ‘world of disorder’); theoretically (since the play between ‘self’ and ‘social’ is central to my own ‘ghosts’ of 7/7); and epistemologically (as my own analysis tracks between the critical realism of ‘walls’ of oppression and the weak constructivism of permeable ‘borders’). 20 As well as engaging with the world of the ‘social’, I also speak as ‘self’, a direct, traumatised casualty of London’s terror attack on 7 July 2005.

Tunnel Victims? I write this chapter through a lens of ‘self’: a victim of some of those other (‘social’) victims of global disorder. I was sitting less than two metres away from Mohammad Sidique Khan when he detonated a bomb in my carriage of the Circle line train in the tunnel just outside Edgware Road tube station. Before the blast, that tunnel beyond the platform was no more than a conduit to the next station, Paddington, where for the past year I had regularly caught the InterCity train to Cardiff. It was just one tube train tunnel among many as I commuted between Brunel University, London, where I worked, and my home in Wales. From 7 July 2005 at about 8.40 am when the bomb exploded, this particular hundred metres of tunnel curving out of sight from the platform changed for me. Lit by harsh orange lights, it now holds spectral memories of incomprehension and trauma. To this day I try to avoid this ‘7/7 tunnel’, travelling instead to Paddington station by bus. On the rare occasion that I do travel through it I literally feel my temperature drop sharply, as if in the presence of a spectral haunting. In secular cognition the haunting is of myself, an effect of ongoing post-traumatic stress disorder. 21 But for my emotive knowledge it is much more. It is a violent space, manifested then and now in my body. So I am a victim. But I have always said that the man who blew himself apart so close to me was a victim of Derrida’s world disorder too. Embedded and Affective Images Even while my tunnel memory is embodied and affective, it has also been engaged, troubled, mediated and memorialised in other (institutionalised)

24  John Tulloch spaces which filled the ghostly absences of that tunnel: my fifteen minutes of unconsciousness; the waking-up time of confusion, distress and sight of death and fearful injury; the cognitive gap as I first labelled what I saw (the burnt seats, the fragmented glass, the destroyed carriage) as ‘train crash’. There were the slowly-emerging half memories, often cued by photographs in the media, as I lay in a bed at St Mary’s ­Hospital, ­Paddington. There I eventually realised that newspaper pictures of a bandaged face staring blankly into space were of me, and that the image of the terrorist was of a man opposite me in the train, together with one other dark-skinned man. They were both, I seemed to recall, looking across at me soon before the explosion. During my hospitalisation, I learned from police and newspapers featuring mobile phone images taken by survivors of another bomb-wrecked Circle line train at Aldwych that this was not a train accident. The after-bombing images I had were existential and mediated. Ontologically they included my view, after waking up, of two severely wounded sisters as I rolled to my left looking for help, and then, struggling up from the wrecked seat, seeing a dead young man at my feet who lay spread-eagled in a deep hollow of the damaged tube train floor. Just above and beyond the two sisters’ grim and bleeding materiality, there appeared surreal two-dimensional silhouettes as people in the stopped train next to us scrabbled at the windows. This was the inaugural moment of my ‘train crash’ cognition. I could remember moving from darkness, horror and half-seen trauma (one eye totally shut, the other only half open) to experiencing surprise that the other carriages seemed undamaged as I was helped through the train to the backdoor steps by a rescue worker and by Wing Commander Craig Staniforth who had kept me awake for about an hour in case I slipped into a coma. Until reaching the train’s emergency exit I had an overwhelming sensation of claustrophobia and ­vertigo. Below at the exit firemen and paramedics with their stretchers became visible. Beyond them, through the tunnel, the daylight around Edgware Road station gave me a feeling of liberation. These gathering memories of that tunnel, existentially, were thus both negative and positive: those firemen’s cheerfulness and that sunlight came to emblematise in memory the humane help given to me by Staniforth in the past hour, and the health workers who helped me walk again in the weeks afterwards. Mediated Images The mediated images came thick and fast in the ten days following the bombing. I was angered at the immediate post-7/7 photograph of Tony Blair who had led Britain into the invasion of Iraq but now was at the G20 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, his head bowed, arms stretched

The Haunted Spaces of 7/7  25 downward before him in what I considered a performative and hypocritical photo opportunity. Then there was the image of a young woman who died in my carriage, yet who was, according to newspapers, travelling in the opposite direction. This conundrum became a point of near-­ obsession, affecting me powerfully. At the Coroner’s Inquest I discovered how she died – face down on the live rail of the train that halted next to us after she was blown out of the carriage door. Within a few days of the attack the images of the suicide bombers emerged in the media, as well as speculation about a fifth ‘Master bomber’. I contributed to the conversations about these images in television interviews, pondering over them in late 2005. I made two ITN television news items for transmission in July 2006 about Khan’s journey as I traversed and reversed his movements from Beeston, Leeds, to London. By that time a new memory had been gained of this same individual as being a dedicated teacher’s assistant who worked for young people in his impoverished community to combat drugs and teenage prostitution. This was a knowledge and memory that led me, in conjunction with personal recollections of him in that tunnel, to write a ‘Letter to ­Mohammad Sidique Khan’ at the end of One Day in July.22 This letter was intended to share my sense of victimhood and to differentiate Khan’s brutal action from those of the rescue teams that day, and from the many helpers thereafter. In the hospital bed and in the ensuing months (and then years) – as I regained the ability to stand and walk, to catch another tube train, to read and engage in an intellectual capacity as an academic – the orange-­ lit tunnel where I had encountered the absence that I call ground zero, an ‘absence’ on many levels, was now being made into something more fixed and present in three other sites. These were the media; the 7/7 Memorial in London’s Hyde Park (opened on 7 July 2009) where the names of the deceased were inscribed; and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest in 2010–2011 where ‘what happened to whom, where and when’ was memorialised as ‘definitive’. Having written elsewhere about 7/7 in the media, in this chapter I want to consider absence, trauma and the memorialisation of ‘presence’ in those other two spaces. 23 It was the coming together of Derrida’s ghosts of world disorder and personal and mediated memories that constituted my haunted spaces.

Haunting, Memorialisation and Performance: The 7/7 Memorial On the day that the 7/7 Memorial was unveiled in 2009, journalist Ellis Woodman commented in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, that there are two major kinds of monument: those erected to honour individuals, and those to commemorate often nameless masses. But, he asserted, the 7/7 Memorial was unique in that it commemorates a large

26  John Tulloch group of individuals whose names and manner in which they died are known: it communicates a sense of collective loss while also honouring the individual tragedies that took place. Designed by the young architects Carmody Groarke, it comprises a field of 52 closely spaced columns, which have been cast in stainless steel. They are arranged on a common grid, but are subtly separated into four groups, the number of columns in each corresponding to the number of deaths caused by one of the four bombs. That relationship has been enforced by casting the location, date and time of one of the deaths midway up the height of each column. Each was cast in a sand mould at high temperature and that process has given every one a highly tactile, unique finish. The casting takes a matter of seconds, and our understanding that the memorial is the product of such a compressed process resonates powerfully with the suddenness of the events of four years ago. 24 At first sight the memorial offers a contrast between those hard-edged, pale grey pillars and the organic softness of the trees and bank separating the structure from the busy London street beyond. This was captured by the government minister, Tessa Jowell, when she said that the monument ‘shows us in gleaming steel and soft earth our communal loss’. 25 In The Guardian newspaper, Haroon Siddique noted that the four clusters of pillars mark the four locations of the terrorist attacks – Aldwych, Edgware Road, King’s Cross and Russell Square – and he cited Jowell telling relatives of the victims at the unveiling that they ‘reaffirm the defiance of London in the face of terrorist outrage’. 26 Thus the stainless steel stelae situated in a naturalistic, green environment evoke memories and emotions of fierce social resistance to terror as well as private contemplation. Saba Mozakka, whose mother was killed on the Piccadilly line train between King’s Cross and Russell Square, and who had worked on the design of the monument, stated that ‘the families had wanted a memorial that would be prominent in London and provide a “reflective space”. “We are very proud of the fact the memorial would be in Hyde Park and reflect everything good about London – its vibrancy.”’27 A People’s Park What is the history of that vibrancy that Hyde Park reflects? Today it is best known for Speakers’ Corner in the northeast corner of the park, quite close to the 7/7 Memorial, and representing the right of the ordinary people of England to impromptu and unannounced freedom of speech. It is the place where the Tyburn gallows for public executions stood, and where the condemned could speak their last words to those

Figures 1.1 and 1.2  Haunted space: John Tulloch visiting the 7/7 Memorial in Hyde Park, London. © Christina Lee, 2013

28  John Tulloch watching. Since then it has had an enduring history linking protest to ‘the commons’. It was the site for the 1855 public riots against the Sunday Trading Bill which forbade purchase and selling on a Sunday, the only day that working people had off, and where workers dissented on behalf of their right to vote in the Chartist demonstrations of 1866 and 1867. As an iconic public space for peripheral voices, open demonstration and dialogue in the United Kingdom, Hyde Park has crucially been a site for protest as performance. Blair’s photo opportunity at Gleneagles was a performance, but so too was the London protest of 2009 against the hegemonic world disorder that induced the GFC. In the latter case the performance was communal, and ended at ‘the commons’ in Hyde Park. The park was one of two major sites chosen for the anti-G20 rallies in London at the height of the GFC; the other being the Bank of England, symbol of the unjust neoliberal economics at the heart of the crisis. 28 But in Hyde Park the ghosts of working-class history were present as traces, in ways that Derrida, in his re-working of the ghost of Marx, would have been the first to appreciate. This is why I spoke on the BBC television news on 7 July 2015, ten years on from 7/7, about my pleasure that the monument had been placed in Hyde Park, a ‘people’s park, not the place for governments, and certainly not the place for terrorists’. Mediatisation as Media Logic My BBC television comments were consciously generated by an emerging cultural memory and connectivity academic paradigm, wherein Steven Brown and Andrew Hoskins regard memory as ‘social practices which orient persons to possible versions of the past in such a way as to make them relevant to ongoing personal, social and political concerns’. 29 They link this definition of memory to ‘mediatisation’, pointing to a distinction increasingly being made between ‘mediation’ and ‘mediatisation’. They are much more specific than Derrida about the historically shifting frames of the media. In their study ‘mediation’ refers to communication by way of a specific medium (television in the case of my BBC News comments) in a particular social context (the British commemoration ceremony at Hyde Park on the afternoon of 7 July 2015). In contrast, ‘mediatisation’ refers to a media logic whereby the collective shock of catastrophe is stabilised, secured and given an understandable continuity. For Brown and Hoskins, ‘the mediatization of memory involves a potentially continuous cycle of the premediation and remediation of schemata’.30 Established frames of reference in media memory – of wars, terror and public bravery notwithstanding this violence – become comfortable, and sometimes comforting, ways of seeing and explaining new catastrophic events like 7/7. In this respect the terrorist attack is premediated, and the reporting of 7/7 and its memorial remediates that reassuring frame for prospective media use in the future. Brown and

The Haunted Spaces of 7/7  29 Hoskins describe the recycling of existent media schemas, for example, old film of British citizens resisting the Blitz during the Second World War, as being remediated after the London bombings in 2005 in order to ‘plausibly draw on an everyday feeling of ethnic diversity and a potential sense of community cohesion available to many Londoners’. 31 However, appalling events that followed, such as the British police shooting of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes (who was misrecognised as a terrorist), images of mass public protests against the very recent and deeply unpopular Iraq War, and (for me subjectively) the media image immediately after 7/7 of a major perpetrator of that war, Blair at Gleneagles, cancelled out the power of that premediated London Blitz film schema. 7/7 ‘could not be held together in a way that felt like it belonged with the collective recollection of “Blitz spirit”’.32 Brown and Hoskins aver that the 7/7 Memorial was more successful in remediating the past. Whereas I think that this was partly because of the ‘popular resistance’ ghosts of the past locked as traces into Hyde Park’s history, they contend that the memorial was a ‘counter-­ monument’ – a monument that challenges conventionally mediatised logics of e­ xplanation – where the careful constitution of space between the stelae, banks and trees encourages visitors to make their own personal relevances. Despite the memorial having no formally designated space for flowers of remembrance, the public nevertheless laid them on grassy banks, or encircled name plaques with them. This established an inter-modal nexus ‘between the stark-toned and hard-edged permanence of the memorial and the temporary presence of the flowers’.33 This flower laying – as a long-practiced grief ritual – marked the 7/7 event as personally new yet contained within a recognised social memory. So this combination of hard-manufactured and softly-organic was itself now a ready premediation ‘at times of future commemorations’.34 I personally encountered one of these ‘future commemorations’ several years later when I was nearby the terrorist siege in Sydney’s Martin Place as it happened in December 2014. I observed the impromptu – and over the days massively growing – memorial of flowers created by the public which proliferated outside the Lindt Chocolate Café, the space of the siege. The sea of floral tributes, in response to the deaths of two hostages, nestled vigorously and expansively among Martin Place’s tall bank and legal office buildings, and adjacent to the New South Wales parliament building. Public agency performed in the places of state and commercial monumentalisation. Further, the anti-terrorist flower-laying each year after 7/7, as in London 2006 and Sydney 2015, prefigured Sydney’s own permanent memorial, planned for unveiling in 2016, where stylised flower images, scattered throughout the paving stones outside the café, monumentalise those human-laid flowers of just one year before. But other public actions of a more negative kind are also possible in the ever-expanding history of the Hyde Park 7/7 Memorial. In July

30  John Tulloch 2014, on the eve of the ninth 7/7 anniversary, shock was caused within the mainstream media and among survivors and the bereaved by those who wrote in red and black paint on the memorial pillars: ‘Blair Lied Thousands Died’ and ‘4 Innocent Muslims’. In essence this was a counter-­ monumental agency. Half of the message – about Blair – resonated with me in emotion and affect, while the other half did not. These were not four innocent Muslims, even though I could see them as victims. The anonymous act of vandalism via graffiti did not simply deface the pillars but also the history of Hyde Park itself which allowed free speech other than in the promotion of violence. Yet in their own minds and beliefs, these four Muslims were acting on behalf of the hundreds of thousands that state leaders like Blair, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin had drowned in blood elsewhere. My point is that haunted ghosts from Derrida’s disordered world may stalk the space of the 7/7 Memorial; and from time to time they can be called up by people who remember the ‘illegal war’ in Iraq, and in particular the long history of British economic politics in the Middle East or Putin’s repression of the Muslim state in Chechnya. These ghosts are counter-monuments too, resonating as what Butler calls ‘specific forms of ambivalence’ as they are tracked across ‘the conditions of subjugation … mired in conditions of hopelessness’.35

Archiving and Memorialisation: The 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest ‘Memorialisation’, in Hoskins’ and my thinking, stands in contradistinction to ‘emergence’. Emergence can be defined as the ‘massively increased potential for media data to literally emerge at an unprescribed and unpredictable time after the moment of its recording, archiving, or loss’, an uncertainty that is built up by pervasive digital media in a ‘postscarcity culture’.36 This ‘postscarcity culture’ is a conflagration in which social networking translates ‘the ongoing and unpredictable potential of the onlife world to transform past personal, semipublic, and public relations through the reactivation of latent and semilatent connections of a living or even a “shadow” archive: a perpetual databasing of risk’.37 For instance, the photographs of detainee abuse and torture by American military personnel that surfaced from Abu Ghraib and were re-­circulated worldwide were the most famous public media example of this databasing of risk. A different example is the common practice among young people of networking images of their own nudity and sexuality, which are meant to be privately received but so easily go viral. In either case these are potent illustrations of Brown and Hoskins’ reference to the glut of the new technology world of emergence and its capacity to transform private and public relations by activating connections. While emergence does offer the possibility for new, democratic aspects of agency, mainstream media, by way of premediation and remediation,

The Haunted Spaces of 7/7  31 often ‘functions to afford continuity and stability’.38 Thus in iPhone intimacies, faraway military camp brutality, and everyday professional practices of mainstream journalism reporting catastrophes, the ‘living archive’ of networking becomes memorialised in being taken out of personal action and becoming ‘archived’, potentially for the world’s gaze. The Inquest In Risk and Hyperconnectivity, Hoskins and I note the large array of emergent media forms at the Royal Courts of Justice in London where the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest was held: the television monitors showing proceedings live from Court 73 via video link; the separate screen showing the unfolding live court transcription; the legal record of this event, typed by a court official, screened along with video of the inquest in near real-time on monitors to the victims, public and journalists gathered in the Court 73 annex; the re-assemblage of the transcript text linked to the digitised elements of pieces given in evidence in the court that was uploaded to the official website of the inquest each evening; and the ­i mages of the seating plans of the wrecked carriages, with names of the victims either attached or to be determined during the inquest. 39 The intention of this excess of technology is complete communication of closed legal proceedings to the watching public world. Instead, we argue that a memorialisation of ‘truth’ and ‘memory’ takes place, which creates haunted spaces of uncertainty and conjecture. New ghosts are present, even as technological devices seek to exorcise them. Coroners’ inquests are typically about who died, when, where and how. When called to witness, I was shown the map of my carriage and asked whether I was sitting in the seat marked with my name at the end of one row along the train wall, next to a set of double doors. I pointed out that I was not sitting in that seat, but in the next bench seat on the same side of the carriage, beside the next set of double doors, and thus nearer to the suicide bomber, Khan, than their map suggested. This degree of precision of seating, this degree of attempted exactitude about where somebody killed was standing, sitting or lying before and after the explosion, this degree of probing about how quickly or slowly the man trapped in the bomb crater died in my carriage (asked for most of one full day at the inquest) is standard procedure. However, Lady Justice Hallett ordered that two further domains of questioning be added: about the terrorists, and about the arrival time and quality of the emergency services who attended the dying, wounded and traumatised people in the train. The journalists in the High Court annex picked up on these questions via the full arsenal of emergent media forms available to them there to raise additional questions – even as the ghosts of inadequate emergency support and of the true number of terrorists were being laid to rest in court. This mixing of emerging and mainstream media as a

32  John Tulloch key part of the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest should be called an ‘archival event’ that ‘provides the impression of transparency and openness, reiterating the “publicness” of the inquest, yet also “monumentalizes” the event through rendering such a comprehensive and definitive account so public, so quickly, and, it seems, permanently’.40 Ghosts of Memorialisation For Hoskins and me, this public ‘transparency’ and ‘definitive account’ were misleading in more than one way. By evaluating the transcripts of witnesses who attended the month of proceedings about the Edgware Road terrorist attack, a blurring of inquisitorial and adversarial court discourses was discernible. Coronial inquests differ from criminal trials in being fact-finding and not apportioning guilt or seeking prosecution or defence. Yet there were cases of unequivocal adversarial discourse where the line of questioning was more like an interpretive duel. This recurred so regularly across multiple barrister practices as to challenge significantly the raison d’être of a coronial inquest, thus releasing more ghosts of uncertainty in the particular networked space of the High Court of Justice. For example, counsel acting for the London Ambulance Service challenged a witness’ account of the arrival time of paramedics to the scene (very late according to the witness and in my impression) by citing against the witness his earlier statement to the police. This permeability, as Butler would call it, between the conventions, procedures and discourses of different forms of court practice began to raise doubt and ambivalence as we analysed the ‘definitive’ court proceedings online. Hoskins and I were examining here the mechanisms of the inquest’s actual court practice. First, there was the matter of time and memory. We describe from the transcript the testimony of a policeman who attended the wrecked train, how unsure he was about vital aspects of what he observed and remembered. He was even unclear: whether the sketch shown in court was made by him or his colleague at the time. The messy sketch itself illustrates the extreme difficulty of the making of a diagram in the dark, hot, and dangerous conditions that confronted the emergency workers, with bodies and twisted remnants of the carriage strewn everywhere. Yet the numbers on the diagram serve a critical function in identifying the position of the bodies, and these markings form a central focus of proceedings.41 Arguably, the testimonials were the mechanism for a process pursuing ‘extraordinary precision from the assimilation of often very partial, vague, and incomplete testimonies, from a range of conflicting sources, drawn across the years since July 2005, that fixes the discourses in place’.42 For us as analysts (and for one of us as victim) the ghosts of

The Haunted Spaces of 7/7  33 suspicion and uncertainty were not exorcised at all by way of this ‘memorialising’ process. Ghosts of Subjectivity In addition to the matter of time and memory, there was my own subjective experience of giving witness at the Coroner’s Inquest. Before the explosion I had, as mentioned earlier, noticed the man later identified as Mohammad Sidique Khan glancing across at me as I looked his way, together with another man with a darker skin colour. Two weeks later, after the failed terrorist attack in London on 21 July 2005, I privately equated the second man’s complexion and facial features as being similar to the Somalian assailants of that second attack – an example of the mediatisation of my memory. I had recounted this memory of the two individuals in the carriage to my sons in Australia who cautioned against making media statements about it because it might inflame the escalating anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia, as elsewhere, after the London bombings (where one Australian died and several were badly injured). Although mentioning the second man briefly in an early police statement, I largely followed their advice. It was not until giving witness at the Coroner’s Inquest in November 2010 that I planned to disclose formally that memory where my witnessing could be openly compared with others.43 By the time of my testimony the inquest had already spent a month on the first train bombing at Aldgate, which I attended for many days. There I heard the awful details of each victim’s death, and one by one, at the judge’s request, families told their stories of the people they had lost, which affected me greatly. This process would be repeated at the inquest of the Edgware Road attack, the second of the explosions which was designed to occur simultaneously. I was moved particularly by the case of the father who died slowly in the bomb crater in my carriage. His daughter told of how they were sitting together on 11 September 2001 as the terrorist attack on New York unfolded live on television before them. She spoke of how her father said he hoped this would never happen again for her generation; and now, nine years on, his adult daughter was telling in court of his death in another terrorist attack. I remember well the account of the young woman who wanted to be a lawyer at the United Nations and was celebrating passing her law exams just before she was killed in the Aldgate bombing. There were countless narratives like these, mixing horror, poignancy and the decent aspirations of people whose lives had been cut short. I now felt much more viscerally that the dead and wounded people the High Court witnesses spoke about were my companions that day, in that tunnel, in this tragic story. Yet I could only hear from the dead in memory, and never meet them. They were lost comrades as spectres.

34  John Tulloch Concerned about how I would perform during my own Royal Courts of Justice witnessing, given my re-traumatised emotional state sitting in on the Aldgate inquest, I consulted a barrister friend who gave clear advice. He said that the lead barrister who would interview me in court already had the answers to all the questions he would ask me, via his research. I was not to intercede, simply follow the barrister’s temporal narrative line. This is what I did, expecting the moment to arrive when he asked what I saw in the carriage soon before the explosion: viz. the two men glancing across at me. But the moment passed, the question was not asked, and the line of inquiry proceeded straight to events after I woke up injured by the explosion. I asked the barrister as we left the courtroom why he had omitted that question. He replied that he deliberately avoided it because he did not want to give any ammunition to the conspiracy theorists – some claimed that the surveillance footage of the four bombers arriving at Luton station on their way to King’s Cross was fake; others hypothesised five or more perpetrators involved in the 7/7 terrorist acts. While I had discounted these conspiracy theories, now, at the Royal Courts of Justice, was the time to speak about my actual memory. After all, if that other man was a terrorist he must have alighted the train at Edgware Road station because he was not found among the dead in that orange-lit tunnel. I assumed that surveillance footage would be looked at, and my ‘memory’ proved or disproved. To my knowledge, none of this happened. That question, already in my mind and the barrister’s, would continue to haunt me. Had I created a spectre of terror in seeing that man next to Khan, both looking at me? And if so, what did it say about my own memory conventions and prejudices? All that seems proven by this personal witness incident and the barrister’s comment afterwards is that the inquest was not entirely transparent in its public address. The 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest sought to make a compelling case for its legitimacy via: this legal discourse and practice of transparency, massive volume of data, and granularity of methodology (in the sense of sifting like sand every grain of “fact”, bound up in the common phrase the “sheer weight of evidence”) … there seems something intrinsically valid and authoritative to an account that appears to consist of both the minutiae of evidential discovery and the exhaustion of interpretive detail.44 However, the opposite is the case: the more fine-grained detail generated by the barristers acting for the State, victims, families of the bereaved and the emergency services, ‘the more the imprecisions and vagaries of the recall of witnesses – and the process of capturing that recall – become

The Haunted Spaces of 7/7  35 exposed’.45 As in Derrida’s central challenge to philosophical dualism and his notion of the ghost of undecidability, this particular ghost of precision as transparent ‘truth’ was present and absent at the same time in the inquest. I could also say, with Butler, that here the coronial ‘organization falters or fails by virtue of the psychic forces it cannot fully organize’.46 Given that the Coroner’s Inquest began in October 2010, once all the terrorist-related legal proceedings were finished, it is imperative to ask what impact this elapse of time had on the veracity of eyewitness accounts: Relevant here is the fact that the bombers were already dead at the beginning of a £100 million police investigation; and that, even though the function of a coroner’s inquest is solely to establish facts and not to attribute blame, there are some who say that, despite some persistent evidence that emergency workers were held back from entering the tunnels after the bombings, failure to take this issue further at the inquest amounts to exonerating others from blame.47 There were many ghosts still circulating, for myself and for others, after the ‘closure’ of the Coroner’s Report, not least of which was my undecidability as to why I was left for so long in the carriage with Staniforth without medical aid. There have been reports that it was government policy to check first for ‘dirty bomb’ devices in the tunnel, and there were more than hints of this among the inquest testimonies. When I questioned Staniforth (as a senior Royal Air Force officer with Ministry of Defense contacts) about this matter after we did a joint BBC radio interview on our memories of 7/7, he replied that holding emergency services back was the result of 9/11, after which so many rescue workers died in the collapse of the Twin Towers. If that is so, I acknowledge that it is ethically and/or politically an arguable case – but not without parliamentary debate and public notice beforehand, neither of which had occurred. Those of us survivors on the train may have died, sealed up in that tunnel if a nuclear device had been located there. It is a haunting thought, with potential relevance for a haunted future. In fact there were no nuclear devices at any of the 7/7 terrorist sites. But if we consider that Western foreign policy changed little in the years that followed; that increasing numbers of states collapsed; and that, as Derrida says, the leakage of nuclear weapons is ‘no longer even controllable, as was the case for a long time, by statist structures’, that haunting possibility may become a more blinding reality.48 In that case, the crucial question must remain: will the response to terrorist attacks at that level be democratically debated and managed, or will the response be from the secret state? That is the haunted future stretching beyond

36  John Tulloch 7  July  2005, when I became one of Derrida’s ‘macroscopic facts’ at a traumatic ‘site of suffering’ in one of his ‘inter-ethnic wars’.

Coda More than a decade on from being a victim of Mohammed Sidique Khan in the 2005 terrorist attacks on London, I write in this chapter of the existential, institutional and mediated spaces which have haunted my recall since then: the Circle line train carriage itself with its glimpsed or imagined terrorists; the august chambers of the Royal Courts of Justice and their ‘tent’ annex where the Coroner’s Inquest sought to fix for all time the vertiginous memories of witnesses to the 7/7 event; and the stark monument in Hyde Park remembering the victims, but also perhaps providing the space for counter-monuments reflecting ghosts of both an oppressed past and a haunted future. Starting from some important observations by Derrida about neocapitalism, the new world disorder and the ghosts of Marx within the hegemonic structure of neoliberalism, I have drawn on the paradigm of memory, mediatisation and connectivity studies; on recent risk theory about the emergence of new spheres of public space; on neoliberalism critique; and on Butler’s ‘what if’ articulation of an interdisciplinary overlapping and permeable (rather than deconstructive) methodology. The events that are mediatised and the alternative places where human agency and traces of memory are performed are significant, because as Derrida said in his Specters of Marx: it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-­evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have ­violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity.49 Like Butler, I contend that these conditions of hope and hopelessness are not only phantasmatic spheres of undecidability, as Derrida argues, but also foreclosing ones that limit ‘democratic social transformation’. 50 The ‘spirit of Derrida’ is moved to writing of this reality when he describes the complex (and confusing) apparatus of mass media culture as: “communications” and interpretations, selective and hierarchized production of “information” through channels whose power has grown in an absolutely unheard-of fashion at a rhythm that coincides precisely, no doubt not fortuitously, with that of the fall of regimes on the Marxist model, a fall to which it contributed mightily … in forms and modes of appropriation, and at a speed that also affect in

The Haunted Spaces of 7/7  37 an essential fashion the very concept of public space in so-called liberal democracies; and at the center of this colloquium the question of media tele-technology, economy, and power, in their irreducibly spectral dimension, should cut across all our discussions.51 I agree. But my point here is that, as with my discussion of the mediatisation of the trauma of 7/7 which leaves me haunted by ghosts of both a ‘self’ and ‘social’ kind, not everything should be interrogated and reduced to Derrida’s ‘irreducibly spectral dimension’. For Derrida the spectral logic of the future, encapsulated in the figure of the ghost, proclaims a heterogenous and disjointed time, an alterity that can have no content, nor sense of justice.52 To define the content of ‘progress’ from present to future by way of any political, religious or epistemological agenda is to insist upon the totalising image of a secular or religious utopia, thus denying the heterogeneity of alterity (and the only human promise of emancipation available). Derrida is so concerned with avoiding the totalising figuration of both Marxism and neoliberalism, in his commitment to a deconstructive presence/non-presence methodology, that neoliberalism now as a contestable force is never addressed. Hence it is not confronted where he sometimes seems to want to do so, ‘in a new, concrete, and real way’ and at the level of ‘practical or effective organization’.53 Nor is it challenged either in terms of the presence of agency within this moment of history, or in the detailed dynamics of remembering and forgetting (whether of terrorist events or of economic crises in our time). Derrida is certainly right to identify ‘three places, forms, and powers of culture’ – specifically the political, media and scholarly spheres – which ‘are more than ever welded together by the same apparatuses’.54 Although complex and conflicting, these co-mingling discourses nevertheless ‘communicate and cooperate at every moment towards producing the greatest force with which to assure the hegemony or the imperialism in question’.55 It is at all those levels of discourse, and to which we add the conflicted legal discourse of the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest, that my work with Hoskins on the risk events of the twenty-first century operates. Our understanding of the past-present-future of neoliberalisation is via its contemporary moment in a series of mutations shifting their focus, as Mitchell Dean says, ‘from risk to catastrophe’.56 In this moment of neoliberalisation we have transcended the classic definition of risk regulation as ‘exercising precaution in conditions of uncertainty’; the central concern now is on ‘fostering the “resilience” of individuals and social, ecological and financial systems against unknowable, unpredictable and unmanageable catastrophe’. 57 It is because we explore the current mutation of neoliberalism – now a project with global uncertainty at its core – as a move beyond its triumphalism of the Reagan and Thatcher eras that this chapter is, indeed, in ‘the spirit of Derrida’, a ‘creative

38  John Tulloch contact’ which is neither ‘mere fidelity’ nor ‘absolute transgression’. 58 So my analysis here is permeable with, but not reduced to Derrida’s rhetorical topos, the undecidable challenge (to all dualities) of ghosts.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 45–46. 2 Ibid., 106. 3 Ibid., 86. 4 Ibid., 110. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 111. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 47. 9 Jack Reynolds, ‘Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (n.d.), accessed 8 January 2016, . 10 Ibid. 11 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 100–104. 12 Andrew Hoskins and John Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 13 Steven D. Brown and Andrew Hoskins, ‘Terrorism in the New Memory Ecology: Mediating and Remembering the 2005 London Bombings’, Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 2, no. 2 (2010): 104. 14 Judith Butler, ‘Foreword: Tracking the Mechanisms of the Psychosocial’, in Psychosocial Imaginaries: Perspectives on Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism, ed. Stephen Frosh (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), vi. 15 Nchamah Miller, ‘Hauntology and History in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx’, lecture notes (Canada: York University, 2003), accessed 8 January 2016, . 16 Butler, ‘Foreword’, vii. 17 Ibid., viii. 18 Ibid., ix. 19 Ibid. 20 John Tulloch and R. Warwick Blood, Icons of War and Terror: Media Images in an Age of International Risk (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 199. 21 John Tulloch, ‘Risk and Subjectivity: Experiencing Terror’, Health, Risk and Society 10, no. 5 (2008): 451–465. 22 John Tulloch, One Day in July: Experiencing 7/7 (London: Little Brown, 2006). 23 See Tulloch, One Day in July; Tulloch and Blood, Icons of War and Terror. 24 Ellis Woodman, ‘7/7 Memorial in London’s Hyde Park’, The Telegraph (7 July 2009), accessed 14 January 2016, . 25 Tessa Jowell cited in Haroon Siddique and agencies, ‘7 July Bombing Memorial Unveiled’, The Guardian (7 July 2009), accessed 14 January 2016, . 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Hoskins and Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity, 154.

The Haunted Spaces of 7/7  39 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Brown and Hoskins, ‘Terrorism in the New Memory Ecology’, 88. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 102. Ibid. Butler, ‘Foreword’, ix–x. Hoskins and Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity, 7, 9. Ibid., 7. Brown and Hoskins, ‘Terrorism in the New Memory Ecology’, 90. Hoskins and Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity, 220–221. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 228, 230. Ibid., 230. This was mentioned in the report I gave to the police about ten days after the 7/7 attack, in my book One Day in July that was published in 2006, and also in a television news interview in 2010. Hoskins and Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity, 241. Ibid. Butler, ‘Foreword’, viii. Hoskins and Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity, 241. These collapsed states are controlled on the one hand by those ‘super-­ efficient and properly capitalist phantom-States that are the mafia and the drug cartels on every continent, including in the former so-called socialist States of Eastern Europe’ that Derrida describes, and on the other those infiltrated by IS-style extremists. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 102, 103. Ibid., 106. Butler, ‘Foreword’, ix. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 65. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 107, 112. Ibid., 66. Ibid. Mitchell Dean, ‘Rethinking Neoliberalism’, Journal of Sociology 50, no. 2 (2014): 159. Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper cited in Dean, ‘Rethinking Neoliberalism’, 159. Reynolds, ‘Jacques Derrida’.

2 Dream House Pippa Tandy

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. —Gaston Bachelard1

In 2012, I spent nearly six months in an empty house. This house at 2 Alice Street in Bellevue, Western Australia had been the home of my parents, Robin and Bernard Tandy, for over thirty years. As executrix of the estate I was responsible for selling it on behalf of five siblings, and caring for it in the meantime. Initially thinking I would be there for a week or two at most, as the sale of the property was protracted I was required to adapt completely to a strange set of conditions. I had already decided that my next photo project would involve making images of the house for an exhibition that year, but did not realise how fully this would inform the texture of my life. Invocations of the past enabled my imaginative responses to the present in daydreaming and in the images I was able to make. It was likely that once sold the house would be demolished. I wanted to use precious time there to discover its qualities. My project was not just a matter of documenting it, although this was important. Photographing the Alice Street house and its surroundings expanded the capacity for meaning in the spaces I occupied and in the relationships with people encountered while there. I kept a diary during this period which I draw on in this essay. Alongside the photographs the extracts offer impressions of a house emptied of people and objects, but whose spaces and marks were loaded with memories and experiences of which death, infirmity, dereliction and also consoling familiarity were a part. In an essay entitled ‘Between Memory and History’, Pierre Nora distinguishes between lieux de mémoire as sites of memory ‘where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn’, and milieux de mémoire as ‘real environments of memory’. 2 This distinction is pivotal to his discussion of the archival nature of modern memory. Whereas ‘true memory … has taken refuge

Dream House  41 in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body’s inherent self-knowledge’, modern memory is conscious of the past as something lost and whose remnants must be preserved: It relies on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. What began as writing ends as high fidelity and tape recording. The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs – hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past.3 I cite this to clarify my project. While I agree with Nora that memory’s ‘new vocation is to record’, he seems to invoke an authentic, solipsistic and possibly incoherent memory, one beyond representation.4 In my photographing of the house I certainly ‘recorded’ the traces of its inhabitants, but in reimaging them I hoped to make images that would allow others to connect with them and so to imagine their own lives. The visual is never just a document as the remarkable account of the imbrications of time, memory and the visual in Chris Marker’s film La Jetée reveals.5 Nonetheless, the house was a lieu de mémoire for me. While not yet derelict it was sufficiently so to offer up as photographic images the signs of its age and use. They were neither picturesque nor nostalgic, but intimate. Gaston Bachelard argues that to ‘write a room’, ‘read a room’ or ‘read a house’, one inevitably enters a space of private reverie, of memory: very quickly, at the very first word, at the first poetic overture, the reader who is “reading a room” leaves off reading and starts to think of some place in his own past. You would like to interest the reader in yourself, whereas you have unlocked a door to daydreaming. The values of intimacy are so absorbing that the reader has ceased to read your room: he sees his own again.6 I found myself in this space of daydreaming, inhabiting the spaces of the dead, but in making images I was able to create something new. The house had to be vacated for this to be accomplished. It became a camera obscura on whose surfaces memories flickered, settled and shifted. I photographed the spaces, the altering light, the marks on walls, floors and windows, intersections of rooms and artefacts. Objects such as an old chair, spring flowers in a plastic cup, the mirrored door of a timeworn wardrobe and, in particular, my temporary bed became the foci for certain memories. They provided the conditions for a dreamscape. I was also attempting to make my own poetry present in the house. No one seems to know when the house was built. It had deco elements, for instance, the decorative mouldings in its high ceilings and

42  Pippa Tandy the etched motifs in the windows and front door glass. Perhaps it was constructed in the 1950s from materials stored during the war.7 It was modern in its openness, but there was something of the farmhouse in the way it was set in nearly twelve hundred square metres of garden. Like most of the properties in the vicinity, it contained the remnants of an orchard with gnarled fruit and nut trees of different kinds. The population of this part of Bellevue was once made up of post-Second World War migrants, some from the Mediterranean and many of them Polish migrants who worked at the nearby Midland Junction Railway Workshops. These workshops have become ‘heritage’, and the residents of Bellevue are now more likely to be fly-in fly-out mine workers. There are a few retirees and elderly Italians living in houses on blocks that were once part of small farms, since sacrificed to real estate. The area is currently under review by the City of Swan and is probably on the cusp of gentrification, or worse. Although the loss of an elderly parent was the reason for my sojourn at 2 Alice Street, the house was not transformed into a mournful ruin. It once again became my home. As Bachelard writes: We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home, and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.8 Perhaps this poetry is the third term that links lieux de mémoire to milieux de mémoire. Perhaps the sparseness of the house made the imaginative processes more obvious, or required me to imagine a bit harder. I had to invest the spaces with memory, not by replicating the mise-­en-scène but by suggestive offerings – a bowl, a pair of shoes by the fireplace, a glimpse of awful plumbing. I am aware that something has been added to my own ‘store of dreams’, but in presenting the images I am inviting viewers to do the same. I arrived at the empty house under a bright moon on Good Friday, 6 April 2012. I brought my camera equipment, laptop and screen, a saucepan, bowl, plate, spoon, knife and fork, some bedding and books. The house still had traces of the recent departure of my brother Nicholas’ family. I stacked these in one corner, leaving most of the rooms bare but for some bits of tired furniture. Most of this no one wanted except for an oak table, which my sister Caitlin would take later, left for me to use as a desk. In this environment I worked, cooked, washed, ate, slept, and took photographs starting that very evening with the moon in the garden and stillness in the hollowed-out house.

Dream House  43 The rhythms of my quotidian life soon adjusted to those of the house and its location. The house quickly became the centre of a web of various paths to other places – shops, letterboxes, bus stops. I walked to the fish and chip shop and liquor store at Koongamia, and in the opposite direction to supermarkets at Swan View. I sometimes drove to Stratton which had the best and cheapest bags of firewood. Down the hill I would buy takeaway curry from an Indian restaurant, once my parents’ local pub outside of which we spent many hours as children. I followed the old train tracks to a series of quarries in the Greenmount National Park from where I would watch winter sunsets. These journeys allowed time to remember, to see and envision other places of shelter, to take great pleasure in the many returns to the house to repeat the necessary chores that accompanied each homecoming. Tim Edensor writes of ‘the ghostliness of mundane spaces’, reflecting on the way everyday life produces ‘cultural continuities [that] are embodied in the historical practices of present inhabitants, echoing the activities and dispositions of their predecessors’.9 The banal, domestic practices that we often take for granted become a way of connecting with the past. Edensor is referring here to communal routines but the same was true for my experience. Although I was alone, the rhythms of my day were in part those of my predecessors. Drawing on memory I knew what to do, how to live in the house by repeating actions, tasks, entrances and exits that became my own while recalling those of the house’s former occupants. The weeks and then months following my first night in the house were extraordinary. From very early in my stay I felt myself breathing with the house, listening. Without conversation I became attuned to all the ‘noises off’: loud music from neighbours, aircraft low overhead coming in to land, freight trains on the nearby tracks blowing their horns and rattling heavily, and trucks changing their gears on the highway. Birds called and dogs barked at the moon and other night wanderers. The spaces of the house were emphasised by these sounds and long periods of near silence. The house had its own cadences. Its dark wooden floors softly reflected light from one room to another. Its timber frame, clad in asbestos sheets and weatherboard, would move. Some nights I sailed through the dark on the edge of the Darling Scarp as the house shifted in response to the wind. The heavy asbestos roof which held everything down was an ironic comfort during the powerful storms that blew up in the winter. I would sometimes stand for long periods just watching the night settle, or looking from one half-lit room to another, camera in hand, observing patches of wall where someone had tried out a new paint colour, corners where a tack still clung to a tiny strip of carpet (the remains of a wall-to-wall ripped up after a bath overflowed), long disconnected electric light sockets or phone jacks, the measured and dated heights of grandchildren on a cupboard door.

44  Pippa Tandy Light I found particularly affecting. I am reminded of Bachelard’s description of the light in the hermit’s hut, seen by travellers from a distance, as evidence that someone inside is protected. The lamp in the window is ‘the house’s eye and, in the kingdom of the imagination, it is never lighted out of doors, but is enclosed light, which can only filter to the outside’.10 It joins inside and outside, home and the road, shelter and exile, departure and return. Bachelard writes of the lamp as ‘waiting in the window, and through it the house, too, is waiting’.11 I imagined others now gone inside the house, and the illuminated windows of neighbouring homes spoke to me of anticipated arrivals, restlessness and patience. The preparation of evening fires became part of the pattern of everyday life at the Alice Street house – aligning the wood according to the grain, swinging the axe, splitting fine kindling, persisting with and triumphing over the knotty pieces, stacking the wood and handling it so as to avoid splinters, igniting the fire. The repetition prompted half-forgotten sensations and moments in childhood – the smell of split wood, the awareness of its finite nature, consideration of where the next lot would come from. Some of the fuel came from the branches of trees that I had cut in compliance with electricity company orders, and some was from the remains of white-ant damaged outbuildings and fences that I had demolished. My first fire in the empty house was from a large pile of menacing rose prunings from my mother’s time that I had obsessively disentangled from other garden refuse. This work was time-consuming and arduous, but there was satisfaction in the transformation of the thorny branches into bright warmth. On cool evenings I would often sit by the hearth with my meal, like Bachelard’s hermit. In its emptiness the idiosyncrasies of the house became obvious, making visible stories from the past. In the bathroom which was very basic the metal hand basin had only a cold-water tap. The shower consisted of numerous plumbing adjustments: a handrail over the bath, various pipes, taps and showerheads, some functioning, some barely. There were grubby cracks between the bathtub and the wall. In bathing myself I remembered the times I helped Caitlin wash our dying mother, and how Nicholas a few years earlier had had the task of carrying our demented father to the bathroom to wash him. Every time I stood in that stained narrow tub and watched the water swirling into the tarnished plughole, I thought of these solemn but sometimes comical duties. Ghosts dwell in the quotidian, ‘embedded in familiar, lingering fixtures and features that provoke a homely recognition of that which was supposedly over and done with’.12 Like other people living alone I had fussy routines. Cooking was simple and ritualistic – making toast in a small frying pan, transferring food from pan to plate and back again to assemble a meal. I had few utensils. Vegetables that I roasted with Robin’s prolific rosemary from a bush near the back door filled the house with a virtuous perfume.

Dream House  45 I would make a pot of soup which would last about a week. I also had the occasional takeaway treat, every dinner of fish and chips reminding me of every other shared with the family over decades. These were often consumed ravenously by the five of us in the back of our parents’ Peugeot 203 parked outside the local pub, while they finished a drink or three inside. Occasionally the proprietor of the fish and chip shop would wrap up the hot batter scrapings for us to eat while we waited. What joy! Sometimes drinks ended soon enough for us to take the meal home, fat chips held out of the open car window on the journey to cool them for the youngest. I remember some of my parents’ last fish and chip treats. As they aged and became ill, losing their appetites, they would buy a serving for one and share it. This in itself was a ritual. My mother, a small bird, breaking the fish in half and giving my father his portion as they sat by the fire. *** Time passes. The nights are cold. I put three hot water bottles into my bed. I bring two chairs close to the fire and hang my towels and pyjamas on them. I place a folded picnic rug on the floor. The icy air blows up from under the floorboards. I stand on the rug to undress. I run through the dark to the bathroom, hands out in front to avoid serious collisions with doorframes, fling open the bathroom door, and turn on the light. I shower and run back to the fire, dripping and shivering while drying myself with the towels that are never quite as warm as I would have hoped, and hurry into my pyjamas. I go outside and hang my towels on the clothesline – a farewell to the day. My nightly traditions confirm the space as a shelter. They locate me in the house and in the stream of memory. I go to my little bed, move the hot water bottles from the top end to the bottom, read and rest as the house mutters and whispers. Let dreams depart and phantoms fly / The offspring of the night… At night the house is very dark, but light is always there somewhere. The streetlight on the corner of Ruby and Alice Streets can be seen through the venetian blinds. The trouble lamp, with its yellow globe that I have hung outside under the wide roof-overhang, illuminates an area of bricks and grass, then fades into the thick vegetation. My parents planted many trees and shrubs here, and the play of light from their leaves can be seen in the house during the day. A macadamia tree, under which the beloved family dog Mordechai is buried, is fruiting. Leaves from the two oaks that my parents grew from Jacoby Park acorns are blowing across the lawn. The bed I sleep in each night has a special significance. It is an old foldabed I had used many times before when visiting my parents. My children had also slept in it during sleepovers at Mammar and Pappa’s. When

46  Pippa Tandy I arrive I find it in a shed at the back and wash it down in the shower. Onto its bare springs and wires I put two inadequate camping mattresses – one is too small, the other has a slow leak – and make it up with a blanket and sheets in Robin’s bedroom. It’s only going to be a short time. In my mother’s last days I slept on the floor at the foot of her bed in the room where I now sleep. I had hoped to give Cait respite from constant care, but she often woke before me if our mother stirred or murmured. We were both with her when her breathing slowed, and slowed, and then stopped. Cait got a mirror because we could not be sure. We laughed nervously. The nurse came to take away the morphine and to do the paper­work, and we assisted in bathing Robin. We discussed ‘arrangements’ with the undertaker. When his assistants came later that afternoon, my sister and I helped zip Robin into their bag and they hoisted her onto their trolley and thence to a modest station wagon. Despite the brightness of the day, the street outside took on an old-fashioned, solemn atmosphere. Neighbours stayed indoors, watching and knowing. As soon as the undertakers were gone I removed the hated electric mattress (required by the home-nursing service) and set up the foldabed for myself in its place, staying until a week or so after Robin’s funeral. Sleeping in this bed places me at the centre of memories of sickness, sleep and death, but this is not disturbing. I drag the foldabed around the house. I take photographs of it on the verandah on the west side of the house, actually a sleepout with a remarkable linoleum floor geometrically patterned in reds, yellows, browns and greens. I move the bed into the room at the middle of the house. I photograph it there. When my father died we brought his body back from the nursing home and my mother and Nick’s partner, Joy, laid him out on a table in this room. He lay there packed in frozen wine bags from Saturday until the following Tuesday when we put him in the coffin that Nick made for the burial. I have no photographs of my father lying dead, but I can make an image that allows me to give thought to his illness in his last years in the house and his presence as a corpse in the dining room. My mother had wanted him to die at home. Having his remains in the house was the next best thing, and added something to the meaning of the house for us all. I do not believe in ghosts, but the cracks in the walls of that room and the images I make of the bed I drag in there give weight to the history of the house. When I lie down in this bed I feel comforted. When I wake in the night there is usually some gift offered up by the house. I walk its boards in my bare feet and look out through windows at the glimmerings beyond the garden. Leafy shadows appear. Sometimes a neighbour’s light will flicker. I think of ministrations to sick children, the muffled and occasionally clanging stillness of a hospital ward in the small hours. And then there is the pleasure of the return to bed, listening to a train pass, the wind in the trees, or sometimes, the magpies calling. Eventually the house sells. I leave, taking the foldabed with me.

Figure 2.1  The wardrobe13

Figure 2.2  Resting place

Figure 2.3  Empty spaces

Figure 2.4  The sickroom

Figure 2.5  Bathroom

Figure 2.6  Dream House

50  Pippa Tandy

Notes 1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 6. 2 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989): 13. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Made up almost entirely of still images, with a voiceover narration, La Jetée dissolves the distinction between the ‘sites’ and the ‘real environments of memory’. It tells ‘the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood’ whose attachment to images of the past allow him to travel briefly into the past and future. It is about time, loss, memory and the visual, and it is the visual that allows ‘real’ memory and its traces to co-exist. Although the man learns that ‘there is no way out of time’, the film’s extraordinary and unconventional poetry invites viewers to imagine beyond memory as document or trace, without denying the power of these human artefacts. La Jetée, dir. Chris Marker (Paris: Argos Films, 1962). 6 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 14. 7 An online search in Wise’s Post Office Directories does not show anyone living at 2 Alice Street in the period up to 1949, but this is not conclusive as street numbers change. 8 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 5–6. 9 Tim Edensor, ‘Mundane Hauntings: Commuting Through the Phantasmagoric Working-Class Spaces of Manchester, England’, cultural geographies 15, no. 3 (2008): 326. 10 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 34. 11 Ibid. Bachelard is writing here about the novel Hyacinthe (1941) by Henri Bosco. 12 Edensor, ‘Mundane Hauntings’, 314. 13 All images in this photo essay are copyrighted by Pippa Tandy, 2012.

3 Home Is Where the Hearth Was Remembering and Place-Making a Vanished Town Christina Lee

When we sense our own ghost in a place we are likely to experience thereby a deep sense of belonging to that place.… We attach our spirits to a place, and thus that place is attached to us. —Michael Bell1

In my childhood I ran a marathon from a town called Goldsworthy in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, to Finucane Island. Relay teams (and the occasional solo runner) pushed a ‘wheelbarrow’ loaded with eleven kilograms of iron ore for one hundred and twenty kilometres. Members took turns at the helm of the barrow, leaping on and off a moving bus with a specially rigged platform. Called the Black Rock Stakes, the event originated as a dare that became a full-fledged annual charity event with participants coming from all over Western Australia and sometimes interstate. At the age of twelve I was already a veteran of Goldsworthy Primary School’s entry – the Flying Fleas – that represented our small mining town. 2 The townspeople called us the Kings and Queens of the Gravel. Before the run we would convene at the town sports ground (‘the oval’) for briefing, stretching and obligatory group photographs, then take to the starting line at De Grey Drive to commence the six-hour journey into the night. The bitumen road stretched ahead and disappeared beyond the reach of the bus headlights, surrounded by little else except red dirt, rock and scrubland. The nearing end of the gruelling race was signalled by the shimmering horizon of houselights from the town of Port Hedland that always ignited a burst of reserve energy, and we would forget about the pain and fatigue. In my final year of primary school, as the female team captain I was given the privilege of being the first runner for the Flying Fleas. I remember lucidly my nervous anticipation, the countdown over the PA system, the crack and echo of the starting gun, and the cheering crowd. That was in 1988. Twenty years later on 28 June 2008, I competed in the sprint marathon again with a new team; three of whom were ex-Fleas. It was to be the last Black Rock Stakes – ‘The Final Run’. The thirty-five-year tradition had come to an end. Our creaky joints and diminished bravado were not

52  Christina Lee the only things to have altered over time. Firstly, the starting line was no longer outside the local pub on De Grey Drive but relocated to the outer perimeter of Goldsworthy across the railroad tracks. After illegally scaling the train tracks I stood at the same spot where the Flying Fleas had gathered many times before. But this time, gone were the power lines, the single workers’ quarters on stilts, the cluster of trees that doubled as a children’s hideout, and the oval itself. In fact, gone was the entire township of Goldsworthy. We often visit physical sites and landmarks to help remember the past. But when those identifiable markers have disappeared, what then? How do we comprehend ‘home’ when it is no longer there? My return to Goldsworthy constituted what Peter Read calls a ‘journey to nothing’, a migration from a place and then the physical and/or psychological return to the empty space where that place once was.3 Where there is a seeming void, a ‘nothing’, he demonstrates the vibrant memories and intense attachments to those places. In this chapter I similarly argue that the old township of Goldsworthy is a place of memories and becoming that reveals the emotional continuity to home in the face of loss. Goldsworthy has a presence in spite of its officially non-existent status that gestures to an ongoing social process of meaning-making. We can only feel at home, avers Ien Ang, if we have succeeded ‘in claiming a space … as home … by actively embracing it, historically, culturally and socially. Home cannot be conceived as a taken-for-granted, fixed and inert space’.4 Memories and embodied and virtual engagements are acts of place-making that allow Goldsworthy’s former residents to perform and commemorate identities and histories that might otherwise be forgotten. In this active reclamation of space our traces/tracings over the site write us back into the effaced landscape that many still call ‘home’.

No Place Like Home: The Imperceptible Hearth Aside from agriculture, arguably no other industry typifies Australian heritage and identity more than mining. Men and women toiling under unforgiving conditions and working the land are allegorical of an inherent fighting spirit where the environment is tough but its people are tougher. The evolution from a convict outpost to an affluent, modern nation can be tracked through the adversity, development and success in Australia’s mining industry, bookended by the rudimentary prospecting methods of the 1850s gold rushes versus the awesome sight of a Komatsu/Haulpak rumbling across an open pit. While mining figures prominently in the nation’s history, there are those whose experiences are marginalised or excluded. This chapter takes as its subject a place and its people that have been rendered largely invisible as the casualties of progress and time; the chapter itself serves as an act of place-making in encouraging individual and collective memories. I write both as a

Figures 3.1 and 3.2  Black Rock Stakes: The Flying Fleas marathon team (1988) and The Final Run (2008). Goldsworthy oval, Western Australia. © Christina Lee, 1988, 2008

54  Christina Lee scholar and as one of those forgotten footnotes. The chapter contains responses of former Goldsworthy residents to a survey in which they were invited to participate.5 While the richness and spectrum of their responses cannot be fully conveyed here, my intention is to provide a snapshot of impressions. In the 1960s, Western Australia experienced unprecedented growth in its mineral resources sector. The Federal Government’s lifted embargo on the export of high grade iron ore in 1960, and the Western Australian Government’s decision to grant iron ore tenements in 1961 led to an upsurge in exploration, especially in the Hamersley Range area, that would establish ‘the Pilbara as one of the world’s major iron ore provinces’.6 The region would be marked with open pit mines and closed company towns built to house and service the needs of employees and their families. Such settlements included Goldsworthy, Shay Gap, Newman, Tom Price and Paraburdoo. Writing in 1979, Peter Newton noted that ‘at least twenty-five new mining towns and eleven new ports (for the most part company-owned and controlled) [had] been constructed in remote locations’ since 1960.7 Limited reserves of the non-renewable resources and the speed at which they were extracted from the ground meant that the mining operations had finite lifespans in these predominantly single-industry towns, of which Goldsworthy was one. The Mount Goldsworthy site was commissioned in 1965/1966 by Goldsworthy Mining Limited (GML), and ‘was the first iron ore operation and associated town site in the Pilbara region’.8 Located near the edge of the Great Sandy Desert in the state’s northwest, the site was one hundred and ten kilometres inland from the coastal town of Port Hedland. A railway owned and operated by GML, now taken over by BHP Billiton, would transport iron ore from the Mount Goldsworthy mine site to Finucane Island (on the opposite side of the harbour and townsite of Port Hedland). The construction of the port and Goldsworthy’s establishment marked the beginning of the iron ore boom in the West.9 According to P. Smith, the ‘mine development peaked in 1977 with the town population reaching 1400 people’.10 That year my family emigrated from Christmas Island to mainland Australia, settling in Goldsworthy. My father worked as a track mobile and forklift driver in the locomotive workshop, while my mother took care of three children and contributed to the household income by working an assortment of jobs, including cleaning offices and making packed lunches for workmen. We stayed for the next fifteen years until the town’s closure. Living in a company town, residents were provided with subsidised housing and facilities to ensure that life in the bush was not only habitable but also comfortable. The amenities included a shopping centre (with a grocery store, milk-bar, post office, bank, video-store and later a toyshop), a primary school and kindergarten, a medical centre, tennis courts, a basketball/netball court, a bowling green, a swimming pool, a public oval for

Home Is Where the Hearth Was  55 sporting events, a golf course, a community hall called ‘the Dome’ used for all manner of events (from the school’s end-of-year Christmas concerts, discos and bingo nights, to indoor cricket and as a cyclone shelter), club rooms, a mess hall (for the workers during work hours and open to their families on weekends), an outdoor cinema, a police station, a BMX track, small parks, a public library, a bus stop, a petrol station, an ice works and the customary country pub. Some buildings in the township had solid foundations but many were demountable structures that could be removed and transported on the back of a semitrailer truck. For all its impermanence, Goldsworthy had a distinct feel of permanence. People settled there and families were raised in the town that many referred to as their ‘oasis in the desert’. In her broken English my mother called it ‘paradise’, while my father would proudly tell us that this was ‘the lucky country’. The mature gardens, with their roots running deep and bougainvillea climbing thick and high, were a visual reminder that this land was cared for and worthy of investment. The town was strongly associated with unbounded freedom, adventure and a carefree lifestyle, and there was a widespread belief in Goldsworthy being a safe and welcoming place. Today, almost all speak with pride and fondness of lasting friendships and the town’s community spirit. ‘Everyone knew everyone, you didn’t have to lock your doors, you were in a very safe environment’, stated Gabriella Shufflebotham (née Machadinho). It was a sentiment echoed by others during the course of this research. This is a marked contrast to the now prevalent fly-in fly-out (FIFO) mining culture whereby workers commute long distances to remote sites for several days or weeks, then return to their place of residence for a fixed period of rest. FIFO workers comprise a transient population for whom the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘home’ spheres is so extreme that attachments to the remote locations are rarely cultivated. Mining at Goldsworthy ceased in 1982 after the ore deposits ran out. However, the township remained open to service the railway operations between Shay Gap – a small town seventy-five kilometres away that would eventually be shut down – and Finucane Island. In 1990 GML was acquired by BHP Minerals, by which point the population of Goldsworthy had decreased to approximately four hundred and fifty people. An assessment of the site’s operation concluded that it was economically unviable, and the ‘decision was made to transfer the base for railing operations to Port Hedland and to decommission the Goldsworthy site’.11 People began to slowly relocate, most to other mining towns, but for those who stayed until the end it was life as they had always known it. Despite its ever-shrinking cohort the primary school still hummed with its last intake of students, the public swimming pool drew crowds seeking respite from the sun, and gardens were maintained with the same care to ensure the grass did not turn yellow and vegetable patches did not wither in the heat.

56  Christina Lee On 3 July 1992, Goldsworthy was officially closed. Two caretakers who were former warehouse storemen remained onsite during the auction of buildings, infrastructure and other items. This was carried out during the two-week period after the town’s closure. On 17 July, the caretakers left and Goldsworthy was no more.12 As the first company town to be built in the Pilbara, it was also the first to be dismantled by BHP Iron Ore.13 The decommissioning of the town and mine site was a ‘rehabilitation’ project with the following objective: ‘To create a stable, sustainable site compatible with the surrounding topography and habitats while achieving the end land use for the site which is rangeland and/or wildlife habitat’.14 Goldsworthy was razed. All buildings were removed, streets and foundations were ripped up, and landscaping and reseeding was undertaken to return the three hundred and fifty-hectare site ‘back to nature’. There was an irony to the mining company’s obliteration of a township to reinstate a wildlife habitat. The process was completed in early 1993. Soon after, Goldsworthy vanished from the maps and its ‘6723’ postcode was deleted from telephone directories. Journalist Nicolas Rothwell wrote: So thorough has this act of “disappearing” the town been that across the Pilbara, a region where the working population churns at high speed, the majority of today’s residents are quite unaware that a large, vivid township once broke the line of the spinifex on the flood-plain of the De Grey [River].15 Instead of a ghost town, Goldsworthy ceased to exist. Eerily absent from the grand narrative of Western Australian mining, it had become an ‘ex-place’.16 Although the township of Goldsworthy is gone, it remains a powerfully affecting site. According to the 2006 Australian Census, ‘613 people considered Goldsworthy (as part of Marble Bar) the place they most likely call home’.17 Anecdotal accounts indicate ‘many of them, in their imaginings, seem resident there still’.18 When asked what Goldsworthy means to them common themes emerged: ‘Although I spent most of my time in Perth, I still call Goldsworthy home’ (Jason Lee), ‘When I turned off the highway onto the dirt road it felt like I was returning home after a long absence’ (Rosemarie Varis), ‘we always say when you meet up with an old Goldsworthy friend it’s like we were speaking to them ­yesterday’ (Jeff ‘Yammy’ Beacham). Synonymous with ‘home’, Goldsworthy is a space filled with absent presences that confound linear temporality. That is to say, the past is not dead and buried but continues to exert its influence on the present, perhaps even more forcefully in Goldsworthy because it is no longer physically accessible. The past has not passed. I employ the language of hauntings to explore how the appearance of absence signifies that something once was, and still is, there. It can be

Home Is Where the Hearth Was  57 conceptualised through the figure of the ghost which Michael Bell defines as ‘a felt presence – an anima, geist, or genius – that possesses and gives a sense of social aliveness to a place’.19 Ghosts are ‘a ubiquitous aspect of the phenomenology of place’, giving us ‘a way to speak generally about the specificity of the meaning of place’.20 We experience ghosts as ‘the unexpected presence of absence’, for instance, in a road leading to a dead end, a clearing of land, a disused railway platform.21 Tim Edensor describes how absent presences can manifest: In some cases there is an absence so profoundly evident, that emptiness is apt to become crowded with remembered and imagined impressions of that which used to fill the absence.… In other cases, recent additions to the landscape look out of place, have not yet blended in with their surroundings.… And there are sites where replacement of the old has not been complete, where the outdated may have been mostly obliterated but familiar features from the past remain to haunt more recent substitutes. 22 In the ways that a swimming pool with no water or a bedroom left untouched for years have haunting effects, Goldsworthy’s vast emptiness today indicates previous occupancy. For many this translates to ‘hearth’ and ‘community’. In asking how far remembering is possible in the face of an enormous physical absence, one cannot avoid summoning ghosts.23 To speak of ghosts and hauntings serves an important social function. Ghosts are ‘a crucible for political mediation and historical memory’; they can stake a claim for those who are not acknowledged.24 While issues of environmental sustainability, land rights, global markets and international relations occupy discussions about Australia’s mining industry, the accounts of workers and their families are notably absent. In the case of Goldsworthy most official documents concern only the mine site and therefore are firmly ensconced within an industrial, scientific discourse. In reports one reads about ‘lode type deposits’ of hematite, the ‘decommissioned mine site’, ‘contract demolition’, ‘scarifying of roads’ and re-profiled waste dump areas ‘to blend with surrounding natural landforms’.25 Save for population statistics, the people seem to be missing from sight/site. After its closure Anne Marie Park (née Watson) briefly visited the site: ‘I thought it looked like it had never existed.… It was as if our childhood didn’t matter. I felt like I had no place to call home’. The theme of loss and sadness was repeated by countless others. As the terrain was being re-profiled and re-contoured to erase any vestige of a town and mine site ever having been there, it was as if the community too was being excised from the landscape. Goldsworthy had been reduced to a geographical locale, geological facts and technical operations that were articulated in a language we could not identify

58  Christina Lee with. There was literally and figuratively no place for the townspeople. Researching this chapter was akin to an out-of-body experience at times, like watching my own autopsy. The stories presented here are about how memories and practices enable identities, lives and dreams to endure even when the body is gone. This project has in part been prompted by aging parents, the passing of former residents and the urgency to affirm that we mattered. Steve Pile avers that ‘we cannot understand social senses of space unless there is a place for feelings, emotions and affect’.26 I turn briefly to Wittenoom as a case in point. Situated in the Hamersley Range, Wittenoom today is a near ghost town. As the infamous site of Australia’s worst industrial disaster, its economy and very existence was built on the deposits of crocidolite (blue asbestos). Mining began in the area in the 1930s, with the township established in 1947 to accommodate those working in Wittenoom Gorge. Although the first cases of mesothelioma were diagnosed among ex-Wittenoom workers in 1961, Wittenoom’s population peaked in 1964 with approximately one thousand five ­hundred people.27 This made it the largest town in the Pilbara. In 1966, the mine was closed due to health concerns but it would be another twelve years before the State Government commenced operations to phase down activities in the town. In 2007, Wittenoom was de-gazetted and essential services such as electricity and water were disconnected. Warning notices of the contaminated site greet those passing through or near Wittenoom, eliciting morbid curiosity, sadness and trepidation. According to the State Government’s website in 2011, efforts were being made to ‘remove any easily visible sign of past habitation’. 28 Yet a handful of people still live there. In December 2015 the headcount was six, three of whom are permanent residents. 29 Mario Hartmann said that he and his neighbours had no intentions of leaving: ‘Because it is a beautiful place, that’s why. It’s very nice here. We have got water holes, we are next to a national park’. Lorraine Thomas’ reasoning was: ‘I invested all of my savings in this place. I have got nowhere to go. Where is better than here?’30 When asked by documentary filmmaker Simon Reeve in 2008 why she and her husband Frank (who passed away in 2010) refused to leave, Meg Timewell responded with the familiar refrain: ‘It’s our home’.31 The tight hold of home and its ghosts complicate any easy division of reason and irrationality when considering the significance of a place to an individual or community. Wittenoom is not simply a hazard zone, just as Goldsworthy is not simply a decommissioned site. There must be room for personal/private accounts and ‘feelings, emotions and affect’, along with public knowledges. ‘Place is best viewed from points in between’, proposes J. Nicholas Entrikin.32 The experiences and meanings of towns like Goldsworthy and Wittenoom, and those ‘journeys to nothing’, require us to look at the betweenness of places – between the visible

Home Is Where the Hearth Was  59 and imperceptible, between the actual and imagined, and between the empirically measurable and sensations that escape full cognition.

Everything Old Is New Again: Traces and Place-Making In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon cites ‘furniture without memories’ as one of many reasons why dreams die.33 This is part of a broader argument she makes about how power is manifested in blatant forms, as well as in forms that are less obvious and seemingly benign but are no less devastating in their effects. She contends that we must: move analytically between that sad and sunken couch that sags in just that place where an unrememberable past and an unimaginable future force us to sit day after day and the conceptual abstractions because everything of significance happens there among the inert furniture and the monumental social architecture.34 In many respects this chapter is about the significance that happens among the often unnoticed ‘inert furniture’, though Goldsworthy’s unique circumstance turns Gordon’s phrase on its head. Goldsworthy is a case of memories without furniture with its potent remembered past and imagined futures. The accounts that follow are the antithesis of ‘monumental social architecture’ – too personal, too small. But it is for these reasons that they matter. In the absence of an organised, official history, Goldsworthy’s ex-­ residents have found ways of ‘doing’ and defining their own heritage. It is a piecemeal assemblage of artefacts, narratives and memories, n ­ etworks, rituals and spatial practices that constitute a living archive of the everyday. Photographs and memories are the most cited ‘memorabilia’ retained. Photographs from private collections have been given a more prolific and lasting afterlife through digitisation and their uploading into various online forums that have inadvertently created an extended family album. They comprise of ‘before’ and ‘after’ images – of town and work life when Goldsworthy was in operation, and the old township, its citizens and kept objects today – acting as triggers for individual and mediated memories. Keepsakes include company shirts, ‘G-M-L Safety Award’ towels, belt buckles, commemorative mugs and plates, safety hard hats, ID tags/ badges, publications and documents (such as newsletters, newspaper clippings, meal vouchers), videos, stubby holders (insulated holders for drink cans and bottles) and sporting memorabilia; and for the children it includes school reports, merit awards, swimming and athletic ribbons and trophies. Samples of iron ore and red dirt, seashells from the ocean where many would travel for fishing expeditions, and street signs bearing names such as ‘Coongan St’, ‘Pardoo Pde’ and ‘Strelley Dve’, even the mess hall

60  Christina Lee signage, are among the mementos that can be found displayed in lounge rooms or blending incongruously into the setting of a suburban backyard or garage. Refusal to discard even the most frayed towels, threadbare shirts and tattered paperwork reveal the need to keep hold of Goldsworthy as an actual and imagined entity. With no original home in which to house these contents, these enduring objects become even more symboli­ cally invested – they are an insurance against amnesia. Posthumous artefacts have been recreated in recent years, such as bumper stickers with the GML logo, exemplifying an ongoing commitment to a community. One must look to the margins to find the stories of Goldsworthy’s people. A text that has become central in this regard is My Balloons Will Fly Over Goldsworthy that was published in 1984 to commemorate the school’s eighteenth birthday. It is an anthology of the schoolchildren’s writings and local history. Kath Walker describes the volume as ‘a history book’ that is ‘symbolic of the busy-ness of the town’. 35 The book brings together fact and fiction. The destruction caused by Cyclone Amy in January 1980 and road trips to other rural towns sit alongside sightings of ghosts, dinosaurs and the bunyip. In the school’s 1987 anthology entitled Our Babbling Brook, then-headmaster Kerry Quealy wrote that the collection captured the children’s experience of growing up in the bush as ‘expressed in their own language’. 36 This language showed how Goldsworthy had become a place of dreaming and imagination. Anecdotal accounts suggest a sacredness and transformative potential, often articulated as an inexplicable force: I only spent two years there as an eight and nine-year-old, but they were the most incredible and magical years of my life and I returned to the Pilbara as soon as I was able as an adult … The country gets into your soul and never leaves you. (Meg Shields) Goldsworthy represents my origins, having been born there. It is a unique place defined by its ephemeral nature that cannot be inherited but belongs only to those who experienced it for the time that it existed. (Megan McCorry) We were there for only one year, and I am now fifty years old, but it was the single most significant year of my life.… I can’t quite put my finger on it as to why it had such an impact, but it is a year that is embedded in my memory. (Tammy Trimble) The accumulated narratives – of fact, fiction and memory – not only mediate tensions in conflicting accounts but have furthermore contributed

Home Is Where the Hearth Was  61 to the town’s construction in almost mythological terms. These stories and the bond of the townspeople to the land bear an uncanny resemblance to Aboriginal understandings of self, belonging and Country.37 Fred R. Myers writes that for the Pintupi peoples of Australia’s Western Desert, ‘people and land are almost inseparable, and throughout much of their past the land was a critical element in their encounter with time’.38 He goes on to say that for this group, ‘individuals come from the country, and this relationship provides a primary basis for owning a sacred site and for living in the area’.39 This connection of the people with the land, the sacredness of the site and sense of ownership is certainly prevalent in the aforementioned statements (‘The country gets into your soul and never leaves you’, ‘Goldsworthy represents my origins’). When asked about the experience of Goldsworthy many explained via references to other sites such as De Grey River, Mulyie Pool, Cape Keraudren, Titchella Creek, Condini Landing and Eighty Mile Beach. These places function as landmarks locating the township site, even when the landscape is no longer recognisable. They demonstrate intimate local knowledge of the land – an ‘identification with country’ and therefore belonging – as well as how Goldsworthy is understood through spatial relations with the greater Pilbara region.40 The unnoticed narratives of the township surfaced in unexpected ways during the course of this research. It was not uncommon for a respondent to the survey to spin off into what seemed to be a stream of thoughts, vivid and visceral in their details, and far exceeding the requirements of the question at hand.41 It was as if the sheer volume of minutiae was an assurance of historical accuracy and a conviction in the trustworthiness of memories. I pictured hands frenetically tapping at keyboards and pens scribbling on paper, trying to keep pace with the deluge of impressions. I wondered if some felt this was the last opportunity to tell their stories and those of loved ones: We would hang out at the pool, place the ghetto blaster in the wheelbarrow and spend our evenings listening to music. On days when the movies were on we would go there. Sitting low in our seats, thinking no one could see us and the boy we were sitting next to. Lo and behold at the most crucial point of the movie an iron ore train would blast its horn followed by many a carriage. How to spoil a punch line.42 (Tina Grace) The hot wind in your hair as you rode around town. “Mum, I’m going for a ride” must have been uttered by every kid a dozen times a weekend. We would ride around for the sake of being outside, finding friends. (Alyssa Hubert)

62  Christina Lee Our house was full of cockroaches! And of course there were the flies and mosquitoes, lizards and snakes. Everything was covered in red dust from the mine. There were only two shops with not much choice. Everything was brought in by road. (Pauline Wilson) The air-conditioner ran twenty-four hours a day but power was cheap as it came from the company’s power station. Everyone had these little frogs and geckos living in the moist vents in the houses, and if they dropped to the floor they would dry out and die. (Bob Ryle) The intimate moments and memories divulged were surprising, and I  found myself becoming somewhat of a custodian for these narratives. This became evident as I sifted through the supplementary material such as magazine articles that some people provided. Many of these moments and memories arrived as fragments, and others as lengthy narrations in memoir form that drifted between whimsical anecdotes of everyday life to observations of a more serious and disturbing nature such as hushed cases of sexual abuse, a neighbour’s post-traumatic stress disorder and the bullying tactics of some union officials. Those distressing aspects tug at loose threads that are in the fabric of any society. They are the nagging inconvenient truths we convince ourselves never happened if they remain unsaid. But in a perverse way, at least for me, reading about them made the town more real for such issues are part of any real place, any true home. I remember whispers of unsavoury behaviour as I was growing up. They were always there, but they did not seem to fit the overarching theme of my town. While narrativising has the potential to reclaim buried/lost histories, it can reveal the limits – the selective recall – of this kind of place-making. The story of small-town communal spirit can itself be a totalising and romanticising narrative. The metaphor of an ‘oasis in the desert’, for example, fortifies memories and myths of the town as a sanctuary that buffers against things that may have been negatively viewed in the past or conveniently forgotten. The Pilbara’s red dirt now is recalled with affection though back then it stained everything on the washing line, and I too had all but forgotten about the purple iron ore dust that covered everything until reading about it again in the recollections of others. Recited accounts of mateship following a severe tropical cyclone or efforts to save a life after an industrial accident have become metonymic of a tight-knit community that overlooks the discrimination against migrants and low-paid labourers in the early years of Goldsworthy’s establishment. Andrea Fong wrote: ‘Before arriving [my husband] Eddie prepared me on what to expect. That and being young meant I adapted well to the conditions and lifestyle. Many didn’t’. For some the adage of the close-knit community connoted an insularity and parochialism that

Home Is Where the Hearth Was  63 could make it difficult for newcomers to acclimatise, compounded by the geographical isolation of the township. Rituals and spatial practices are integral to Goldsworthy as a site of becoming, that is, its ‘sense of social aliveness’. The townspeople have forged new social networks and a virtual community transcending the limitations of place and time. The public Facebook group entitled ‘Goldsworthy (The former town of…)’ has over nine hundred members and functions as a forum for sharing photographs, news, details of gatherings and obituaries. It is tantamount to the town newsletter but allows for dialogue and engagement. For instance, notifications of deaths are followed by comments ranging from supportive words for the family to amusing reminiscences. When the town’s long-serving medical practitioner ‘Doctor Ted’ died in August 2016, the post prompted an array of responses: ‘you fixed my burns after I fell off my motorcycle, fixed my dog’s dud ear and so many other things (I think you even taught me how to hang out my socks!)’, ‘I remember him digging gravel out of my knee after I fell over a dead cow doing the Black Rock Stakes. Vale, Ted’. The grief and memories are shared. Notably, the Facebook site is utilised by long standing residents of Goldsworthy, those whose sojourn was brief, and those who had relatives that once lived there. The children and grandchildren of former townspeople have a presence on the site, indicating the trans-generational social reach of the town. Aside from virtual and individual contacts made, face-to-face social gatherings also occur. Ever since Goldsworthy’s closure a reunion has been organised every two years in Perth. Through this tradition old friends are reunited and new family members are brought into the fold. Group portraits are taken that are reminiscent of school photographs of bygone days. The reunions exemplify a ‘feeling at home’ through kinships that are actively maintained, illustrating how Goldsworthy as home is not a ‘taken-for-granted, fixed and inert space’. While these practices and modes of remembrance have little or no validity in the authorised records of the Mount Goldsworthy operation, they have enabled people to engage with their past. To visit the old township is to reacquaint with one’s ghosts. Physically walking through the site generates powerful affects. Bell’s notion of the ‘ghost of the collective’ is most apt here. ‘This area feels to me like our area, and there is a sense of general and rightful possession’, he writes.43 This was expressed by my sister Josephine, who joined me on the Final Run, when she said: ‘We were the Flying Fleas. That was our town’. The place and event stoked intense feelings of territoriality and belonging. Her ghosts resided over the dump spoil barrier, claiming ownership of the site and testifying to her place within it. Traversing through Goldsworthy is a process of place-making and felt remembering in which the town that no longer exists is very much alive and present. A number of ex-residents said that they had returned to

64  Christina Lee the site after 1993. The majority searched for where their houses once stood and places of personal significance. Several went to the old mine site; now an iridescent turquoise lake with angled stepped walls in the middle of nowhere. The uncanny qualities of Goldsworthy bodied forth in encounters that elicited a sense of déjà vu: There was the satisfaction of finding points of interest in the bush and, in particular, satisfying myself of the position of my family’s home.… I remember a strange sense of apprehension as I neared where my house had been. I remember thinking “has it all come to this?” (Eric Balodis) Wandered up and down the former streets with my mind and thoughts in the past, reflecting on events and people of the town. A bit sad, when looking at what was left, but also happy that I had made contact with an old friend (Goldsworthy) once again. It was a bit like coming home from a long journey. (Tony Armbrust) I visited the coordinates that were Goldsworthy in January 2009. By now the town was mostly removed so we didn’t do much except to look for remnants of features that I remember from the town. For example, I like to think I found a mound that was part of where the BMX track used to be. I felt mostly nostalgia, which is what I feel whenever I think of Goldsworthy. (Angela Ho) These embodied engagements made the past immediate and tangible again. Several people brought their children to see Goldsworthy as a way of explaining their history. All spoke of the mixed emotions of sorrow and happiness (a ‘feeling of warmth’) that signalled a simultaneous homesickness and homecoming. The returns to the past discussed in this chapter are ‘not so easily readable within a nostalgic or sentimentalizing frame’.44 While there was an element of wish fulfilment (‘I know some former residents talk as if they wished [Goldsworthy] were still there and they could live there with the same people from thirty years ago’ [Christine Bauer]), many others talked of ‘reflection’ and the opportunities the town offered that would set them up later in life: My time at Goldsworthy was the making of me – I arrived at Goldsworthy as a callow middle-class Englishman with soft hands.… when I finally arrived back in England to live, I found that I wouldn’t take crap from anyone. (Peter Gompertz)

Home Is Where the Hearth Was  65 I experienced a wonderful life, maturing as a young wife to a mother of two children. (Nancy Richardson) Goldsworthy was the beginning of what became my lifelong occupation which saw me through to retirement. (Murray Hunt) There was a futurity in looking back, even if it was the inevitability of death. John Mitchell wrote that the town and work site ‘supplied us with a great lifestyle and secure future.… Still have great friendships with many, many former residents. Unfortunately too often [I] see many of them at funerals. We will have our turn’. Svetlana Boym outlines different nostalgic tendencies. Restorative nostalgia attempts to recuperate historical truth and ‘proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps’; reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is a meditation on the past and human finitude whereby remembering is an imperfect process.45 In the latter, the past is not sacrosanct nor static. Returning to the opening anecdote, the humour and irony of running the 2008 Black Rock Stakes was not lost on our team. Like a bizarre school excursion, we were travelling to a vanished town to complete a gruelling sprint marathon after only three weeks of patchy training. The injuries incurred – among them pulled muscles, torn ligaments, subungual hematomas and fractured ankles – dispelled any illusion that we could perfectly recreate or relive the past. Instead, in that moment our pasts and presents coalesced – the experience was both old and new. Our recollections and ghosts contributed to a living history in the remaking. As Gordon states, writing about hauntings and invisibilities ‘requires attention to what is not seen, but is nonetheless powerfully real; requires attention to what appears dead, but is nonetheless powerfully alive; ­requires attention to what appears to be in the past, but is nonetheless powerfully present’.46 The residual traces of Goldsworthy are everywhere, exposing the affective agency of the site itself. For example, where the spinifex grows at an unnaturally uniform height, that was the town oval. Where there are grid-like growths of white gums, one can ­detect the layout of the streets. The town protrudes from the ground with ­objects that have been missed by the decommissioning crew – unearthed bitumen, bits of chicken wire, a rusted sprinkler, a chipped kitchen tile, a Matchbox car. These buried things obstinately ‘unbury’ themselves and their memory, offering ‘visible and durable evidence of the more intangible gestures, habits and routines of the everyday’.47 Random items are reconnected to a socio-cultural and historical context. Despite its effacement Goldsworthy resists amnesia. The traces are the past confessing and reasserting itself.48 We are still here.

66  Christina Lee

Coda There is a photograph of our 2008 Black Rock Stakes team that is particularly memorable to me. And that is because I am not in it. Returning to Goldsworthy for the first time after nearly two decades, a childhood friend and I could not resist jumping the train tracks and entering the township. We went to places that defined our youth – the site of the primary school, the adjacent oval, the kindergarten in the middle of town, my house at 26 Coongan Street, the BMX track. Our footsteps compulsively followed the patterns of the streets, even though they were long gone. We were performing the past ‘by putting our bodies into its flow’, and in doing so ‘“memory materialises in the body, in movement” and “is lived in the present”’.49 There was a reverential quality to our careful treading. We picked up bits of detritus found on the ground like they were totems. We played with them in our hands, as if the action and their tangibility would provide a direct link to the past, or at least conjure memories of events and routines that were interwoven into childhoods spent in the outback. We found gratification and comfort in shared recollections that confirmed indivi­dual accounts, but we also walked in silence at times. For myself, this was when sensations, observations, half-forgotten/half-remembered memories and emotions surfaced that felt too inarticulate, personal, peculiar or banal to communicate meaningfully. While the spectral traces offered us ‘a language of belonging’ they also spoke of past loss. 50 The whimsical delight of finding ourselves in the flow of our own pasts was concomitant with the sobering realisation of the ephemerality of time and the inevitability of loss. In trespassing, Taygen and I – the two captains of the 1988 Flying Fleas team – missed the customary pre-race pictures. Just as Goldsworthy had disappeared from the photograph so had we. But this time, our absent presence signalled that we had gone back home. That day of the Final Run I sought an echo of sorts. Even when a scientific reason exists to explain the phenomenon of an echo, we often experience them as strange occurrences that seem to emanate from nowhere and nothing, that is, not from here and not from us. Think of the young child’s surprise at the sound of their own disembodied voice, or the adult calling out in the dark (‘Is anybody out there?’) as if tempting or willing another voice to reply. Walking through Goldsworthy was akin to such a moment of suspenseful waiting – between the send-out and the return – in which something else might appear. Here, I come back full circle to my childhood and the memory of a school project – a time capsule filled with bric-a-brac that an inspired headmaster believed would be part of the town’s legacy. The entire school attended this ceremonial burial. As far as we know that time capsule still lies buried somewhere under the old school grounds. Whether it is discovered or not, it is poetic confirmation that – as with the stalwarts of Wittenoom – our stories and dreaming are not yet ready to be over.

Home Is Where the Hearth Was  67

Notes 1 Michael Bell, ‘The Ghosts of Place’, Theory and Society 26, no. 6 (1997): 824. 2 Due to the small size of Goldsworthy’s school population, in 1988 the Flying Fleas comprised of children from Goldsworthy and Shay Gay. 3 In Returning to Nothing, Peter Read explores the meaning of ‘lost places’ in Australia – including villages submerged under artificially created lakes and towns destroyed by cyclones and bushfires – and the reasons people return to them. Peter Read, Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), vii. 4 Ien Ang, ‘Precariously at Home: Chinatown in Sydney, Australia in Asia’, in RUPC #2 (Victoria, Australia: Surpllus Pty Ltd and the University of Melbourne, 2013), 3. 5 Former Goldsworthy residents were invited to participate in a survey about the town, which was advertised on a public Facebook site in 2013. Respondents spanned all ages and represented different stages of the town’s operation. I  am grateful to all the people who participated and whose responses informed this chapter. 6 M. Kneeshaw, D. A. Kepert, I. J. Tehnas and M. A. Pudovskis, ‘From Mount Goldsworthy to Area C – Reflections on Forty Years of Iron Ore Exploration in the Pilbara’, Applied Earth Science 112, no. 1 (2003): 38. 7 Peter Newton, ‘In the North, Overseas Priorities Inhibit Local Identity, with Ultimate Economic and Social Costs’, Royal Australian Planning Institute Journal 17, no. 3 (1979): 189. 8 GML comprised of Consolidated Goldfields Australia, Cyprus Mines and Utah. P. Smith, ‘BHP Iron Ore Pty Ltd Protocol for Mine Closure Goldsworthy, Western Australia’, conference paper (Perth, Australia: 4th Large Open Pit Mining Conference, 1994), 29. 9 GML cited in My Balloons Will Fly Over Goldsworthy (Goldsworthy, Australia: Goldsworthy Primary School, 1984), 16. 10 Smith, ‘BHP Iron Ore Pty Ltd Protocol’, 29. 11 Ibid. In 1984 BHP Mineral’s acquisition of Utah gave it a forty-two per cent interest in Mount Goldsworthy. In 1990 the company gained full ownership. 12 Personal communication with Ronnie Hubert (2011). 13 Smith, ‘BHP Iron Ore Pty Ltd Protocol’, 29. 14 Ibid., 30. 15 Nicolas Rothwell, Another Country (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2007), 66. 16 Ibid., 65. 17 Cited in OK Travel, ‘Goldsworthy’ (2013), accessed 27 January 2013, . 18 Rothwell, Another Country, 65. 19 Bell, ‘The Ghosts of Place’, 815. 20 Ibid., 813, 815. 21 Kevin Hetherington, ‘Secondhandedness: Consumption, Disposal, and ­Absent Presence’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1 (2004): 170. 22 Tim Edensor, ‘Mundane Hauntings: Commuting Through the Phantasmagoric Working-Class Spaces of Manchester, England’, cultural geographies 15, no. 3 (2008): 325. 23 I have borrowed from and inverted Sharon Macdonald’s statement that ‘Nuremberg’s Nazi Party Rally Grounds raise questions of how far forgetting is possible in the face of an enormous physical presence’. Sharon Macdonald, Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 19.

68  Christina Lee 24 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 18. 25 R. T. Brandt, ‘The Genesis of the Mount Goldsworthy Iron Ore Deposits of Northwest Australia’, Economic Geology 61, no. 6 (1966): 999; Smith, ‘BHP Iron Ore Pty Ltd Protocol’, 29, 32, 30. 26 Steve Pile, ‘Spectral Cities: Where the Repressed Returns and Other Short Stories’, in Habitus: A Sense of Place, ed. Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 220. 27 James McNulty cited in A. William Musk, Nicholas de Klerk, Jan Eccles, Michael Hobbs, Bruce Armstrong, Lenore Layman and James McNulty, ‘Wittenoom, Western Australia: A Modern Industrial Disaster’, American Journal of Industrial Medicine 21, no. 5 (1992): 742; Phil Cornford, ‘No Place Like Home’, The Age (17 March 2007), accessed 30 January 2013, . 28 Government of Western Australia, ‘Government Policy for Wittenoom’ (2011), accessed 30 January 2013, . 29 Calla Wahlquist, ‘“Where Is Better Than Here?” Last Six Residents of Wittenoom Resist Efforts to Close Asbestos Mining Town’, The Guardian (16 December 2015), accessed 6 June 2016, . 30 Ibid. 31 Tropic of Capricorn (episode 3: ‘Australia’), dir. Dominic Ozanne (United Kingdom: BBC Two, 2008). 32 J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 5. 33 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 3–4. 34 Ibid., 4. 35 Kath Walker, ‘Foreword’, in My Balloons Will Fly Over Goldsworthy (Goldsworthy, Australia: Goldsworthy Primary School, 1984), 4. 36 Kerry Quealy, ‘Introduction’, in Our Babbling Brook (Goldsworthy, Australia: Goldsworthy Primary School, 1987), n.p. 37 I am grateful to John Carty for raising this point after I presented a paper on Goldsworthy at the 2014 Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference at the Australian National University in Canberra. 38 Fred R. Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 25. 39 Ibid., 51. 40 Ibid., 128. While Myers describes ‘identification with country’ as ‘a notion rooted in the fact that place always bears the imprint of persons’, I use this phrase in a more generalist sense to mean an ability to identify (with) the land because of one’s familiarity with it. 41 For instance, a person wrote a twenty-eight-page response to one of the questions. 42 The outdoor cinema screen backed onto the railway tracks. 43 Bell, ‘The Ghosts of Place’, 824. 4 4 Joe Moran, ‘History, Memory and the Everyday’, Rethinking History 8, no. 1 (2004): 58. 45 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 41, 49.

Home Is Where the Hearth Was  69 6 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 42. 4 47 Moran, ‘History, Memory and the Everyday’, 62. 48 Kelvin McCann cited in Rothwell, Another Country, 79. 49 Ann Game cited in Tim Edensor, ‘The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, no. 6 (2005): 840. 50 Karen E. Till, ‘Mapping Spectral Traces’, in Mapping Spectral Traces, ed. Karen E. Till (Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 2010), 1.

4 Unsettling Space and Time Journey to Purton Ships’ Graveyard Lisa Hill

It was late February 2014, a grey and somewhat dismal day, when I began my journey from historic docks in the city of Gloucester, England, along the old towpath of the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal. Like the haunting landscapes evoked in W. G. Sebald’s ‘travel writing’, my route was filled with moments in which fragments of past, memory and landscape folded together in uncertain and often unexpected ways.1 The Gloucester and Sharpness Canal was designed as a broad port-serving ship canal, carrying goods, fuel and labour between the Severn Estuary and the city of Gloucester. Opened in 1827, it was vital for the safe movement of shipping – avoiding the most dangerous sandbanks and tidal effects of the River Severn. 2 However, in the early 1900s significant erosion culminated in a landslip in the bank of the adjacent Severn just south of Purton, putting the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal at risk. The solution devised by the Chief Engineer of the Canal Company, A. J. Cullis, was to procure, and deliberately run aground at high tide, redundant vessels to reinforce the riverbank.3 Boats were periodically beached from 1909 until the 1960s. Today, the Purton ‘ships’ graveyard’ contains a diverse assemblage of vessels. The ghostly remains of schooners, Severn trows, lighters, and wooden, concrete and steel barges lie motionless, semi-­ submerged beneath the sediments they aim to trap. In varying stages of ruination, they have been subject to strong tidal currents and the ravages of the elements. Many have also fallen victim to vandalism and arson, which has greatly accelerated their decay. Sites such as these demand a certain level of openness – to manifestations of the past, to memories, traces and happenings. A growing interest in spectrality has recently emerged within cultural and historical geography as scholars rethink the manner in which spaces, events and practices disrupt notions of presence and absence.4 The spectral suggests a space-time in which past, present and future co-exist and interact in unpredictable ways. Understood in these terms, it is not a supernatural spirit hovering over a concrete world of real objects and living bodies but is integral to our experience of the world, as the enduring and unsettling capacity of place to haunt.5 Yet for Jacques Derrida the self is always-­already haunted, for ‘there is no Dasein without the uncanniness, without the

Unsettling Space and Time  71 strange familiarity … of some spectre’.6 In other words, the self is constituted by the revenant or the incessantly returning; the spectres that cannot be exorcised. Indeed, the spectral destabilises our sense of place, time and self through the arrival of haunting memories. According to Derrida, as long as we perceive time as ‘a historical temporality comprised of the successive linking of presents identical to themselves and contemporary with themselves’, we are unable to grasp the true nature of history and memory.7 Spectrality leads us ‘to doubt [the] reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present … and everything that can be opposed to it: absence, non-presence, non-­ effectivity, inactuality, virtuality’.8 But to adequately convey the spectral also requires a willingness to allow for the disintegration of conventional narrative forms for, as John Wylie asserts, ‘as well as exploring forms and fabrics of spectrality, spectral geographies should themselves be spectral’.9 In the narrative that follows, I seek to reveal the haunting trace of the spectral. Focusing on the post-industrial landscape of the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal and the haunting remains at Purton, I take inspiration from W. G. Sebald, who combines existential memoir, autobiography, travel writing and phantasmagoria, to explore the legacy of the past and its capacity to generate affective registers, to evoke and to unsettle.10 In my account of the ships’ graveyard at Purton and its ongoing association with the ­Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, I seek not to impose a neat, linear narrative, but to reveal something of the complex temporalities that operate across space, and the enduring capacity of place to haunt. In doing so, I seek to invoke multiple meanings and representations. Connections between text, image and place are deliberately left unstated, so that it is possible for the reader to detect alternative potentialities and trajectories, times and places, presences and absences.

Gloucester Docks Perhaps it is the sheer size of the Gloucester Docks complex, with its numerous wharves, bridges and yards, that creates a vertiginous feel. The old warehouses – many now transformed into exclusive flats – tower high above vast expanses of water, while defunct railway lines wind their way to empty sidings. The sickness I experienced that day while wandering the labyrinth of docks and warehouses was made worse by a disorienting and disturbing sense of the uncanny.11 On more than one occasion I reached a dead end at the water’s edge, awash with restored barges and pleasure cruisers, and was forced to retrace my steps. I walked past the Barge Arm that erstwhile provided valuable quay space, only to find myself some minutes later emerging at its entrance. Opened to river craft in 1812, the Main Basin, from which the Barge Arm extended, was the original terminus of the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal.12 Here

72  Lisa Hill cargoes were transferred to smaller craft, which passed through the lock and continued on via the River Severn to the industrial heartlands of the ­Midlands. Finished in 1825, the Barge Arm was an early feature that was to accommodate small vessels bringing goods for local distribution.13 Yards with tramway sidings were laid out around it, used mainly by coal, stone and slate merchants. Baker’s Quay was constructed in the late 1830s by a group of Birmingham bankers and local businessmen, while Victoria Dock was opened in 1849.14 In the early 1850s, Llanthony Quay was built opposite Baker’s Quay by the Gloucester and Dean Forest Railway Company (later taken over by the Great Western Railway) to provide a means of supplying coal from the Forest of Dean as cargo for export.15 Behind the Quay are the ruins of Llanthony Secunda Priory, a former Augustinian priory founded in the twelfth century. The Gloucester Docks is a site that swarms with ghostly intimations of the past: huge iron mooring rings embedded in the quayside that might once have held magnificent three-mast barques; the foundation stones of a crane, which would have been operated by hand; tramway lines that carried wagons pulled by the Midland Railway’s team of horses; faded advertising or ‘ghost signs’ painted onto crumbling brickwork.16 All are encircled by tired Victorian pubs from which sailors once spilled full of ‘grog’.17 During the second half of the nineteenth century, additional

Figure 4.1  Gloucester Docks. © Lisa Hill, 2014

Unsettling Space and Time  73 work was undertaken below Llanthony Bridge. A dock and large pond for floating timber were constructed in Monk Meadow, west of the Canal, in 1891 and 1896 respectively.18 Monk Meadow Dock would later function as a petroleum depot, and by the 1930s petroleum brought up the Canal in special tanker barges had become the most important traffic to Gloucester. Despite these additions, there were few major projects after the mid-nineteenth century. Many seagoing vessels had become too large for the docks, and for the Canal itself. Instead, the Canal Company turned its attention to the development of facilities at Sharpness, where the first docks were opened in 1874.19 With seagoing vessels docking at Sharpness, cargo could be loaded onto barges and transported via the Canal to Gloucester – a practice that persisted well into the 1960s. However, traffic slowly dwindled in the face of competition from motorways and the rise of container shipping. It is a familiar story of decline. In my formative years, the town of Bridgwater, in the southwest of England, was the centre of my world. On a Saturday afternoon, my maternal grandfather and I would while away the hours exploring the docks and marina. Erected between 1837 and 1841, this ‘floating harbour’ became the terminus of the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal, with connections to the Bristol Channel via the River Parratt. Sand, coal, timber and flour passed through the thriving commercial port. Bridgwater itself had been a leading industrial town, exporting bricks, tiles and ironwork, but by the 1970s these industries had long since died. Construction of the floating harbour had been a major undertaking. Excavated spoil material was originally stored on the north side of the docks site, creating what became known locally as the ‘mump’. A mountain of earth and clay, the mump was cloaked in scrub-like vegetation. I remember it as a waste ground, a wilderness place on the edge of town. And it was on the mump that my grandfather and I had our greatest adventures. Scrambling to the top, we would slide back down on scraps of corrugated iron or cardboard. I never tired of this somewhat dangerous game. However, in the 1980s a redevelopment programme was approved to make way for dockside apartments, bars and restaurants – and the mump was removed. I do not recall the work that was done to erase it. It was almost as if it had vanished into thin air. Looking back on those halcyon days, I find myself haunted by a place and a time to which I can never return. It is often our own spectrality that is the most disorienting and unnerving. Our earliest and vaguest recollections are complicated by the loss of youth, the spectre of our former selves. It is in this respect that the inescapable revenance of the past acts not as a consoling or revelatory disclosure. It is, rather, a fragmentation and a fracturing, a dislocation. I noted the names of the warehouses as I drifted from quay to quay – Victoria, Albert, Britannia, Alexandra – all reminiscent of bustling docks and industrious Victorian England. It was in 1826 that the Canal

74  Lisa Hill Company commenced building the first of the large warehouses that were to become the dominant architectural feature of the Gloucester Docks. 20 Most held grain or salt. In the early days, grain imported through Gloucester was sent on to be processed by mills in the Midlands, but during the second half of the nineteenth century several mills were established in the docks, all worked by steam power. Located in front of Reynold’s Warehouse is the Grade II Listed Gloucester Mariners’ Chapel. Opened in 1849, the cost of building was met by subscriptions and private benefactions. 21 It was to serve the large numbers of dockworkers, sailors and boatmen. Men of many nationalities worshipped there, taking spiritual comfort where they could. Venturing inside, it was even smaller than I had imagined. I rested a while on one of the pews, enjoying a moment of solitude, emerging some minutes later to find that a rabble of schoolchildren had gathered outside. Also adorning the quayside is steam dredger SND No. 4. Built in Holland in 1926 for the Sharpness New Docks and Gloucester and Birmingham Navigation Company, she worked on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, River Severn and at Lydney Docks until 1963. Now fully restored, the dredger is an exhibit at the Gloucester Waterways Museum. And there she sits, eerily quiet, pigeons perched in her buckets.

Monk Meadow and Hempsted South from Gloucester, I followed the west bank of the Canal past timber yards, industrial units, redundant chimneys, and warehouses ripe for development. Sometimes there is an absence so palpable that it becomes crowded with remembered and imagined impressions of that which used to be. As I neared the old oil depot at Monk Meadow Dock, I recalled grey and ghostly images I had seen in the Gloucester Waterways ­Museum – phantom memories of the Regent Oil Company’s fuel tanker barge Regent Swallow at Monk Meadow Dock sometime in the 1930s, and the tugs Severn Iris and Primrose cutting through the ice on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal during the ‘Big Freeze’ of 1963. During the worst of the weather, tankers were assembled in convoys, and with the help of the tugs traffic was kept moving. Further south, a new housing estate at Monk Meadow Quay is filled with rows of regimented houses, raised on the likes of ‘Drydock Way’, ‘Jetty Road’ and ‘Quayside Way’. These recent additions to the landscape look distinctly out of place – the old names endowed with new meaning and purpose at odds with their prior significance. There is something bleak and depressing about this stretch of the Canal, despite the presence of factories and businesses on the opposite bank with the busy Bristol Road just beyond. Used car dealerships, petrol stations and repair shops jostle with marine engineers and boatyards. As I continued along the west bank towards Hempsted Bridge, I noticed

Unsettling Space and Time  75 the unmistakeable aroma of fast food drifting from a nearby burger van. The bridge, until recently a busy thoroughfare bypassing the city of Gloucester, is now traffic-free except for pedestrians and cyclists. ­Traditionally an area occupied by boat builders, it was at ­Hempsted that a fleet of seagoing ferrous concrete barges were assembled and launched by Gloucester Ferro-Concrete Shipbuilding Co. Ltd. The first, the Creterock, was launched on 23 November 1918, followed by her sister ships the Creteridge, Creteriver, Creteravine and finally, the ­Creterampart.22 Described as ‘dumb barges’, they were towed by a tug, and were deployed towards the end of the First World War to take munitions from Dover to Calais. According to an article in The Citizen dated 1960, concrete lighters were still in use at that time in the salt basin of Gloucester Docks. Mr H. Crook, who witnessed one of the launchings, saw the immense wave which resulted from the barge’s broadside entry into the water, ducking a number of spectators on the opposite bank. 23 They must have been standing where I was stood.

Quedgeley and Hardwicke The west bank below Hempsted Bridge is fairly open. At the end of the long straight, the Canal has been diverted at Two Mile Bend where the Netheridge Bridge, opened in May 2007, carries the new Gloucester bypass. South of the bridge there is a large sewerage works. It is impossible to avoid the unpleasant odour. From here, the Canal takes on a more rural aspect, despite skirting the vast Gloucester suburb of Quedgeley. From Sims Bridge to Rea Bridge, and then to Sellars Bridge, the scenery changes little, and I allowed my mind to wander – from vague memories of a school trip in a narrowboat some twenty-five years ago, to the spectres of Purton, and what might lie ahead on my journey. Eventually, I came across the vestiges of Hardwicke Bridge which was demolished in the 1980s. Disrupting the very fabric of space-time are traces that persist – of bygone structures (both physical and social), historical events and lives lived – traces that produce a series of disjunctions through which the past erupts into the present. The bridge keeper’s cottage is still there. Somewhat incongruous in the absence of the bridge, it presents its best face to the water. Built to similar specifications as other bridge keepers’ cottages on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, it is a neat, white, single-storey structure with a grandeur disproportionate to its size. Its Classical Greek fluted columns and pediments were the height of fashion in the nineteenth century, intended to be a statement of the solidity and refinement of the Canal Company. Bridge keepers were expected to open their bridge for any vessel passing along the Canal, and could be called out at night for an additional fee. On one specified day of the year, bridge keepers would close the towpath to the public to prevent it from becoming established as a public right of way. An occasional distressing

76  Lisa Hill duty was to help recover a body from the water using drags provided by the Canal Company. From here to Saul Junction I saw barely a soul, even among the moored narrowboats at Parkend Bridge.

Saul Junction The completion of a junction with the Stroudwater Canal at Saul in the 1820s enabled vessels to enter Gloucester Docks from cloth mills in the Stroudwater Valley, and opened up trade between the Midlands, Gloucester and London. Lockgates were used to raise the level of the Stroudwater Canal by some four feet to match the level of the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal. Here they remain in situ, long since abandoned to the ravages of time, extant elements that through their desolation conjure a sense of the infrastructure of which they were once a part. Passing through Saul Junction that afternoon I noticed the large R. W. Davis boatyard, a hive of activity. Famed for the restoration and replication of historic craft, R. W. Davis & Son Ltd. has been building boats at Saul Junction since 1887. 24 Originally specialising in wooden ships, the company has evolved over the years to include the construction of steel vessels such as replica Dutch barges and working narrowboats. Saul Junction is a picturesque and popular spot, even in the winter. I sat for a while at the Stables Café, cradling a warm cup of tea and listening to the conversation around me. On the table to my right, talk had turned to events in the Ukraine, to revolution and political instability. Opened in 2008, the café occupies a stable block built by the Canal Company for the towing horses. A series of by-laws defined how many horses were needed, and what charges were to be levied. As tugs started towing vessels along the Canal from 1860, the role of the towing horses gradually diminished. Footsore and weary I continued on, eager to reach the village of Frampton-on-Severn and a bed for the night.

Frampton-on-Severn Frampton reputedly has the longest village green in England. It is also the site of the former Cadbury Bros. Ltd. factory, opened beside the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal in 1916.25 It was here that ground cocoa beans and sugar were blended with locally produced milk, and then baked to form ‘chocolate crumb’.26 It was probably growing demand, as well as the need to minimise the distance over which milk had to be transported in the days before refrigerated bulk tankers, that led Cadbury to locate a factory in Gloucestershire. The Severn Vale was, in the early twentieth century, prime dairy country with rich pasture and numerous farms. Frampton was well positioned, but its crucial advantage was the Canal.

Unsettling Space and Time  77 Cocoa beans and sugar arrived at the ports of the Bristol Channel where they were discharged onto lighters or barges, then brought up the River Severn, and Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, to Frampton.27 Chocolate crumb was then loaded onto narrowboats to be taken up the Canal, back onto the River Severn, then via the Staffordshire and W ­ orcestershire Canal to the main Cadbury factory at Bournville, Birmingham.28 Known as a paternalist employer, Cadbury provided a range of facilities in Frampton, including a bowling green, tennis courts and a first-class cricket field. It was a significant local employer until closure of the factory in the early 1980s. The iconic white concrete silo, added in the 1930s as a store for the ingredients of Cadbury’s chocolate crumb, today stands out against the surrounding landscape. Its stark modernism must have been quite shocking for the residents of this quiet backwater. Its bold geometry and imposing architectural style is a monument to the Art Deco movement, while its faded façade harks back to Britain’s former industrial glory. Just south of here is the first of two crossing points at Frampton. ­Fretherne Bridge carried the turnpiked Perry Way across the Canal, and beyond to a ferry – crossing the River Severn. The Canal was once a busy highway for people taking their produce for sale at the twice-weekly Gloucester market. According to an information sign on the bridge, Frampton Packet Boats operated a horse-drawn service from this location in the 1840s. And in 1851, a regular steamboat service was introduced. It was at this juncture that I left the Canal and headed into the village, towards the Bell Inn. Often I have been regaled with stories about the annual ‘elver eating contest’, which was once staged here on the green. It was stopped in the mid-1980s when stocks were depleted and prices had soared. Today, elvers or young eels are a delicacy found in expensive restaurants and shipped as far afield as Japan, but in the past a plateful of elvers was a cheap treat for working-class people all over the southwest of England. They could even be bought by the pint from local fishmongers. In mid-March fisherfolk would disappear down to the river in the dead of night – as some still do. Picking a favoured spot on the bank, they would set down a lamp to attract the young eels, scoop them up and carry them home. Often fried in bacon fat, they looked like little white worms when cooked, and were never a dish for the faint-hearted. Next morning, I felt a growing sense of unease as I set off from Frampton-­on-Severn. I had suffered a fitful night’s sleep, with the names of the decaying hulks at Purton whirling round in my head. Retracing my steps back to the Canal, I proceeded south to Splatt Bridge – named after an ancient plot of waste ground close to Frampton Pill, which carried the road from Church End across the Canal and into the adjacent fields. The bridgeman was opening the swing bridge as I arrived, thus enabling me to observe the winding mechanism operated by hand. A large and ostentatious pleasure cruiser passed through, travelling north along the Canal.

78  Lisa Hill

Figure 4.2  Opening Splatt Bridge. © Lisa Hill, 2014

My mood lifted as I made my way south along the Canal. The surrounding countryside between Frampton and Slimbridge opened out before me, and for a moment I felt as though I could walk for miles and miles.

Slimbridge It was the call of a curlew – one of many wading birds occupying the marshes of the Severn Estuary – that brought me back to the here and now. Drifting along in something of a daze, I had returned in my mind to a Royal Geographical Society dinner at Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetland’s Trust (WWT) attended some fifteen years ago. I could recollect few details about the evening, except for the presence of Lady Philippa Scott and the local chairman’s rather amusing if not outrageous welcome to ‘fellows and their wives’. Sir Peter Scott was born in London, the only child of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and sculptor Kathleen Bruce. Arguably the most influential conservationist of the twentieth century, he was knighted in 1973. He founded the Severn Wildfowl Trust (later the WWT) in 1946, and was a founder and the first chairman of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). According to her obituary in The Guardian newspaper on 10 January 2010, his second wife, Lady Scott, was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where her British naval officer father was recovering from tuberculosis. 29 In Britain, during the Second World War, she had served in the Land Army and was later

Unsettling Space and Time  79 engaged in intelligence work at the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. She spent a year in post-war Belgrade, capital of what had by then become communist Yugoslavia, for the Foreign Office, before returning in 1947. The early years of their marriage were devoted to the newly founded wildfowl centre at Slimbridge that would become the world’s finest collection of ducks, geese and swans. After her husband’s death in 1989, Lady Scott continued to promote the cause of conservation. She lived at Slimbridge until the end of her life, overseeing the wildfowl collection that she and her husband had created. The WWT at Slimbridge is accessed via the busy Patch Bridge, which spans the Canal. It is here that narrowboats and cruisers congregate, and couples saunter along on an afternoon stroll. Leaving the relative hustle and bustle behind, I began the final leg of my journey to Purton. I wandered, solitary, lost in my thoughts.

Purton I was relieved to finally reach the village of Purton. The weight of the past had taken its toll. Although aware that work on the waterways had been a dangerous business, the area between Purton and Sharpness seems to have been particularly treacherous. Indeed, I had spent a little too long in Gloucester Records Office sifting through inquests, coroners’ reports and witness statements, as I searched for information about the Canal. Unfolding each document with care, I was surprised to find them crisp and clean – they could almost have been written yesterday. Sworn testimonials and eyewitness accounts tell of frequent deaths by drowning, and skippers haunted by the loss of their crew. On 14 April 1863, Able Seaman Anthony James fell from the Alma and was drowned. Being towed by horses along the Gloucester and Berkeley Canal, the vessel had been laden with wheat. According to the Master, Henry Jones, the young lad was stood high on the cargo, pulling a rope which was wound around the mainsail. He gave the rope a sudden jerk, fell down onto the cargo, and rolled off into the water. His lifeless body was recovered thirty minutes later.30 These stories are haunting – not because they tell of lives lost, but because they reveal something intimate about lives lived. At sixteen years of age James Bearman was an apprentice on board the barque Albatross. It was the evening of 27 February 1865 when Bearman ‘accidentally casually and by misfortune fell into the Gloucester and Berkeley Canal and was drowned in the waters’ as he returned to the vessel from shore.31 When his body was retrieved from the water near Purton Bridge he had in his possession a two shilling piece, two penny pieces and a halfpenny, a penknife and piece of chain, some apples and tobacco.32 It is these quotidian items that become the material through which a person’s absence is felt.

80  Lisa Hill I could only imagine the ghosts that haunt these waters on a cold morning, as the mists are rising from the Severn. In January 2014, the bodies of two boatmen were found here – one in the Canal and the other on the towpath – both thought to have drowned.33 South of the village of Purton, as the Canal stretches on to Sharpness, are the remnants of the Severn Railway Bridge where stone-built columns previously supported a swing bridge section over the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal. Completed in October 1879, the bridge quickly became a vital link between towns on the River Severn and, in the post-war years, it carried school children from Sharpness to Lydney Grammar School. But on 25 October 1960, the ties between these communities were abruptly severed when two oil barges, the Wastedale H and the Arkendale H, collided with column 17, sending two bridge spans crashing into the Severn. A thick fog descended on that fateful night and, as they neared the difficult entrance to Sharpness Docks, the vessels had become entangled. 34 As they fought to break apart, the locked barges drifted into fast flowing currents and were swept towards the bridge. They struck it at around 10.30 pm, sending flames high into the air. 35 Five crew members perished. The wrecks are still visible at low tide. But it is Purton’s ships’ graveyard, lying on the eastern banks of the River Severn, that marks the end of my journey. Taking a short diversion from the towpath, my first encounter was with the formidable hulks of the ferrous concrete barges. Built by Wates Building Group Ltd. in Barrow-in-Furness in 1941, they were ordered by the Ministry of War Transport, and were designed to replace vessels lost during the Second World War. 36 Purton’s concrete fleet formed part of a flotilla that was cheap to construct, while having the advantage of being prefabricated and thus able to be assembled and dispatched quickly. Ferrous concrete barges were eventually issued to all of the United Kingdom’s major port authorities. However, they were never very popular – not for transport or storage – for as well as being heavy and difficult to manoeuvre, they were also porous! Stepping onto the deck of one of these colossal concrete white elephants, I could not help but think that they had finally been put to good use. Hulls overflowing with estuarine mud and capped with common saltmarsh grass, they had surely found their calling. From here I cast my eyes down the shoreline, to the remains of several wood-framed vessels that lie beached, their rotting carcasses grouped as if to form some kind of grotesque display. From the outset I was interested in the shape and nature of the things to be found there: the curve of a bow, its bleached white timbers, the tangled precision of the blades of saltmarsh grass. The Dursley was one of a fleet of barges to spend most of her active life plying back and forth between Bristol, Avonmouth and Gloucester

Unsettling Space and Time  81 via the Severn and the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal. Built in 1926 at Monk Meadow, she was of wooden construction and bore the official number 145630.37 During her early years, the Dursley brought timber to S. J. Moreland’s match factory in Gloucester, towed by the tugs of the Severn and Canal Carrying Company, which had been formed back in 1874.38 It was essentially a one-way trip, with the barges making their return journey empty that perhaps contributed to the downturn of the industry. The Dursley reached the end of her working life in 1959, and in 1963 she was towed up the Severn and ran aground on the beach at Purton.39 Here, her bow protrudes from the mud. Like a ghost ship rising from the depths, her stern can just be discerned beneath the sediment and grasses. Near to the Dursley lies the once mighty Dispatch – all that remains of the Geddie shipbuilding empire. Dispatch was a large topsail schooner built at Kingston-on-Spey, Scotland, in 1888, and was the penultimate sailing ship to be launched from the Geddie slips. Some eight hundred sizeable vessels were built there in the nineteenth century, but the Spey shipbuilding trade was eclipsed in the latter part of the nineteenth century by the railways. Purpose-built for the distant Newfoundland fish trade, the Dispatch is believed to have made her maiden voyage to Morocco, most likely with salted fish from Newfoundland. Some decades later she was shipped back to the United Kingdom to a yard at Hempsted Bridge on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal where she was cut down and reregistered in 1940 as the New Dispatch. Stripped of her figurehead, masts and sails, New Dispatch was reborn as a towed barge carrying grain and general cargo in the Bristol Channel. It is believed that the New Dispatch was eventually towed into the River Severn in 1961.40 And there she rests, barely recognisable as a seagoing vessel. Arson and vandalism have culminated in the total destruction of her bow and stern sections, leaving only parts of her port and starboard, which protrude from the ground like the ribs of a beached whale. Nevertheless, souvenir hunters continue to take whatever they can. What remains is all charred wood and rusting iron, the decaying materiality of mutable matter. As a sleek topsail schooner, the Dispatch would have been an impressive sight when under full sail. Nowhere is her current form more atmospherically depicted than in work by the artist Emma Stibbon. Charged with the energy of change, Stibbon’s work calls forth the fullness of the past and the uncertainty of the future. But it was to the Severn Collier that I found myself drawn. Originally a motorised vessel, she was built in 1937 to replace Cadbury’s towed barges which had until then supplied their Frampton-on-Severn factory’s weekly demand of three hundred tons of coal from the nearby Sharpness coal terminal. It was initially conceived that the Collier, as she became known, could cut costs by navigating the short distance to the Forest of Dean coal port and negotiating with the coal exporters

82  Lisa Hill

Figure 4.3  The Dispatch. © Lisa Hill, 2014

themselves, thus effectively removing the burden of paying Sharpness levied port dues and taxes. This was not to be. During her maiden voyage it was quickly discovered that her engine size had been grossly miscalculated. The Collier was duly towed back across to Sharpness, where her engine was removed and she was used as a dumb barge until 1965.41 Residues of blue and red paint stubbornly adorn her interior. One portal remains intact. I took my leave from Purton via the charming village church of St John the Evangelist, founded in 1874. Inside sat an elderly gentleman with his aged dog. He ushered the animal out of the way as he proceeded to tell me about the stained glass windows which had been added around four years ago, and through which sunlight flooded down the aisle of the church early in the morning. He talked about the first boats he had ever boarded in 1940 at the age of fifteen years, Monarch and Britannia, and their relegation to the Purton foreshore. He had spent some three decades working on the Canal, taking chocolate crumb from Frampton to Bournville, and returning with matches from Moreland’s in Gloucester. Four hours to do sixteen miles and sixteen bridges, he said. On some days he would manage three trips in one day – but that would be a long and tiring day because of the need to remain vigilant at all times. It was this chance encounter that impressed upon me the transience of all things human.

Unsettling Space and Time  83

Notes 1 John Wylie, ‘The Spectral Geographies of W. G. Sebald’, cultural geographies 14, no. 2 (2007): 171–188; Lisa Hill, ‘Archaeologies and Geographies of the Post-Industrial Past: Landscape, Memory and the Spectral’, cultural geographies 20, no. 3 (2013): 379–396. 2 The River Severn has the second highest tidal range in the world, and a flow speed reaching up to thirteen knots. 3 L. Paul Barnett, The Purton Hulks: The Story of the Purton Ships’ Graveyard (Purton: The Friends of Purton Publishing, 2008), 2. 4 For example, see Kate Shipley Coddington, ‘Spectral Geographies: Haunting and Everyday State Practices in Colonial and Present-Day Alaska’, Social and Cultural Geography 12, no. 7 (2011): 743–756; Dydia DeLyser, ‘Authenticity on the Ground: Engaging the Past in a California Ghost Town’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, no. 4 (1999): 602–632; Tim Edensor, ‘The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, no. 6 (2005): 829–849; Steve Pile, Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London: Sage, 2005). 5 Derek McCormack, ‘Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives: The Spectral Geographies of Material Remains’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100, no. 3 (2010): 642. 6 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 100. 7 Ibid., 70. 8 Ibid., 39. 9 Wylie, ‘The Spectral Geographies of W. G. Sebald’, 184. 10 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London: Vintage, 2001); Vertigo (London: Harvill Press, 1999); The Rings of Saturn (London: Harvill Press, 1998); The Emigrants (London: Harvill Press, 1996). 11 The power of the uncanny is arrived at not by an encounter with anything strikingly odd or unknown; rather, it is held within something that has a familiarity about it. As such, the uncanny arises from instances of repetition, including incidents wherein one becomes lost and accidentally retraces one’s steps. 12 N. M. Herbert, A History of the County of Gloucester. Volume 4: The City of Gloucester (London: Victoria County History, 1988), 253. 13 Ibid., 254. 14 Ibid., 254, 255. 15 Ibid., 255. 16 A barque is a type of sailing vessel with three or more masts, having the foremasts rigged square and only the aftermast rigged fore-and-aft. 17 Traditionally consumed by sailors; a drink made with water or ‘small beer’ (a weak beer), lemon or lime juice and rum. 18 Herbert, A History of the County of Gloucester, 257. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 254. 21 Ibid., 255. 22 Gloucester Records Office (GRO D4325). 23 Ibid. 24 R. W. Davis & Son Ltd., ‘About – Overview’, R. W. Davis & Son Ltd.: Ship and Boat Builders (2012), accessed 11 March 2014, .

84  Lisa Hill 25 C. R. Elrington and N. M. Herbert (eds.), A History of the County of Gloucester. Volume 10: Westbury and Whitstone Hundreds (London: Victoria County History, 1972), 165. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Stephen Moss, ‘Philippa Scott Obituary’, The Guardian (11 January 2010), accessed 11 March 2014, . 30 (GRO CO1/I/9/B 1 16 No. 5). 31 (GRO CO1/I/11/A/1 No. 11). 32 Ibid. 33 Ben Falconer, ‘Updated: Two Men Found Dead Near Sharpness’, Gloucester Citizen (12 January 2014), accessed 12 March 2014, . 34 Chris Witts, Severn Bridge Disaster (Gloucester: River Severn Publications, 2010). 35 Ibid., 15. 36 Janet Presley, ‘Two Years on the Banks of Purton’, The Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 67 (2010): 14. 37 Andrew Barton, ‘A Boat Named Dursley’, Journal of the Dursley and Cam Society (2006): 14. 38 (GRO D2460/4/5/1-4); Barton, ‘A Boat Named Dursley’, 14. 39 Barton, ‘A Boat Named Dursley’, 14. 40 L. Paul Barnett, ‘Dispatch/New Dispatch’, Friends of Purton: Largest Ships’ Graveyard in Maritime Britain (n.d.), accessed 3 December 2013, . 41 L. Paul Barnett, ‘Severn Collier’, Friends of Purton: Largest Ships’ Graveyard in Maritime Britain (n.d.), accessed 3 December 2013, .

5 ‘Popping Up to See Pat’ Attending Absence at Roadside Shrines Elly Bavidge

In 2005, on a routine trip to my brother’s work, the face of a young blonde boy staring out from a photograph sellotaped to a lamp post interrupted my usual unthinking driving gaze. I parked by a call centre and crossed two lanes of fast traffic to read the words of a mother to her dead child: ‘To my darling son, I can’t believe you’ve gone. The pain is unbearable but you will always be in our hearts, love Mam’. Over the weeks the shrine grew and I became increasingly fascinated by the intrusions of the personal that were taking place at the side of my local road. I began to notice and map the locations of other shrines as I drove to teach and study in Newcastle upon Tyne, becoming attuned to their presence and the emotional charge they brought to my journeys. Deeply private and yet commanding attention, since that initial discovery in 2005 I have found roadside shrines to be particularly amenable to cultural studies analyses due to their symbolic richness, physical presence and performative power.1 The proliferation of roadside shrines means that we now encounter death in the everyday. We see them up and down the country; football scarves tied to road signs, damp teddies oddly placed at motorway slip roads, scrawled notes addressing someone loved. They appear as eruptions of colour on grey roadsides. The moment of encounter is brief but long enough to impress a sense of loss and to understand that a tragedy took place at that very spot. We know that someone is gone but remembered, and we imagine what the story behind the shrine might be. Roadside shrines are a striking example of the way spaces can take on spectral qualities. Intense grief is an experience that transports us to other times and draws forth other places. The sites that make this experience tangible will be markedly different from other spaces and will disrupt the fabric of the everyday. Memory sites like a roadside shrine reflect the peculiarity and particularity of their physical realisations, such as the outward expression of the memory of a child now gone creating a special hallowed space in a depersonalised environment. At these sites the private and the public cross and overlap in an effort to make the past present, to retain the presence of the deceased and anchor memory in space at a time of increased anxiety of placelessness. This chapter explores the usefulness of the concept of heterotopia to comprehending

86  Elly Bavidge roadside shrines and considers how the notion of absence-presence has extended thinking on sites of memory. The memorials share the iconography of private remembrance in a way that problematises the borders separating interior from exterior. As spaces that are transformed by death, they introduce a sacred landscape into the mundane and act as thresholds for the communication between the living and the dead. I argue that while the sites may represent a gentle critique of traditional forms of memorialising, they do not negate them entirely. In fact, the significance of roadside memorials comes from the way they are in dialogue with, and incorporate aspects of, other memorial spaces that they exist alongside.

Placing Memory There has long been the sense that memory is becoming disconnected from place and a belief in the demise of authentic and secure places to house memory. This is attributed to a number of factors: the impact of mass communications and technology resulting in ‘time-space compression’; the creation of historic zones and heritage marketing; regeneration projects and gentrification; the effects of multiculturalism and mass immigration culminating in the breakdown of ethnic and national boundaries. 2 These transformations have destabilised categories such as home, nation, community and identity, and has replaced them with foreignness, difference, dispersion and alterity. The impact of these shifts has been a main concern of memory studies and has shaped the central tenets of the field. Pierre Nora forwards that ‘memory has been torn’.3 Les lieux de mémoire or sites of memory have developed because there are no longer milieux de mémoire or ‘real environments of memory’. This can be seen, for example, in the disappearance of peasant culture as ‘that quintessential repository of collective memory’.4 Nora presided over a massive recording and cataloguing of the ‘places’ and symbols that can be said to make up French identity, from the Louvre to croissants, and his analysis was essentially intended as a project of deconstruction. For Nora, lieux de mémoire are a symptom of rupture representing the end of tradition. He asserts that changes in memory and memorialising are due to the ‘acceleration of history’ by which he means ‘that the most continuous or permanent feature of the modern world is no longer continuity or permanence but change’.5 The legacy that is so apparent in Nora’s binary of milieux de mémoire (organic places of stable, authentic, lived memory) and lieux de mémoire (empty, commodified places) has proven difficult to escape. More broadly, theorising on memory has inherited the binary oppositions that characterise theorising on space in modernity – old/new, pre-industrial/post-industrial, rural/urban, good/bad. The city has often been viewed as an exceptionally bad place for memory, represented by

‘Popping Up to See Pat’  87 the host of personalities who emerged from it – from Charles ­Baudelaire’s ‘flâneur’ and Georg Simmel’s ‘stranger’ to Gustave Le Bon’s ‘crowd’. ­Detached observers wandering and inhabiting the city, these figures undermined memory with their restlessness, anonymity and fascination with urbanity and the new. Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin believed that the city’s bombardment of the senses causes memory to retreat and fail.6 M. Christine Boyer even surmises that the modern city engendered new psychological disturbances: the increasing medicalisation of memory introduced the terms ‘amnesia, paramnesia, hypermnesia’.7 Boyer implies that the afflictions of modernity manifest physically and psychologically in the landscape and its occupants. It seems that in the harmful city there is too little of the right sort of memory and too much of the wrong sort. Scholars in cultural geography and death studies have since identified vibrant practices in urban locations that challenge the idea that the city is incompatible with pastness, demonstrating the powerful and complicated relationship between memory, affect and place. Furthermore, there is now a significant body of literature focusing on particular memorial sites as rich and profound spaces precisely because of their ephemerality, ranging from ghost bikes and memorial webpages to roadside shrines.8 Importantly, theories of both place and memory have moved away from static models towards the notion of continual reproduction and becoming. They have been partly influenced by Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia that sidesteps the binaries that have shaped previous approaches. In his seminal essay ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, Foucault suggests that the current experience of space takes ‘the form of relations among sites’.9 He is especially interested in those sites ‘that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect’.10 There are two kinds of such spaces: the utopia and the heterotopia. Utopias, in common with heterotopias, have a ‘general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down’.11 The critical difference is that hetero­ topias are real spaces, while utopias are ‘unreal spaces’. Heterotopias are ‘something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.12 Foucault goes on to outline six principles of heterotopia. The first principle states that heterotopias are constant, they have existed in all places and at all times. However, they have varied forms of which he recognises two dominant types: crisis heterotopias of ‘primitive societies’ (‘privileged or sacred or forbidden places’ that house individuals in moments of crisis such as menstruating women, the elderly), and hetero­ topias of deviation.13 The latter constitute Foucault’s consistent area of

88  Elly Bavidge study, that is, sites of discipline and punishment: rest homes, prisons, psychiatric wards. The second principle describes how heterotopias have a function, but this function can change over time.14 To illustrate, ­Foucault cites how the nineteenth century relocation of the cemetery from the sacred city centre to the outskirts indicated its new heterotopic function as a place for distancing and containing illness. The third principle explains how in a single real place the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing ‘seve­ral spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’; the theatre and the cinema are examples of places that conjure other places.15 The fourth principle states that heterotopias are ‘often linked to slices in time’.16 The museum and the library are ‘heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time’, while festivals and vacation villages are hetero­topias where time is ‘flowing, transitory, precarious’.17 The fifth principle speci­fies that they ‘presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable’.18 They are not wholly accessible because one must undergo various ‘rites and purifications’ to gain entry (barracks, prisons) and ‘have a certain permission and make certain gestures … partly religious and partly hygienic’ (hammams, saunas).19 The sixth, and final, principle outlines the function heterotopias have ‘in relation to all the space that remains’: Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space … as still more illusory … Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. 20 The notion of heterotopia that Foucault develops describes a space of difference, a space that somehow calls up other spaces and holds together discontinuous times. The remainder of the chapter will show that roadside shrines are charged with many of the heterotopic qualities outlined by Foucault that explain their role and status, and their simultaneous centrality and marginality in our culture. Sites of memory have always existed and are common to all civilisations. Remembering is universal like the heterotopia, yet comes in various forms that alter in structure and purpose throughout time. The strangeness and haunting nature of memory sites derives from their evocation of incompatible times and places, and the behaviours and gestures expected and performed in a ritualistic manner at their thresholds. The heterogeneity of these spaces affirms that ‘we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another’. 21 Crucially, Foucault’s heterotopia has allowed representational and non-representational theories to be held in tension (the former involves processes of representation, readership and interpretation; the latter

‘Popping Up to See Pat’  89 pertains to the realm of non-representation, performance, event and materiality). This is pivotal to understanding the roadside memorial as a ‘simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live’. 22 This is exemplified in Avril Maddrell’s work on the absence-­ presence dynamic in which she adopts the term ‘Third Emotional Space’ to describe spaces that afford performative and embodied-­emotional remembrance, mediating between ‘private and public, domestic and institutionalized spaces of memorialization; different notions of the sacred; sad and happy memories; and between absence and presence’. 23 Writing on the growth of commemorative benches in public spaces, she avers that they ‘constitute a mediating space between those funerary and domestic spaces … at a distance from both, but where ongoing experiences of bereavement can be located and negotiated in the medium term’. 24 This ‘Third Emotional Space’ suggests something of the multiplicity and fluidity of Foucault’s heterotopia and relation between sites. Beyond their obvious liminal status, Maddrell complicates the meaning of memorials by acknowledging that they need to ‘be recognized as moored in the embodied past life, present memorial and ongoing emotional journey of the bereaved, as well as any “life of its own” that a memorial artefact might engender with those who encounter it’. 25 In this respect her work is more attentive to the embodied and lived dimension of the sites and the intersections of people, objects and place. Taken together the heterotopic and absence-presence models identify specific physical properties of loci of memory and their affective regis­ ters. In this chapter, I apply this two-pronged approach to a study of roadside memorials in the United Kingdom as heterotopias of memory and absent presences.

Roadside Shrines as Heterotopias of Memory and Absent Presences We are now accustomed to seeing small clusters of paraphernalia – ­flowers, notes, bottles, candles – during our daily travels. We are able to quickly recognise these spontaneous tributes as marking the site of a violent and unexpected death. We may take a breath in response to the taboo of death appearing where it ought not to be; perhaps momentarily aware of them as a warning and reminder of the fact of our own mortality. Unlike cemeteries which are secluded, laid out like a garden and offer quiet contemplation, roadside memorials are located in inhospitable environments near traffic, outside other people’s houses or on a busy high street. When they first appear as a gash on the landscape, an explosion of emotion in otherwise drab and functional spaces, they signal the suddenness and immediacy of a fatality. After this they can either become embedded in the local landscape (though they generally remain unsanctioned) or slowly disappear (as in most cases). Their unofficial

90  Elly Bavidge status and use of ephemeral materials and forms that need to be regularly maintained contributes to their temporary quality. Of key importance is that roadside memorials evolve (and are themselves the result of evolving memorial practices) and are always ­unfinished, and therefore fit Foucault’s second principle of heterotopia in that they change function over time. While relatives’ testimonials claim that friends and acquaintances begin to lay flowers immediately after the accident and before funeral arrangements can be made, it seems that the site is often initially too painful for those closest to attend. As time passes they take on significance as locales to feel ‘near’ to the deceased and around which a ritual of behaviour is built. This is frequently conveyed in interviews in the British press concerning tragic human interest stories. One family recounts how floral tributes had already been laid while their thirteen-year-old son was in hospital on a life-support machine. Although it was one week before the father visited the location, it would become a sanctuary ‘where we can put flowers on birthdays, anniversaries, ­Christmas and Easter’ and where a stone plaque now rests. 26 A woman who lost her twenty-four-year-old son when he was knocked off his motorcycle in a hit-and-run accident said: ‘To begin with I couldn’t go near this place’, but now she calls in on his birthday, Christmas, Easter and the anniversary of his death. 27 Similar comments were found in a Dutch study which interviewed twenty-four people who maintained roadside memorials, such as one participant saying: ‘Initially I hated that road along the canal. Now, I’ve started to see it as his place’. 28 These testimonials imply the mutability of roadside memorials and how they can move from being sites of fear, distress and isolation to sites of ownership and reverence. The intense investment in roadside memorials is apparent in their maintenance and renewal in keeping with anniversaries, the seasons and the needs of mourners. At a memorial I visited on Killingworth Road in Newcastle upon Tyne, the cellophane-wrapped, shop-bought flowers held down with bricks underneath a street sign have now given way to a more permanent flower box resting on marble paving slabs, two candle holders and a wooden cross. The potted flowers represent an attempt, literally and metaphorically, to put down roots there. The memorial is intended to remain and last, to maintain a memory and moment long after the first chaotic responses a decade ago – initials scrawled on the street sign and ‘R.I.P’ in marker pen on a no through road sign – have faded or been cleaned off. A second roadside memorial on the Coast Road in Newcastle upon Tyne has since grown to be one of the most prominent and established in the area, adorned with small shrubbery, framed photo­graphs, plaques and stone and plastic ornaments. The notes left there often refer to the passing of time since the accident, refuting amnesia and indifference. One card reads: ‘Thinking of you … Another year and always so missed’. Scholars such as Maddrell and Catherine Collins

‘Popping Up to See Pat’  91 and Alexandra Opie view these actions and signs as vital to the therapeutic ‘memory work’ these sites allow for.29 Here, mountainside memorials, roadside shrines and memorial benches are special places for working through trauma and maintaining bonds with the departed. They draw out the affective dynamics and underline how ‘emotions, memory and materiality of absence through death is expressed and negotiated in different memorial forms and landscape settings’.30 Importantly, repeated management and engagement with the sites reflect ‘agency rather than victimage’.31 Roadside shrines act as rhetorical and performative sites where the past can be negotiated and recovery can begin, and are recog­ nised as fundamental to those learning to live with absence. Roadside memorials are an attempt to set up a reserved and consecrated place within social space and so create a site of multiple meanings. In this regard we can apply Foucault’s third principle that the heterotopia can juxtapose several incompatible spaces. Death itself ‘has the power to create a heterotopia, that is, the layering of meanings at a single material site’.32 The ‘uneasy conjunction’ of the abject and the ordinary requires that abjection be brought under control or be excised through ritual acts.33 At roadside memorials, one of the primary means of sanctifying the dead zone and extending personalised space into an anonymous stretch of road is through the arrangement of tributes. M ­ organ Meyer argues that because the felt absence of the deceased matters, the dead themselves are ‘turned into matter’; their absence is ‘performed, materialized and objectified’ in order to make them present through the representational aspects of the site.34 This is important because it means absence is something that can be traced and mapped. When Meyer asks ‘how and where does absence come to matter?’ we can look to the roadside shrine for an answer.35 The site is transformed and appropriated by the arrangement, almost the curatorship, of newly purchased objects and those that belonged to the deceased that signify ‘presence in the face of absence’ and create a startling juxtaposition.36 The tributes – generally food, alcohol, toys, messages, poems, photo­ graphs, ornaments, clothing (commonly shirts with affiliations to a sporting team), helium balloons and makeshift crosses – exemplify the incongruous qualities of roadside memorials as simultaneously fleeting and fixed, personal and impersonal, sacred and profane, ordinary and extraordinary. For instance, the do-it-yourself style of roadside memorials combines informal memorialising and religious ideas and iconography that in many cases tend towards an eclectic mix of the vaguely spiritual. At the aforementioned Coast Road memorial, a homemade cross is supported by an ornament of Buddha and letters frequently refer to angels and the afterlife although the tone is jovial and lighthearted (‘I know you’ll be having a ball up there’, ‘I know your resting peaceful up there’).37 The centrality of popular culture and mass-produced commodities to the language of mourning reveals how objects can become

92  Elly Bavidge invaluable memento mori. While stone and flowers have traditionally been adopted in the culture of death, plastic and cellophane are now ‘socially recognizable marker[s] of the sacred’ that redefine our relationships to the material world.38 At another makeshift memorial I discovered on Church Street in Stoke Newington, a packet of Quavers, whisky bottles and bananas were among the items left as part of a memorial to a nineteen-year-old male. They may be disposable consumer items, but positioned at these sites they become symbols of endurance and links to the deceased. Maddrell’s assertion that absence has a ‘social reach’ proposes another way of comprehending the growing acceptance around the externalisation of memory rituals.39 This is demonstrated in the communication at roadside memorials between disparate groups – family members, friends, acquaintances, teachers, local tradesmen or strangers who add letters, flowers or objects – that makes the site unlike the gravesite with its relative privacy and solemnity. It is a place where the dreadfulness of the death is acknowledged by a wider circle and the person is honoured and cared about by more than just the immediate family. Strangely, it might be at the fatal site that the dead are remembered least as road accident victims. They are not just victims, nor just sons or daughters; the individual is a football fan, a great mate, a ‘star’, a ‘legend’. The intensive use of football shirts at a roadside memorial on Newcastle Road in Sunderland signifies group allegiances and shared interests. More than a collection of things, roadside memorials allow for diverse representations of an individual’s identity enacted across different spaces. The ‘opening’ of the grieving process can be seen in the notes and letters that are commonplace at roadside memorials. Compared with the authoritative inscriptions found on headstones that must comply with the cemetery’s policies and protocols, they are handwritten (usually in biro) and frequently in poor and colloquial English. Spelling mistakes and the use of exclamation marks are customary. ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ may be replaced by ‘Mam’ and ‘Dad’; ‘mate’ is often used along with nicknames. At the Sunderland memorial even the local butchers had left a message (‘Sleep well Sweetheart, we will get you a meal deal, from all the staff Sea Rd Pork Butchers’). Others read: ‘I never really knew you but I remember you. You were beautiful. Behind the bar at The Pipe or smiling as you walked down the road’, ‘Sorry to hear about your loss from Margaret (a local lady that’s thinking of you)’. These notes provide a glimpse of ‘emotions as relational flows, fluxes or currents, in-between people and places rather than “things” or “objects” to be studied or measured’.40 The roadside memorial’s informality, creativity and materiality permit teenagers and young adults to communicate feelings of loss, love and respect in their own language. Here, text-speak, love hearts, smiley faces, references to songs and school life are validated as an integral part of memorialisation: ‘Am really gona miss your gowjuss smile that makes my day?’, ‘Words don’t really cut it but one things for certain.

‘Popping Up to See Pat’  93

Figure 5.1  T he social reach of absence: A roadside memorial on Newcastle Road, Sunderland. © Elly Bavidge, 2009

English won’t be the same. I’ll always remember you as the guy I pushed off stage in year 6’. All the letters are addressed to the deceased and to a broader audience, and make a statement about affiliations to the person now gone. For Maddrell the act of writing is crucial to the social grieving process, the letter itself a ‘materialized affective space’ bridging that gap between the living and the dead.41 An essential element in the power of roadside memorials is their intrusion of intense feeling and individual concern into an impersonal environment, and their retention of a catastrophic moment out of the flow of events. These eruptions resonate with Foucault’s fourth principle that heterotopias are ‘linked to slices in time’; layering of spaces also has a temporal dimension. While sanitisation of an accident area usually occurs within several hours to erase any indicators of death and trauma, roadside memorials evoke the last moment when a person was alive and possess an agency in terms of their effects on persons and patterns of remembrance. The mother of a thirteen-year-old boy killed in London says: It means so much to me that he’s remembered … This is where he died so it’s very significant. It has more meaning to us than his grave because this is the last place he was as I knew him. There’s a special feeling here.42

94  Elly Bavidge This is echoed in comments by the aforementioned mother of the motorcycle victim, ‘It’s strange because sometimes I feel closer to him here than at his resting place’.43 Foucault employs the term ‘heterochrony’ when describing the experience of time at a heterotopic site which, he argues, begins to ‘function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time’.44 At roadside shrines the living are encouraged to imagine or remember the time of death which separates us from our ‘normal’ time. This shapes the ‘topography of remembrance’, opening up a space where slices of past, present and other futures (‘what if she took another route that morning?’, ‘what if he were still here today?’) overlap.45 Forever linked to the time of death, leaving ‘the past open in the present’, roadside shrines allow mourners to rewind, replay and re-experience loss in a way that can cause pain but can also give mourners a sense of agency which leads to healing.46 Foucault’s fifth principle describes heterotopia as marked by systems of openings and closings, and refers to the symbolic acts that must be executed before entering certain sacred or holy spaces. Roadside memorials act as thresholds between private and public, but it is not entirely clear where they begin and end. The appropriation of public property for enacting private grief renders them mysterious and somewhat sacrosanct, incorporating one into the other. One becomes aware that the confluence of conflicting traits is complex and fraught. Simply walking up to a roadside memorial, reading the messages left there, although they are, presumably, meant to be read, is uncomfortable. Despite the displays openly addressing unknown visitors and inviting the attention of strangers, when I approached, read, touched and, especially, when I photographed the notes and miscellaneous articles at the shrines, I felt I was crossing the boundaries generated by the memorial. They may be invisible boundaries, but the traces of previous practices marked out a space for a community of mourners to which I did not belong. As heterotopias of memory, roadside memorials are sites of otherness that close the gap between the dead and the living. Death has historically had its specific locations which, as already mentioned, shape the nature of remembrance. Joseph Roach expounds on the ideological shift in thinking from the medieval period when the deceased were ‘omnipresent’ both spiritually (spirits continued to occupy the spaces of the living) and materially (places of burial were also used for trade), to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the living and the dead were increasingly segregated: the dead were compelled to withdraw from the spaces of the living … new practices of interment evolved, eventually including cremation, to ensure the perpetual separation of the dead and to reduce or more strictly circumscribe the spaces they occupied. As the place of burial was removed from local churchyard to distant park, the dead were

‘Popping Up to See Pat’  95 more likely to be remembered (and forgotten) by monuments than by continued observances in which their spirits were invoked.47 Institutionalised mechanisms for containing the dead are challenged by memorials that evoke death in common, unremarkable places. As victims are often struck down near to where they reside – on their paper round, crossing the road – this adds a dimension of intimacy and may force acknowledgement of the site and its various affects. Perhaps because of this close proximity the transition of personal effects into public space does not seem like so much of a transgression. One letter at a roadside shrine in Newcastle casually signs off: ‘Anyway got to go now’. ­A nother woman says of the memorial dedicated to her sister: ‘It’s a way of keeping in touch, and we’re able to say we’re “just popping up to see Pat” still’.48 According to Joanna Wojtkowiak and Eric Venbrux, in many instances the bereaved will integrate the dead into everyday life.49 Here, Foucault’s sixth principle that heterotopias have a function in relation to all other space can be applied. By summoning presence through symbols of loss, memorial practices are an endeavour to find ‘a place’ for the deceased in the mourners’ lives. 50 For instance, toys may conjure up the space of a late child’s bedroom. Roadside memorials take on a hybridity that mixes the look of hearth and garden in the street. A simi­ lar process has been noted in a study of a Nottinghamshire cemetery, where tri­butes and possessions of the deceased left at the gravesite transformed the space into one ‘in which the “living” deceased reside and receive visitors and gifts’.51 ‘Home’ is projected onto these sites in order to resettle the departed, illustrating a threshold breach and the force of the domestic on public space. Although registering changes in memorial culture over recent years, it should be noted that roadside memorials exist alongside traditional forms of remembrance. The bereaved frequently tend multiple sites of memory, such as the official place of burial or crematorium, the site of death and the bedroom which may be preserved shrine-like. While cultivating a distinctive mode of remembrance, it is in the roadside memorial’s connection to other sites – the dynamic and movement between settings – that aids emotional expression.

Coda Returning to the first memorial I photographed in 2005, the weight of the years passed can be felt. Standing at the site in 2016, I think about my choice to go there and I am aware that in the intervening years, as a stranger to the deceased, I have been free from the burden of his memory. I think about the boy’s parents’ lack of choice and the continued pull and meaning of this site for them. I imagine their repeated visits in the time elapsed and hope that they have been able to work through their grief. Revisiting the locations of roadside memorials, even when they are gone,

96  Elly Bavidge the vibrance of the past remains. Loss and absence have a presence, and sites of death have agency. These aspects of memorial sites should be considered as critical to their aesthetic and therapeutic function. Memorialising is increasingly seen as a social experience and process that is realised in space and utilises diverse objects.52 As Elizabeth ­Hallam and Jenny Hockey argue, it is an embodied practice whereby the ‘nexus of space/body/object’ is of greatest importance.53 While authors such as Marcel Proust and Gaston Bachelard have elucidated how the routine, intimacy and privacy of the domestic sphere make the home a unique and safe place for memory, memory is now perceived to be moving outwards. New types of media engagement, such as reality television programs, YouTube and Facebook, have meant that we live progressively more of our lives in social spheres and have effectively altered previously held ideas about appropriate behaviour in memorial consciousness. Alongside these explanations for a shift in memorial culture in the United Kingdom is the public reaction to celebrity deaths, most prominently that of Princess Diana in 1997. Responses to the murders of James Bulger (1993), Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells (2002) and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann (2007) have been discussed in terms of the ‘Dianafication’ of ordinary people. Such intense displays of mourning and the desire to share in the tragedy of a stranger have attracted criticism as being exploitative, predatory and aggressive.54 Journalists have reported the potential ‘mob violence of grief’ and ‘fascism of flowers’.55 This ‘look-at-me grief’ has also been associated with roadside memorials as they guarantee that ‘the anonymous deceased can be granted a posthumous celebrity, 15 minutes of floral fame’.56 It is against this background that roadside memorials are to be understood. However, to dismiss them as merely mawkish, morbid or reflecting a celebrity-obsessed culture does not account for the ways in which they contribute to a new sensibility of grief as a shared and spatial experience. Instantaneous and impermanent, roadside memorials mirror the wider cultural scene. Rather than assuming that the mass media of western culture has led to a desensitised attitude towards the misfortunes of others, media events surrounding death can encourage individual and collective remembrance and instigate alternative memorial traditions. Recent terrorist attacks have seen buildings across the world temporarily lit up in the colours of the national flags of France and Belgium in memoriam, an emerging practice that is captured and then re-circulated in public forums. These unofficial memorials destabilise the diagnosis of amnesia and placelessness in theories that are reliant on outmoded notions of public/private space and that espouse the dearth of meaningful places of memory in contemporary urban life. The concept of heterotopia accommodates the ambivalence and incongruity of memory sites. As the external expressions of disruptive internal processes of remembrance, memory sites are characterised by

‘Popping Up to See Pat’  97 their excessiveness, their strange inclusions, their hallowed aspects, their thresholds, and their capacity for change and multiplicity. The roadside memorial as heterotopia implies that this multiplicity is not purely an emotional response on the part of human agents but that it is also an intrinsic quality of certain spaces. It is this crucial point that necessitates a return to Foucault’s first principle. It has become popular to discuss heterotopia as symptomatic of postmodernity. According to Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter’s edited collection Heterotopia and the City which includes chapters on gated communities, theme parks, Dubai and the Villages in Florida, these hetero­topias originate from the growth of the ‘postcivil society’. 57 Simi­larly, Edward Relph forwards that postmodern space is inherently hetero­topic and ‘bears the stamp of our age and our thought’.58 However, Foucault’s first principle claims that there have always been hetero­topias in all cultures; they are spaces that are ‘formed in the very founding of society’.59 Conceding to this basic premise has implications for memory studies. There cannot have been, as Pierre Nora suggests, some kind of pure, whole or direct memory before any of the technologies of memory. Nora’s account of the move from milieux de mémoire to lieux de mémoire has established a mode of seeing modern memory as commodified and depthless, overemphasising a prelapsarian notion of memory.60 Roadside memorials share traits that Nora implies are confined to pre-modern memory or non-Western societies: they are ­community-based, bottom-up initiatives that are resistant to the authorities of state remembrance. They subsequently contest the supposed discontinuity between pre-modern and modern memory. Once the weaknesses of Nora’s approach are recognised it becomes possible to take popular memory practices, such as roadside memorials, more seriously and sympathetically. By mobilising the notion of heterotopia, we can avoid the prevalent and powerful tendency to think of memory as ‘lost and over-present’ and of place as fragmented and marked by amnesia.61 Coupled with an understanding of the absence-presence model, the ways we navigate spaces in extraordinary circumstances and in everyday life, and the impact of material forms and representation, this enables a more productive reading of the experience of memory and absence.

Notes 1 This chapter draws on research conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation. See Eleanor Bavidge, Heterotopias of Memory: Cultural Memory in and around Newcastle upon Tyne, unpublished PhD thesis (Sunderland: University of Sunderland, 2009). 2 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 3 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989): 7.

98  Elly Bavidge 4 Ibid. 5 Pierre Nora, ‘The Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory’, Tr@nsit online 22 (2002), accessed 20 February 2016, . 6 See Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997); Walter Benjamin, The Berlin Chronicle, trans. Carl Skoggard (Portland, OR: Publication ­Studio, 2011); Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott ­Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985). 7 M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 24. 8 See Robert Thomas Dobler, ‘Ghost Bikes: Memorialization and Protest on City Streets’, in Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, ed. Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero (New  York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 169–187; Andrea Hajek, Christine Lohmeier and Christian Pentzold (eds), Memory in a Mediated World: Remembrance and Reconstruction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Jeffrey Durbin, ‘Expressions of Mass Grief and Mourning: The Material Culture of Makeshift Memorials’, Material Culture 35, no. 1 (2003): 22–47. 9 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. ­Nicholas Mirzoeff (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 230. 10 Ibid., 231. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 232. 14 Ibid., 233. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 234. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 235. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 231. 22 Ibid., 232. 23 Avril Maddrell, ‘Living with the Deceased: Absence, Presence and ­Absence-Presence’, cultural geographies 20, no. 4 (2013): 511. 24 Avril Maddrell, ‘Mapping Changing Shades of Grief and Consolation in the Historic Landscape of St Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man’, in Emotion, Place and Culture, ed. Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 46. 25 Maddrell, ‘Living with the Deceased’, 504. 26 Andrew Hartley, ‘Moving Stories Behind the Roadside Shrines’, Daily ­M irror (18 November 2006), 29. 27 Ibid., 28. 28 Mirjam Klaassens, Peter Groote and Paulus P. P. Huigen, ‘Roadside Memorials from a Geographical Perspective’, Mortality: Promoting the Interdisciplinary Study of Death and Dying 14, no. 2 (2009): 198. 29 Catherine Ann Collins and Alexandra Opie, ‘When Places have Agency: Roadside Shrines as Traumascapes’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2010): 107–118. 30 Maddrell, ‘Living with the Deceased’, 501. 31 Collins and Opie, ‘When Places have Agency’, 110. 32 Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 84.

‘Popping Up to See Pat’  99 33 Ibid., 83. 34 Morgan Meyer, ‘Placing and Tracing Absence: A Material Culture of the Immaterial’, Journal of Material Culture 17, no. 1 (2012): 103. 35 Ibid. 36 Miles Richardson, ‘The Gift of Presence: The Act of Leaving Artifacts at Shrines, Memorials, and Other Tragedies’, in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, ed. Paul Adams, Steven Hoelscher and Karen E. Till (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 263. 37 The spelling and grammatical errors in the notes and letters have been retained in this chapter. 38 Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture, 210. 39 Maddrell, ‘Living with the Deceased’, 510. 40 Liz Bondi, Joyce Davidson and Mick Smith, ‘Introduction: Geography’s “Emotional Turn”’, in Emotional Geographies, ed. Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 3. 41 Maddrell, ‘Living with the Deceased’, 514. 42 Hartley, ‘Moving Stories Behind the Roadside Shrines’, 29. 43 Ibid., 28. 4 4 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 234. 45 Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture, 212. 46 Collins and Opie, ‘When Places have Agency’, 110. 47 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 50. 48 Blake Morrison, ‘Saying it with Flowers’, The Guardian (3 November 2005), 11. 49 Joanna Wojtkowiak and Eric Venbrux, ‘Private Spaces for the Dead: Remembrance and Continuing Relationships at Home Memorials in the Netherlands’, in Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance, ed. Avril Maddrell and James D. Sidaway (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 207−221. 50 Tony Walter, ‘A New Model of Grief: Bereavement and Biography’, Mortality 1, no. 1 (1996): 7–25. 51 Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture, 147, 151. 52 See Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); C. Nadia Seremetakis (ed.), The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 53 Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture, 77. 54 Rosie Boycott, Don’t Get Me Started! (episode: ‘Rosie Boycott on False Grief’), prod. Charlotte Wyatt (London: Liberty Bell Production, 2005). 55 Boycott, ‘Rosie Boycott on False Grief’; Morrison, ‘Saying it with Flowers’, 8. 56 Julian Barnes, ‘Kitty Zipper’, The New Yorker (29 September 1997), 78; Morrison, ‘Saying it with Flowers’, 8. 57 Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (eds), Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 58 Edward Relph, ‘Post-Modern Geography’, The Canadian Geographer 35, no. 1 (1991): 104. 59 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 231. 60 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, 7–8. 61 Susannah Radstone, ‘Working with Memory: An Introduction’, in Memory and Methodology, ed. Susannah Radstone (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 5.

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Part II

Spectres of the Social

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6 ‘Un aéroport-fantôme’ The Ghost of Mirabel International Airport Liz Millward

Airports can be strangely haunting, uncertain places. The sprawling buildings themselves, their typical location on the peripheries of the ­cities that they serve, and the difficulty of reaching them via ground transportation form a cluster of factors which tend to set airports apart and outside of the quotidian. Corridors and walkways corral passengers into predetermined pathways. Alarms blare if someone tries to return through an exit. Walls of glass separate the domestic from the inter­ national, and transit areas are completely sealed off. Delays and cancellations stop time and motion. For passengers, airports are spaces of arrival, departure, movement and suspension, of wrenching loss and excited reconnection, as well as of deep fatigue, anxiety, misery, miscommunication and excessive expense. While the role of airport staff is to pacify fraught travellers and move them through an unfamiliar procedure, they too contribute to the displacing qualities of the space – their presence unsettling hierarchies of power and privilege as bodies are searched, bag contents exposed and intrusive questions asked. Any notion of the self as being in control is undermined. Perhaps that is a precondition to strapping oneself into an uncomfortable seat and entrusting a transportation system which has, more than once, lost an entire airliner. However, this unmooring from everyday life and the certainties of selfhood can provide moments of apprehension, a recognition or perhaps just an inkling that something else is out of place and time. This chapter explores one such spectral presence – the abandoned site of Mirabel International Airport in Canada – that intrudes into other airport spaces.

Airports as Testaments to Modernity Various scholars have suggested that airports are significant indicators of the flows of modernity, globalisation and the history of a trans­national elite. Marc Augé, perhaps most influentially, characterised them as ‘nonplaces’.1 Unlike ‘places’ which can be identified as ‘culture localized in time and space’, non-places are: the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified … by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins

104  Liz Millward called “means of transport” (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself. 2 For Augé, airports are not unique in themselves. To the extent that they are airports rather than, say, leisure parks (although in the past they often endeavoured to be both), they are interchangeable, just a particular ‘type’ of space which forms a necessary element of what he identifies as supermodernity. This is a state distinguished by the speeding up of modernity, leading to excess of time (too much simultaneous information), space (through hyperconnectivity) and hyperindividualism.3 The airport is thus a node in a network, a temporary pause in a decentred world that is constituted through linkages across space. Airport developers and city boosters have certainly embraced the notion that their projects must be built (and funded) in order to ensure that their city or town is not left outside the network initially of modernity and later of supermodernity. However, they do not characterise their airports as ‘non-places’. Instead, they tend to argue for the significance of (their) place within global flows, and this is important for considering the reverberating effects of Mirabel. In his study of Liverpool Airport Peter Adey examines the importance of historicisation and the local. He proposes that no airport is just ‘a stop or interchange on the way to somewhere else’ but is ‘intimately intertwined with the time, the place, and the people that it shaped and was shaped by. The airport’s context mattered’.4 These structures were built to materialise the dreams of modernity and can carry that emotional charge forward into the present through personal histories. Beyond the sudden departure as a dearly beloved disappears through the security screens, Alastair Gordon hints at the peculiar sense of loss experienced at airports whereby return visits can reveal the effects of irreversible change. Gordon contrasts two visits he made to JFK Airport (formerly Idlewild) in New York City.5 His first was filled with wonder for it was as if a science-fictional world of the future had been actualised in the airport’s ultramodern architecture and design. The second visit years later tarnished that optimistic image. In part this was because of altered processes. Hijackings of aircraft during the 1970s, for example, induced airport authorities to reconfigure security arrangements and passenger flows through terminals without remodelling the buildings themselves. They therefore could still gesture to a more open, confident and imperialistic moment when air travel was expected to connect people worldwide, while cutting off that vision with barriers and partitions. In addition, the evolution of the business model of commercial aviation and consumer practices heralded an era of mass jet travel which, alongside

‘Un aéroport-fantôme’  105 deregulation, open skies policies and cutthroat competition, promoted a no-frills approach. The magic of air travel vanished, along with most of the inflight metal cutlery, to be supplanted with a transit experience more akin to taking a coach. This experience of loss intensifies in an abandoned airport which contains traces of its provincial context and the physical proof that the dream is over. Even devoid of human activity, the disused buildings are far from inactive. They express an ‘unsettling quality of absence’, showing that ‘opposed to a comfortable understanding of entities dwelling in the world – haunting exists as an eerie undercurrent that threatens to destabilize established categories of self as well as place’.6 In his work on industrial ruins, Tim Edensor attempts to capture the affects of an absence that makes its presence felt. He refers to the ghost of factory life that is conjured up by the litter of objects without apparent purpose, half-filled orders and tangible evidence that workers used to occupy the space.7 The once rigidly policed hierarchies – of office and factory floor, of foreman’s bench, or of gendered cloakrooms – become pointless and poignant when they are no longer peopled. Taken together, the remnants produce a feel for the mundane aspects of the workers’ daily rounds. This poignancy is a general affect experienced in ruins and to some extent the contextual detail is immaterial.8 Indeed, too much context can undermine the ghostly effect since the ruin becomes rational wreckage rather than evocative spectre. However, in certain cases particularity is crucial since it is not the universalising narratives of progress, globalisation and corporatisation that matter. What matters is that a specific past is now gone, and therefore a specific future will never come to pass.

Abandoned Airports If airports as a whole can be uncanny, abandoned airports combine that strangeness with the futures envisaged when they were built. Abandoned airports rarely remain undeveloped; after they have been decommissioned their location, previously outside the city but now surrounded by residential tracts and industrial parks, is reconceptualised as valuable real estate and the facility quickly disappears into its environs. While that process is underway, the airports (or sometimes a few of the original buildings which survive, reused or preserved as ‘heritage’) are haunted by the promise of the future towards which they adamantly remain turned. It is a dream of technological advances, new and faster networks, and of the profits to be made from interminable development. Most of these airports were shut down precisely because that ambition was (more or less) realised through changing technical requirements and an increase in air traffic. Croydon Airport in London, for example, was from 1920 the point of departure for an emerging subjectivity, that of

106  Liz Millward the adventurous and primarily elite passenger. The major British airline, Imperial A ­ irways, commenced service out of the airport in 1924, eventually offering flights to destinations in Africa, India and Australia through which it reinforced and simultaneously undermined British imperialism.9 ­Croydon was also the scene where rapturous crowds greeted famous flyers: Alan Cobham on his return from a pathbreaking flight to South Africa and back in 1926, Charles Lindburgh after his transatlantic flight in 1927, Amy Johnson in 1931 on her return from a triumphant 1930 flight to Australia, and Jean Batten at the end of her record-­breaking flight from Australia in 1937. In spite of its importance to British aviation, ­Croydon Airport was shut down in 1959 after having been superseded by Heathrow which opened in 1946 on the site of an older airfield far out in the sticks. To complete the transformation from the earlier to the later airport, by 1977 Heathrow could be reached via the democratising ­London Underground. More recently, Kai Tak ­A irport in the heart of Hong Kong was closed in 1998 when the more remote and larger Chek Lap Kok Airport, erected on an island that was levelled for the purpose, was finished. In 2008, Tempelhof in Berlin, famous for its role in the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949, was closed and all residual air services relocated as part of a shift towards one vast consolidated facility that will, in addition to Tempelhof, eventually replace the city’s other existing airports, Tegel and Schönefeld. This pattern of replacing an airport within city limits with a greater one situated many kilometres outside the metropolis is repeated across the globe. It is indicative of the potential success of capitalist deve­ lopment when wedded to technological marvels. Moreover, it gently reproaches those shortsighted city boosters and aviation proselytisers since the airports they planned and the requisitioned land could scarcely keep up with the pace of innovation and burgeoning demand. With aircraft becoming heavier to achieve greater lift in order to carry larger payloads, soft grass landing strips had to be replaced with hard runways so that these aircraft would not sink into the ground and noseover. Runways which had been projected to provide ample room for take-off and landing could already be too short to meet the needs of newer aircraft types before the concrete was even dry. Airport management companies, airlines and governments constantly negotiated to purchase extra land so that they could again extend the runways.10 As Gordon argues: airports would continue to grow in fits and starts, reinventing themselves as aviation advanced to its next phase of evolution. If no other lesson had been learned in twenty-five years of trial and error, it was that airports were never finished. They were in a constant state of flux, flirting with obsolescence, reshaping themselves, and adapting to new technologies.11

‘Un aéroport-fantôme’  107 This is the abandoned airport as an indicator of dynamism and growth, a key player in globalisation that is naturally retired once those processes which it helped to sustain outgrow it. It is a looming figure in the landscape assuring that progress works. In this schema, however much the nostalgia industry paints sanitised pictures of a golden era of (imperial) flying from Croydon or Kai Tak, it is preferable and a sign of success to depart from a pristine postmodern facility.12 Some airports, on the other hand, were deserted for a different reason. Far from being rendered obsolete by lack of capacity and capability, they were too big. Airports such as Washington Dulles International Airport and Friendship International Airport (now Baltimore Washington International Airport) were initially labelled ‘white elephants’ because they followed a trend in the mid-1950s in which the facilities were to become ‘self-sufficient entities, displacing traditional patterns of urban growth and setting the stage for the sprawl to come’.13 This spurred the development of immense tracts of land and the construction of sweeping terminals, hotels, even entertainment complexes, but expectations of massive demand alone could not persuade passengers and corporations to flock to these new locations. Friendship International, for example, ‘had been designed in anticipation of the travel boom [but] the mobs never came. Fewer than seventy thousand passengers used the airport in the first full year of operations. (Only four planes arrived from overseas all year.).’14 Dulles and Friendship stayed open and eventually generated enough activity to bury the slur that they were fiascos. Although it took decades, their dreamt-of future did finally arrive. Friendship International has been characterised as ‘one of the rare cases of overestimating’.15 Even rarer was Mirabel which indulged in the zealous overestimating of a Dulles or a Friendship but was to be ultimately plagued by its abject failure, its demise mockingly relegated to the ‘News in Brief’ sections of North American magazines.

Mirabel International Airport Opened on 29 November 1975 on expropriated farmland fifty-five ­kilometres north of downtown Montreal, Mirabel was intended to replace the smaller and more centrally positioned Dorval Airport. Just twenty-two years later it would cease international passenger flights, and was completely closed to commercial passenger flights in 2004. Ironically, all of Mirabel’s passenger services returned to Dorval. The reasons for its demise are many and varied. Briefly, a post-war agreement requiring flights from Europe to land in Montreal had instituted a false impression of the urgency for a large airport, which dissipated once aircraft with longer range did not need to stopover and the agreement was terminated (in 1972); Canadian markets were turning towards the United States and Asia and away from Europe, so Montreal became

108  Liz Millward geographically marginal; Toronto replaced Montreal as the country’s economic powerhouse, perhaps because of the influence of the separatist movement in Quebec; and the lack of adequate ground transportation links between Mirabel and Dorval meant that passengers had to travel over thirty kilometres to make their connections between international and domestic flights.16 Today, Mirabel still lingers over Montreal, Canada and international airports more generally. The novelist Monique LaRue called it ‘[un] aéroport pseudo-international’ and ‘[un] aéroport-fantôme, desert, dérisoire, qui n’a jamais fonctionné ni servi à rien’ (‘a ghost-airport, a desert, derisory, which has never worked nor been any use’).17 In 2004 The New York Times evoked its desolate quality, ‘[p]arking is never a problem at Montreal-Mirabel International Airport, where entire days go by without a single passenger passing through the terminal. The granite floors are squeaky clean, the carpets look brand new, the aluminum trimmings are polished’.18 In its news-in-brief ‘ScoreCard’ section Maclean’s magazine tersely noted, ‘last passenger jet departs Montreal’s white elephant, leaving the barely used carcass a ghost town of chrome, marble and goofy disco-era dreams’.19 The latter phrase is too simplistic, too dismissive though for the ghost that Mirabel was (when it was operational) and still is (as it endures today). Like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome built for the 1967 World’s Fair, Expo 67, or the now crumbling ‘Big O’ of the 1976 Olympic Stadium, Mirabel is a relentless reminder of that unfulfilled ‘disco-era dream’ that Canada would attract throngs of international visitors and become a vibrant and significant global power. Even when it was active as the ‘North Atlantic Gateway’, it was haunted by the absence of anticipated crowds and the displaced farmers whose land (and dreams of their futures) was so pointlessly taken away. Writing for Maclean’s magazine in 1997, Brenda Branswell commented that upon Mirabel’s opening, ‘passenger agent Lise Latour volunteered to work there. Now, sitting at the Air Canada counter, Latour laments: “We were told that this was the airport of the future”’. 20 Her sentiment was eerily echoed seven years later when the airport ceased operating passenger flights. Intended as ‘the airport where the future is present’, or ‘2000 A.D., Now’, Mirabel was designed to exemplify modernity. 21 The approach was similar to that taken by architect Eero Saarinen in his ideas for Dulles ­International Airport, built like Mirabel on ‘ninety-eight hundred bucolic acres buffered from urban sprawl by a forest’, which Saarinen wanted to turn into a ‘great entrance to the United States, not just another airport’.22 One of his goals was ‘to make a freestanding object, without any of the parasitic attachments that ruined so many other terminals. There would be no ugly fingers or boarding satellites, just a pavilion of white concrete rising from the plain of Chantilly’; and to achieve this he used the ‘mobile lounge’, described as ‘a cross between a bus and a waiting

‘Un aéroport-fantôme’  109 room’, which transported passengers between terminal and aircraft. 23 Less effective than the jetway or even mobile stairways and detested by many passengers, these mobile lounges were put into service at very few airports. Mirabel, determined to be as pioneering as Dulles before it, was one of them. In addition to novel concepts, the airport was going to be imposing in spatial dimensions. The overall area to which Mirabel staked its claim was an excessive two thousand five hundred and ninety square kilometres, making the airport ‘the largest in the world; unimpeded development thereby becomes possible over many decades’.24 The plan was for it to include ‘six runways and six air terminals able to serve over fifty million passengers and to handle several million tons of freight per year’.25 This was a vision of an airport that would never have to be abandoned. In 1975 the provincial government in Quebec published a booklet called Montréal-Mirabel. Its size, shape, minimal text, large font, simplistic and grandiose messages, hardback cover and watercolour illustrations which portray landscapes, jetliners and white men (and a very few women) dressed as scientists and construction workers create the illusion that it is a storybook, not a promotional pamphlet about a controversial government project. To hold it is to effect childlike wonder as the story-booklet explains how to comprehend this remarkable place. It is, apparently, ‘a superairport five times the size of Dallas-Fort-Worth, nearly twelve times that of Charles De Gaulle [sic], and fifteen times that of John F. Kennedy’ and, as if this was not enough, ‘the airlanes radiating from Montréal-Mirabel are expected to proliferate at a rapid pace’.26 This hyperbole assured that Mirabel would become the hub around which North America and Europe would wheel. The immense Mirabel should have supplied sufficient excess to satisfy the demands of supermodernity. It should have ushered in the future. Ondine Park, Tonya Davidson and Rob Shields define ‘affect’ as part of an ecological system ‘in which diverse forces and processes intersect and give rise to new forms’ through constantly shifting relations bet­ween ‘material places and social spaces’, as well as ‘imaginary places, ideals, and real but intangible objects’.27 This definition offers a way to understand how massive infrastructure projects that were born in the context of the 1960s, including Mirabel, the Montreal metro system and the structures built for Expo 67, can conjure up powerful yet dramatically different sentiments: shame in the case of the former and pride in the case of the latter.28 Park, Davidson and Shields suggest that any discussion of the ecologies of affect needs to consider ‘intangible objects’, which include ‘brands, groups such as communities and classes, sets, and the ­social – any intangible “thing” that is not a mere fiction but is known only through its effects, “as if” it was a thing’.29 ­Mirabel is such an intangible because while it is an actual, material place, it creates contradictory affects through its various absences. In her study of Mirabel, ­Suzanne Laurin discovered that everywhere she went she found people who had

110  Liz Millward an association with the airport, and that the ‘viscerally political’ was palpably evident in the responses she received.30 The word ‘­Mirabel’ itself immediately meant ‘an error’, ‘a mistake’, ‘the fiasco of the century’, ‘a monumental failure’, as if it still existed. Forty years earlier, before it was built, it was described as ‘the project of the century’, ‘a technical and architectural success’, ‘the symbol of progress’, as if it already existed.31 In neither case is Mirabel actually there. Instead, it combines those two troubling states that Lars Frers calls the ‘absence of presence’ in which one notices that the thing is missing, and the ‘presence of absence’ whereby one’s attention is drawn to the feeling that something is missing: in the latter case what is encountered is that absence.32 Both before and after its life, the absence of Mirabel is filled with ‘emotions and imaginations’ brought into being (in the future) and reanimated (from the past) through the intense meanings attached to it.33 As a result of its extraordinary scale, Mirabel was, and still is, an eerie windswept expanse. In Laurin’s book L’Échiquier de Mirabel, one photograph shows a paved road between trees with a metal gate across it. Signs on the gate read ‘Route barrée’ and ‘Defense de passer/No’. Laurin notes that there are dozens of these meaningless roads leading nowhere as they were cut off by the closure of the airport zone. 34 In other industrial ruins these pathways would indicate the return of nature, reclamation of now redundant tracks by an even greater force.35 This encroachment would call up the ghost of the former activity in the space because if that activity still took place it would be able to keep nature at bay. Edensor makes a similar observation on the route of the South Manchester Loop Line, a disused railway which previously transported suburban dwellers into Manchester for work. He suggests that the ‘energy, noise and movement’ of the trains which used to run along the loop are ‘summoned by the surrounding tranquility’ of what is now a cycle path and wildlife corridor.36 Mirabel twists this perception. Its blocked roads call up a sense of arrested development, of a frozen future, as if Mirabel has not yet opened to passengers and that when it does those ‘No trespassing’ barriers will come down. Another of Laurin’s images juxtaposes an artist’s rendition of the terminal in the 1970s, vibrant and full of white people (surprisingly so, in the era of official multiculturalism) and their apparently unattended baggage, with a present-day photograph of the vacant multi-storey car park, a bleak grey stretch of pillars and pooling water. In all of these images it is the scale which underscores the epic failure of modernity, through the contrast between the surrounding farmland and the isolated airport, and the absence of trading estates, freight terminals, housing or roads that were expected to appear around it. That contrast has always vexed Mirabel. In 1975 Jean-Paul l’Allier, then Quebec Minister of Communications, railed against the Federal Government which had admitted that they ‘had taken far too much land’ because they ‘in fact

‘Un aéroport-fantôme’  111 needed 15,000 acres of land. They expropriated 90,000’.37 The consequences continued to reverberate through the decades. It is exemplary of ‘modern imperatives to swiftly bury the past’, the inevitable outcome a landscape of ‘signs, objects and vaguer traces that rebuke the tendencies to move on and forget’.38 The mayor of the town of Mirabel, Hubert Meilleur, argued in 1997 that two generations of local people were impacted by the airport, ‘those who endured the expropriations, and their children, who benefited economically from the airport and could now lose their means of making a living’.39 Mirabel intruded into an agricultural landscape as a phantasm of the future and persists now as a ghost of that unrealised past. The return of much of this farmland by 2006 has not laid this ghost to rest. If the barred roads and angry rhetoric gesture to the absurd grandeur of a futuristic dream, there is another set of phantoms which became even more elusive with the closure of the airport. In what came to be called the ‘Air India disaster’, 329 people died when a bomb exploded on Air India Flight 182 about one hundred and seventy kilometres off the coast of Ireland on 23 June 1985. The flight had departed from Mirabel (having flown from Vancouver via Toronto) en route to New Delhi and thence to Bombay. Of the 307 passengers on board, 105 had joined the flight at Mirabel. The spirits of these people are themselves haunted, and not just by the men who killed them: there were also the careless attitudes and oversights of security and airline staff on the day of the flight, attempts to pretend that the victims were not Canadian, and protracted government refusals to launch an enquiry. Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee claimed that less than a year after the fatal incident those ghosts were: in the process of disappearing from the larger Canadian consciousness. Politically, the tragedy was “unhoused”, in that Canada wished to see it as an Indian event sadly visited on these shores by uncontrollable fanatics, and India was happy to treat it as an “overseas incident” with containable financial implications.40 After years of lobbying, the Commission of Inquiry finally examined the series of catastrophic events leading up to the bombing, notably entitling its 2010 report A Canadian Tragedy.41 By the time this Commission was formed Mirabel was long closed and was not, therefore, one of Canada’s ‘official sites of memory’ for this tragedy.42 The memorials to the passengers and crew who died on Air India Flight 182 are located in Ahakista, Ireland and Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Lachine in southwestern Montreal, nowhere near Mirabel. This all combines to evade responsibility and deny that the victims belong anywhere, eternally displaced. If the farmers, passengers and crew members are the ghosts whose absences haunt Mirabel, who does Mirabel itself haunt? Even before

112  Liz Millward its permanent desistance the site had for some time been hard to see, a doubtful presence. Airports are periodically renamed: Stevenson Field was opened in 1928, retitled Winnipeg International Airport in 1958 and then James Armstrong Richardson International Airport in 2006. Malton Airport, opened in Toronto in the late 1930s, was by 1960 ­Toronto International Airport and then Lester B. Pearson International Airport in 1984, although it is usually just called ‘Pearson’. Dorval ­Airport was renamed Montréal-Dorval International in 1960, and in 2004 became Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport.43 This process honours one version of the past by attaching it to singular, apparently ‘important’ men while at the same time erasing the past which was attached to that older name. Given this common practice, the fact that Mirabel and Dorval operated simultaneously, and the ambiguous role of Mirabel once Dorval was re-opened to international passenger flights, it is not surprising that there was confusion over whether Mirabel and Dorval were, in fact, merely different names (new and old, or was it old and new?) for the same Montreal airport. Lurking somewhere in peri­ pheral vision, Mirabel was neither clearly present nor obviously absent.

Intrusions into the Present One of Edensor’s main arguments is that industrial ruins challenge the ways in which dominant groups try to order all possible knowledge and understanding about the past and orient our experiences of the present, smoothing them out into seamless interactions rather like the supposed workings of capital itself. Unlike those sites which Edensor depicts in nostalgic, romanticised tones, Mirabel is not derelict nor been stripped by canny scavengers. Its skeleton remains on the landscape, part base for the aerospace manufacturers Bombardier and part racecourse. Given that it is now privately occupied, and that the transportation links to it are as woeful today as they were in its heyday, it is not a space in which one can wander and become immersed. There are not even any guided tours of Mirabel, no narrative of an imagined past as there is at ­Tempelhof. Instead, the ghost’s presence surfaces in other spaces, at other airports. Frers explains how this can happen: an absence arises in the experience, it is a relational phenomenon that constitutes itself in corporeal perception. Someone has to miss something for it to be absent. Different from a general not-being or not-existing, it is a not-being-here, a not-existing-now.44 It is in this sense that Mirabel is a haunting presence hovering over expansion projects in Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver, where hectares of concrete and glass dwarf the passengers whose numbers, like M ­ irabel’s, never really seem to grow.

‘Un aéroport-fantôme’  113 In the late 1970s I flew into Mirabel from Heathrow. I remember little about it, except that we were transferred to a coach to drive through a snowstorm, but what has stayed with me is the impression of expanse and emptiness. I am struck by the same sensation at ­Pearson when I stand on the rapid moving walkway and pass along the seemingly endless and oddly deserted corridor which takes me from my arriving flight to the Canada Border Service Agents; ‘something that is experienced as absent, like a deceased relative, can be extremely powerful because the person who experiences the absent entity must raise it herself, from her own corporeality’.45 As I wait in the baggage reclaim hall, I gaze across all of the motionless carousels. This vast hall is so much like Mirabel – so determined to pretend that it is another Heathrow in London, or O’Hare in Chicago, or Schiphol in ­A msterdam, so keen to maintain the visage of relevance, prosperity, of promise, as if all this excess capacity will necessarily be utilised one day. In the same way, Mirabel’s spectre appears on the few occasions when I have to transfer at Pearson and take the Terminal Link train that was introduced in 2006. This is an elevated driverless train, like the Skytrain in Vancouver or the now defunct Monorail in Sydney, Australia. There is something futuristic and outmoded about these ele­ vated trains, a contradiction attested to by Sydney’s Monorail which lasted for just twenty-five years and had to introduce drivers early on because the system was too prone to breakdown to rely on its intended automation. Mirabel’s mobile lounges function similarly for they are a nod to the lofty aspirations and monumental failings of that same era. As ­E densor comments: while ruins always constitute an allegorical embodiment of a past, while they perform a physical remembering of that which has vanished, they also gesture towards the present and the future as temporal frames which can be read as both dystopian and utopian, and they help to conjure up critiques of present arrangements and potential futures.46 The inert carousels, the cavernous spaces, the elevated train are all present now, gesturing towards a future that they expect will come to pass. They are not Edensor’s ruins, but because Mirabel existed they invoke the ‘presence of absence’.47 This is a complicated absence. Mirabel is missing from the present-day aviation landscape, but its future, which should now be its present, was always absent. Will Toronto suffer the same horrible fate? Current costly infrastructure projects cannot shake Mirabel. The presence of its absence and the absence of its presence, its inability to usher in supermodernity, destabilise the ‘present arrangements’ of Toronto, Vancouver and elsewhere, and call into question their ‘potential futures’.

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Coda If ‘dominant strategies of remembering tend to exorcise haunted places’, this is absolutely true of the typical abandoned airports, cheerfully relinquishing their version of tomorrow that was realised in due course and then inevitably discarded, overtaken by progress.48 Even Mirabel has a dominant tale which insists that it is now closed, the expropriated land has been returned (but to whom?), memorials to Air India Flight 182 do exist, and Quebec’s concerns are marginal to the rest of Canada anyway. Consequently, Mirabel’s ghosts can no longer haunt anyone. In spite of this narrative, this ‘aéroport-fantôme’ pushes through into the present at unexpected moments. While Mirabel is not a ruin or a mundane space, it holds the same promise as those spaces to unsettle. In our encounters with other airports we are reminded of Mirabel, where ‘fluid and evanescent experiences of the spectral disturb the reifications through which performances, narratives and experiences of memory become fixed in space by those with concerns to settle accounts with the past’.49 This forsaken airport refuses to be fixed in the past as somewhere that has been superseded. It represents time that has stopped (nothing on the departures or arrivals boards), is bereft of people and distant from the spatial networks of supermodernity. Its presence and absence problematises the claims of a decentred and mobile subjectivity which is not tethered to the past or to specific locales. Mirabel does not make any particular sense. Indeed, Laurin suggests that it would be impossible to fashion the story of Mirabel into one cohesive narrative.50 But it is still out there, waiting, a shimmering reminder that tells an incomplete tale not just about the fantasy of capitalism, but also of the limits of expansion, the shelf-life of technological solutions, loss and the illusion of security.

Notes 1 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). 2 Ibid., 79. 3 Peter Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture (London: Routledge, 2012), 53. 4 Peter Adey, ‘Airports and Air-Mindedness: Spacing, Timing and Using the Liverpool Airport, 1929–1939’, Social and Cultural Geography 7, no. 3 (2006): 358. 5 Alastair Gordon, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). 6 Lars Frers, ‘The Matter of Absence’, cultural geographies 20, no. 4 (2013): 433. 7 Tim Edensor, ‘The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (2005): 829–849.

‘Un aéroport-fantôme’  115 8 Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 15–16. 9 Gordon Pirie, Cultures and Caricatures of British Imperial Aviation: Passengers, Pilots, Publicity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 10 For an excellent example of this process, see Colin Simmons and Viv ­Caruana, ‘Neighbourhood Issues in the Development of Manchester A ­ irport, 1934–1982’, Journal of Transport History 15, no. 2 (1994): 117–143. 11 Gordon, Naked Airport, 167. 12 See Pirie’s Cultures and Caricatures of British Imperial Aviation for a discussion. 13 Gordon, Naked Airport, 167. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Carine Discazeaux and Mario Polèe, ‘Comment expliquer le déclin de Montréal comme centre de transport aériens: une question de géographie économique?’, Canadian Geographer 51, no. 1 (2007): 22–42. 17 Ceri Morgan, ‘Writing the Heartland II: Monique LaRue and la Côte Nord’, Comparative Critical Studies 4, no. 2 (2007): 290. 18 Clifford Krauss, ‘End of Era Near in Montreal for White-Elephant Airport’, The New York Times (3 October 2004), n18. 19 ‘ScoreCard’, Maclean’s (15 November 2004), 16. 20 Brenda Branswell, ‘White Elephant’, Maclean’s (8 September 1997), 24. 21 ‘Crash and Burn’, Canadian Business (25 October to 7 November 2004), 16; Intercommunica, Montréal-Mirabel: The Largest Airport Complex in the World (Québec: Éditeur officiel du Québec, 1975), 21. 22 Gordon, Naked Airport, 205. 23 Ibid., 205–206. 24 Intercommunica, Montréal-Mirabel, 21. 25 Ibid. The world’s busiest airports today do not even come close to these dimensions, and barely this tonnage, but they far exceed this number of passengers. 26 Ibid., 7. 27 Ondine Park, Tonya K. Davidson and Rob Shields, ‘Introduction’, in Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope, ed. Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Park and Rob Shields (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011), 5–6. 28 Suzanne Laurin, L’Échiquier de Mirabel (Montreal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 2012), 21. 29 Park, Davidson and Shields, ‘Introduction’, 7. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 Laurin, L’Échiquier, 18–20. 32 Frers, ‘The Matter of Absence’, 434. 33 Ibid. 34 Laurin, L’Échiquier, 24. 35 There is a genre of ruin photography that celebrates the apparent triumph of nature over the abandoned built environment. As Nate Millington argues, this work tends to reproduce ‘crude binaries between urban hubris and natural reclamation’ rather than complicate the processes of change and renewal. Laurin’s photographs are not part of such ruin photography, since their intention is precisely to illustrate her complex argument about the inter­ sections of economic, political, cultural and natural processes at Mirabel. Nate Millington, ‘Post-Industrial Imaginaries: Nature, Representation and

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36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ruin in Detroit, Michigan’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 1 (2013): 285. Tim Edensor, ‘Mundane Hauntings: Commuting Through the Phantasmagoric Working-Class Spaces of Manchester, England’, cultural geographies 15, no. 3 (2008): 318. Roger Gosselin and Jean-Pierre Brassard, Mirabel: Part II. Land Expropriation and Management (Toronto: Case Program in Canadian Public Administration, 1977), 2. Edensor, ‘Mundane Hauntings’, 313. Branswell, ‘White Elephant’, 24. Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee, The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (Markham, ON: Penguin, 1987), ix. Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air ­India Flight 182, Air India Flight 182: A Canadian Tragedy. Vol. 2: Part 1: Pre-Bombing (Ottawa: Public Works and Government Services, 2010), 214, 220. Edensor, ‘Mundane Hauntings’, 330. This was not without some controversy since Prime Minister Trudeau had intended to close Dorval in favour of Mirabel. Frers, ‘The Matter of Absence’, 433–434. Ibid., 438. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 15. Frers, ‘The Matter of Absence’, 434. Edensor, ‘Mundane Hauntings’, 330. Ibid. Laurin, L’Échiquier, 20–22.

7 Zombie South Cormac McCarthy’s Architectures of the Undead Daniel Cross Turner

Set apart from the, by now standard-issue, tropes of the gothic, ­undeadness encompasses ‘a wide continuum of posthumous pheno­ mena, from funerary rites and mourning practices to the shocking, overwhelming affect of terrifying spectacles and post-traumatic flashbacks, to figures from beyond death: ghosts, vampires, zombies’ and other revenants.1 Undeadness also signals a notable form of the in-between, limning bounds between the living and the dead. It therefore overlaps with critical theories of thingness insofar as it traffics in corpses unburied, decayed, dismembered, yet still filled with life, or a kind of life, be it with the multitude of microorganisms drawing sustenance from decomposing bodies or the psychical afterlife of remembering the deceased. Over the past decade thinkers in a range of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, philosophy, aesthetics and literary criticism, have reconceived notions of objecthood and the impact of nonhuman entities on the human realm to question whether such a thing as ‘the human realm’ exists in itself. At the crux of these inquiries is the split between objecthood and thingness. An object is defined vis-à-vis a parti­ cular subject-object relation, as, for instance, a stone is used as part of a wall or a weapon. Once a thing – amorphous, lingering before and beyond human systems – is named, ‘[i]t is assimilated into the terms of the human subject at the same time that it is opposed to it as object, an opposition that is indeed necessary for the subject’s separation and definition’. 2 Even after being plugged into social codes of meaning there endures ‘an unknowable otherness to the thing’, a puncturing sense of in-betweenness that we can never fully place.3 The underlying thingness of an object becomes visible when the normal chain of subject-to-object is corrupted, the thingness irrupting as objects break apart or swell beyond their assigned usage. Through the lens of object-oriented ontology, undeadness presses forward a posthuman emphasis on the shaping power of nonhuman actants. In the first instance, posthumanism is time-bound, denoting an ideology emerging after humanism. The philosophic tenets and political discourse of traditional humanism, initiated in early modern European culture, have thinned to near-nothingness under contemporary critiques

118  Daniel Cross Turner of the authority of, among other things, a privileged subject position, implicitly coded as First World, white, male. There is no longer belief in the universality of ‘the human condition’, nor in ‘humanity’ as an exceptional plane of experience, nor in ‘individualism’ as an intact, sovereign mode of agency. In the second instance, posthumanism implies a theoretical direction beyond humanism. The very nature of ‘human nature’ undergoes severe trial and transformation whereby all human actions are viewed as imbricated in larger networks inextricable from and impacted strongly by nonhuman elements (technological, scientific, infrastructural, environmental, etc.) that manipulate, if not dictate, outcomes. The physical and intellectual boundaries of the human subject are viewed now as cut-and-paste amalgams of human and nonhuman (or parahuman) materials, for the human organism is defined as an amorphous web strung through with other organic and nonorganic tissue permeating its porous structure (the human microbiome, synthetic toxicants absorbed into the body, etc.). In Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, the presence of undeadness heightens awareness of how extensively and intensively inanimate things influence social spaces and express forms of agency within, and beyond, cultural systems.4 When the thingness of nonhuman environs asserts itself we often experience a moment of uncanny affect, even dread, at the recognition of the thingness of our own bodies. McCarthy’s narrative erupts with what Jane Bennett calls ‘vibrant matter’ coursing through and across bodies, both individual and collective, illuminating the way events and actions are always ad hoc combinations of human-nonhuman assemblages.5 The novel’s attention to synergies between living and dead materials critiques anthropocentric faith in individual agency and the fiction of cohesive political entities. This chapter will expound on the ‘object matter’ of McCarthy’s work, specifically how his texts expose ‘the phenomenal object world through which human subjects circulate’.6 The Road, I argue, allows us to reapprehend ‘life’ as ‘a pre-individual plane of forces that does not act by a process of decision and self-maintenance’, thereby offering ‘difference and distance from already constituted images of life as necessarily fruitful, generative, organised and human’.7 Human life, then, ceases to be seen as operating according to linear narratives of progress towards productive, achievable endpoints. Through the irruptive presence of undead things we see that traditional religious and socio-­political teleo­logies hold no sustaining power. All roads now are marked as destination unknown. The Road is fraught with the walking near-dead as well as reanimated and repurposed corpses. The earth is ruined in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event that was either purely accidental (a giant meteor crash), humanly induced (nuclear apocalypse) or perhaps even divinely ordained (The Apocalypse), or some combination of these. The sun has

Zombie South  119 been essentially blotted out, and grey ashes sift down continuously from the skies. Virtually all animal and plant life has been eliminated so survivors must subsist on the ever-decreasing stores of canned goods left over, or else resort to cannibalism. The Road focuses on the journey of a father and son as they make their weary march through an unforgiving terrain. The novel’s fearsome brand of vibrant matter is wrought most keenly in spectacles of decapitated, deskinned, deboned and other­ wise desecrated human bodies grafted onto architectural structures. These haunted spaces come not from a spectral trompe l’oeil or sleight of the imagination. Philosopher Maurice Blanchot defines the concept of ‘the radiant cadaver’ in which, as Daniel Tiffany notes, the corpse is ­continually transformed by ‘infinite erosion’ and ‘imperceptible consumption’, properties that emphasise the cadaver’s ‘partial and unstable identity’ and ‘help to explain its aesthetic allure’.8 Unlike traditional ghosts that function as flickering holograms of buried pasts, the radiant cadavers in The Road unveil a distinct undeadness all the more disturbing because of their recalcitrant presence. Sapped of vital fluids, minus critical organs and void of brainwaves, these posthuman forms haunt in plain sight, grossly and grotesquely bodying forth post-traumatic sites of disaster. They rethink dividing lines between living and nonliving matter, and turn the gaze to conventionally less visible actants and forms of agency. McCarthy’s undead architectures trace the ‘eerie life of the dead in an age without ghosts, that is, the matter that escapes the concept that ought to master it by making it thinkable’.9 In a fully material world which has stopped believing in access to a spiritual afterworld, there is still mystery and the dread of unknowing things, quite literally. Our ghosts now materialise as the undead matter that we cannot readily order or control by systems of organisation and thought. To turn Hamlet’s phrase, even or especially without recourse to a heaven, there are more things in earth than are dreamt of in all our philosophies.

The Undead South My interpretation of McCarthy’s architectonics of undeadness is given cultural and geographic specificity by interleaving this frame with cathected issues surrounding ‘southernness’ vis-à-vis ‘Americanness’. In its creation of a post-apocalyptic South swarming with environmental catastrophe, abject poverty and barbarism, The Road extends the region’s stereotypical ‘belatedness’ outward and everywhere – a decline into late stage primitivism on a global scale that, nevertheless, speaks particularly to ideologically vexed matters regarding southern and American modes of belonging and citizenship. Leigh Anne Duck critiques the purported exceptionalism of the U.S. South as an idea produced and disseminated to quarantine the region from the rest of the liberal nation.10 The rheto­ rical construction of the South as chronically stuck in its own time and

120  Daniel Cross Turner ways fell through during the Great Depression. During this time when the country as a whole was afflicted with economic deprivation, there was fear that the South’s savagery – its violently enforced racial apartheid and rural isolation, therefore backwardness – might well infect the rest of the nation. As Duck writes, ‘no longer an effective container for the nation’s disavowed antiliberalism, the trope of the backward South began to comprise an image of what the United States could become’.11 Set in the Greatest Depression, The Road demonstrates that this trope is not an inherent state-of-being but has been historically conditioned by socio-economic and political forces. Even though published two years before the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, McCarthy’s novel is eerily prescient. Its decimated architectures seem like spectral doubles for the desolate urbanscapes and ‘zombie’ mortgages in the wake of this financial panic. This makes the novel’s haunting affect seem not the trick of a distant spectrality, but very real to us. The Road’s undead architectures actualise present conditions, linking the exhaustion of natural and economic capital. McCarthy works across his native territory of east Tennessee and places familiar to him personally all the way down to the South Carolina coastal plain. The ragtag figures of a fictive father and son make their way from lower Kentucky to east Tennessee through the Smokies and down to the South Carolina lowcountry, concluding someplace along the South Carolina/Georgia seaboard.12 The setting begs questions: how are we to understand the ways in which The Road addresses the real – and/or imagined – past and present places of the American South? Do the cataclysmic renderings of the contemporary South depend upon its native and plantation pasts, and their neocapitalist aftermaths? Does anything distinct remain, or are all spatialities afflicted in ways that lead to doom? Undeadness, in its liminality and recrudescence, allegorises the paradoxical claims of a once-‘real’ South as against the cultural manufacturing and fetishisation of an exceptional regional past. All of the South, all of America, all of the world has become one vast wasteland – one that signals an ‘over-presence’ (an excess of undead things piling up) as much as an absence.13 The ‘See Rock City’ advertisement the father notes on the side of a barn in what used to be Tennessee connotes the ‘unique’ ­American South at the end of its writ, for the whole earth now is in essence petrified, one expansive, indistinguishable rock city. Because the consumptive engine of late capitalism has stalled in the apocalyptic fallout, what Scott Romine calls the South as ‘a consumption-based e­ conomy – the South of the museum, the reenactment, the themed space, and the tourist destination’ has itself been shut down.14 The scattered traces of global capital emanating from what was previously the U.S. South (for example, the ‘See Rock City’ poster, the leftover can of Coca-Cola the father shares with his son, the mountain and coastal resorts turned ghost towns along the road) suggest that regional affiliation is largely, if not entirely, a by-product of

Zombie South  121 the capitalist marketplace. With the markets dissipated, regional identity seems to be leaning terrifyingly on nothing. The shattered physical infrastructures throughout The Road echo fractured political, economic and social infrastructures. The architectural aftermaths of this segment of the South make manifest that regions and nations are, in language fraught with spectrality, ‘fantasmatic objects knotted together by ambivalent forces of desire, identification, memory, and forgetting, even as they simultaneously move within, across, and beyond a series of spatial and temporal borders (us/them, territory/flow, present/past, life/death)’.15 The ruined landscapes remind us how precipitously objects can come undone, how readily fractionalised and factionalised regionalist and nationalist formations really are. Undeadness reveals them to be ‘fantasmatic objects’ on the verge of failing, yet still powerfully imprinted models that condition, if not coerce, our collective knowing and unknowing, remembering and forgetting. McCarthy’s architectures of the undead drag us into awareness of our global interconnectivity, but one denuded of the sunny rhetoric of multicultural inclusion under the sign of humanism. Instead, the novel calls us to accept the responsibility of our inextricable relationship with other regions and nations through our very indifference – that is, our lack of real differentiation – from the ecological surround. George Monbiot calls The Road ‘the most important environmental book ever written’, asserting that McCarthy’s ‘thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biologi­ cal production remains absolute’.16 Human-centric hubris is subjected to nonhuman humiliation. Man-made objects, even the longest-lasting artefacts, fall prey to built-in obsolescence at the hands of environmental contingencies. Any commitment to craft and futurity must be based on a greater awareness of our responsibility (in its etymological sense of ‘responding to’) to the nonhuman world. This human-ecological responsivity is founded on the understanding that things will change. And that things will change us existentially (in terms of individual human mortality) and historically (in terms of ecological and cultural transitions). Seen in this light, doing good work means acting with knowledge of our thingness, our connectedness with the materia infusing our consciousness of the world. As the father and his young son journey through east Tennessee down to the coastline of the southeastern United States, we witness the splintering of models of regional and national exceptionalism. The symbolic cannibalism of the black-market drug trade streaming across the border from Mexico in McCarthy’s previous novel No Country for Old Men – described by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell as ‘the sort of breakdown in mercantile ethics that leaves people settin around out in the desert dead in their vehicles and by then it’s just too late’ – is exchanged for a more extreme economic and ethical bankruptcy in The Road.17 Where people

122  Daniel Cross Turner are shooting each other because of a collapse in lex mercatoria of self-­ governance in the former, people are eating each other in the latter. The porous borders of Sheriff Bell’s Texas may be no country for old men, but in the horrorscape of The Road there are no countries at all. The ghostlier demarcations of nations in the earlier novel have disappeared almost wholly, dissolved into the ghosts of ghosts; landscapes have ceased to be effective affective spaces buttressing regional and national formations. Instead they embody sites of dread, marring our collective memory. Most geopolitical markers of the South and the nation have disintegrated amid massive climate change and phenological devastation. The cartographic impulse of father and son’s threadbare map points to the deterioration of federal and state roadways, grids that once attempted to bind together region to nation. Places that were familiar and comforting (for example, the father’s boyhood home which parallels McCarthy’s own childhood home in Knoxville, Tennessee) have become haunted houses, eerie spaces teeming with undeadness. They are startlingly and sublimely unhomelike – unheimlich in its root meaning. These spaces no longer bear the imprint of the teleological impetus and temporal flows of modernity and nationhood as the narrative presents an end-of-days premonition of a contemporary society that has exceeded boundaries, metaphorically and even geopolitically. This is foregrounded in the persistent gutting and grim renovation of man-made structures: outstripped houses, melted cityscapes, an antebellum plantation manor converted to cannibal ‘farm’, morbidly adorned stone walls and cairns. And of course endless roadways accompanied by detached bridges, underpasses and outworn roadside sellscapes of unattended filling stations, empty resorts and tourist attractions. The lobotomising of environmental memory is coupled with transformations of such unbuilt and rebuilt constructions functioning as bleak palimpsests of past civilisations. The novel’s interminable wastelands starkly, darkly overriding the old uses of the landscape and objects will not let us forget the horror of our ways – we cannot bypass these terminally lost roadways. The landscapes of decay now house the living dead, the few human stragglers who drag out existence treading the broken edges of late capitalism’s implosion. It is a real-life zombification bereft of redemptive spiritual overtones. No longer are we awaiting the imminent eschaton à la Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending). Instead, we suffer a centreless stasis à la John Berger (Hold Everything Dear) where it seems the end has already been, the great change already passed.18 The most memorable structures are those that create parallels between the cannibalising of architectural bodies and human ones, fusing skulls, bones, whole corpses into their designs. These undying forms reflect a vibrant materiality, efficacious assemblages that press us beyond the human, or at least past the failing platitudes of an outshorn humanism.

Zombie South  123

Undead Architectonics: Modern/Primitive McCarthy’s undead architectonics recurs in walls, memorials and tombs made of stone that harken back to humankind’s primal will to outbelieve death by casting permanent structures. The ethos of stone-built arrangements is seen when father and son follow a stone wall into a decrepit orchard that infuses its form with the remnants of corpses. The orchard summons an atmosphere of a prelapsarian garden overlain with decorative relics of primordial savagery, the roughly reconstructed fashions of a bygone era remodelled for the end times: The trees in their ordered rows gnarled and black and the fallen limbs thick on the ground. He stopped and looked across the fields. Wind in the east. The soft ash moving in the furrows. Stopping. Moving again. He’d seen it all before. Shapes of dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled away. The wall beyond held a frieze of human heads, all faced alike, dried and caved with their taut grins and shrunken eyes. They wore gold rings in their leather ears and in the wind their sparse and ratty hair twisted about on their skulls. The teeth in their sockets like dental molds, the crude tattoos etched in some homebrewed woad faded in the beggared sunlight. Spiders, swords, targets. A dragon. Runic slogans, creeds misspelled. Old scars with old motifs stitched along their borders. The heads not truncheoned shapeless had been flayed of their skins and the raw skulls painted and signed across the forehead in a scrawl and one white bone skull had the plate sutures etched carefully in ink like a blueprint for assembly…. He walked along the wall passing the masks in a last review and through a stile and on to where the boy was waiting. He  put his arm around his shoulder. Okay, he said. Let’s go.19 Human heads are treated as the materials on hand, undifferentiated from stone or any other thing used to custom a frieze. The evisceration of the human form dovetails with the structural disembowelling and refurbishment of archaic architectonics expressed in the orchard walls. The cannibalising of past forms as nonredemptive, fruitless salvage is clear in ‘one white bone skull [that] had the plate sutures etched carefully in ink like a blueprint for assembly’. These blueprints reveal the dissection of human designs that have been outlived by undeadness. The dry bones cannot live but, like the ‘vermiculate patterns’ on the backs of mountain trout reflecting designs of time immemorial, the primal blueprints are ‘[m]aps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again’. 20 The totemic heads on the wall are not a symbol of regenerated belief or even of warning so much as a blank sign of the times: a  string of useless memento mori, total overkill, as

124  Daniel Cross Turner if we needed reminding of death’s nearness or intractability, for death is no longer a philosophical abstraction but is viscerally present in this zero-sum world. Many apocalyptic narratives attempt to wipe the slate clean, giving civilisation an opportunity to do better this time around. In McCarthy’s book, this second chance is dead-on-arrival as things fall apart into the ultimate dystopian mire. The stone-and-skull palette is apparently the ruins of one of the post-apocalyptic ‘bloodcults’, signifying a vain and futile tribalism that is creedless even in an age of post-belief, with their ‘Runic slogans’ and ‘creeds misspelled’. The wordplay on ‘spelling’ as incantation implies these creeds hold no magic and are merely masks for brutalism. In piecemeal manner they redeem the ‘old motifs’ (­ ‘Spiders, swords, targets. A dragon’), poorly restoring emblems that are less metaphoric than metonymic. The mish-mash forms an undead pastiche inferring that such tribal affiliations undergird all regional and national ‘civilisations’, past, present and future … if there is any. Moreover, referring to atrophied heads as ‘masks’ (the father passes the heads like a visitor at a museum exhibition) further raises primitivist connotations, recalling modern European art’s use of African masks as a crude appropriation of premodern culture. This posthuman/posthumous architecture reflects a heightened aestheticisation of trauma (physically, in heads ‘truncheoned shapeless’) in its display of the undead thingness of the human subject turned to object. The repulsive is raised to the status of art, of ornament; an impulse captured in the grim beauty of ­McCarthy’s taut language. Yet the awful artistry of the stone orchard evokes a closing vignette of compassion between father and son. It is a sentiment rendered on the knife’s edge of an aesthetics of abjection. Does it take horror to elicit beauty? Must we be drawn over the abyss to draw back into an ethics of reciprocity, of doing unto others as you will have done to you, but also of not doing bad things to others even if they had done them to you? Later, the severed, decorated heads of the old stone orchard are reimaged as a dried-out head under a cakebell, sardonically crowned with a baseball cap, atop a pharmacy counter in the South Carolina upcountry: In a town in the piedmont they’d slept in a place like this and listened to the rain. There was an oldfashioned drugstore there with a black marble counter and chrome stools with tattered plastic seats patched with electrical tape. The pharmacy was looted but the store itself was oddly intact. Expensive electronic equipment sat unmolested on the shelves. He stood looking the place over. Sundries. Notions. What are these? He took the boy’s hand and led him out but the boy had already seen it. A human head beneath a cakebell at the end of the counter. Dessicated. Wearing a ballcap. Dried eyes turned sadly inward. Did he dream this? He did not. 21

Zombie South  125 The strange intactness of the drugstore as a site of catchall consumption, from the latest pharmaceuticals and cutting-edge electronics to old-­fashioned diner fare, shows how far the world has drifted beyond the reaches of flexible accumulation. The drugstore joins destitute supermarkets as signs that late capitalism is itself belated, manifested in the father and son’s shopping cart, a movable architecture of surplus consumerism. The consumptive impetus of modern capital – its sundries and accompanying notions now desiccated – is grossly diverted, where undead flesh substitutes for cake. The roadscape contains a series of monuments to the dead, the landscape a kind of mass grave, with former cities now all cities of the dead. Yet these tributes seem to have lost their sustaining power since they are drained of specificity and de-individualised. Rock cairns indicate an archetypal need to not forget, and these appear insistently along the road. Their rudimentary formation evokes origins that translate across cultural spaces as well as times, the earliest dating from the Neolithic era (c. 4000 BCE) and appearing in diverse sites, from Western Europe to Asia to the Middle East. However, McCarthy does not lay emphasis on their memorialising function but rather their cryptic nature and irrecoverability. Father and son would pass ‘small cairns of rock by the roadside’ that denoted ‘signs in gypsy language, lost patterans’.22 Though the stone structures may last as long as anything left on earth, their meaning is already lost. They are patteran signalling nothing but nothingness. Such ‘hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead’ will remain eternally untranslated as individual identity; the clarion call for modern democratic government carries little weight at a time when the human body is valued more as a food source than as a vital ­consumer-citizen of a thriving region or nation. 23 The obsolescence of these timeless constructions is seen again in the dolmen stones in what used to be the South Carolina lowcountry: ‘The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind’.24 Soundless, besides the monotone static of the wind, the oracles have spoken, but only in their bones. The unnecessary prophecy of death to all living things at this late stage goes without saying. Purportedly lasting, timeless structures mean little when humankind itself is ‘timeless’ in the sense of being ‘out of time’. We find ourselves again in that unheimlich space between past and present, living and dead. Moreover, a makeshift cairn is realised memorably in the unintended grave-marker created by the remains of the cannibal shot dead by the father: ‘Coming back he found the bones and the skin piled together with rocks over them. A pool of guts. He pushed at the bones with the toe of his shoe. They looked to have been boiled. No pieces of clothing’. 25 The man’s companions have made quick work of his body, picking his bones clean. He is converted to his component parts, his internal architectonics laid bare. It is another

126  Daniel Cross Turner telling instance of late capitalism leaving behind a legacy where everything is expendable. Archaic stonework is not the only space for undead architectonics. Modern architectural sites often offer an equally mixed idea of the power of the undead to shape human conditions. Arguably the most distressing manifestation is placed in the cellar of an antebellum plantation manor that was ‘tall and stately with white doric columns across the front. A port cochere at the side. A gravel drive that curved up through a field of dead grass. The windows were oddly intact’.26 This ‘once grand house sited on a rise above the road’ typifies the threadbare mythos of the Old South, a motif in literary and popular depictions of the region from Tara and Twelve Oaks in Gone with the Wind (and its ironic inversion as Belle Rêve in A Streetcar Named Desire) to the venerable manor in John Crowe Ransom’s ‘Old Mansion’. 27 The edifice, its white-­columned façade symbolising order and eminence, veils a double trauma: one past (‘Chattel slaves had once trod those boards bearing food and drink on silver trays’), and one present.28 Per usual, the father leads the descent into darkness: He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. The boy clutched at his coat. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. 29 The cellar inverts Plato’s Cave to an abyss of Sartrean Huis Clos, where the prisoners never get out. What was formerly the site of a different form of objecthood – the conversion of purchased and transported Africans into human chattel in the antebellum South – has shifted to the farming and slaughter of human livestock at modernity’s endpoint. An uncanny affect is produced as two images are superimposed in a photographic double exposure. Living off the labour of enslaved Africans gives way to living off the bodies of the captured. Set against the weighted air and neoclassical balance of the old manor, the underpinnings are saturated with undead presence. The grotto is rough, gloomy, cold, damp, the air overpowered with an ‘ungodly stench’. There is an unsettling anachronism of premodern, antebellum and contemporary times that implies the brute groundwork supporting the abstract machinations of global capi­ tal and its accompanying humanist ideology. The scene parallels Paul Gilroy’s argument that slavery and apartheid, far from being vestiges

Zombie South  127 from ‘backwards’ cultures, are foundational to late modernity.30 The faint offering of hope for these miserable human livestock through help from the father and son is quickly blackened as the cannibals, four bearded men and two women, return to the house, and father and son must make their escape. In a broader sense, and on a broader scale, stonework reappears in the novel’s concern with highways, bridges and overpasses. A spectacle of architectural invention and execution, the U.S. interstate highway system was ‘the greatest and the longest engineered structure ever built’.31 It fostered the movement of capital into and out of the South, upgrading its traffic (automotive, commercial, ideological) with the nation, contri­ buting to the federalisation of the country. These structures were creative with aspirations towards modernising the South and linking it to modes of commerce and consumption in the nation at large. At modernity’s stopping point however, they embody a failed futurity. One of our few views of the post-1956 Eisenhower interstates comes just outside ‘the city’. Previously a major nexus of travel and trade, the interchanges of I-40 and I-75 at Knoxville have transformed into an uncanny postmodern ‘funhouse against the distant murk’, ‘ruins’ even amid the ruins.32 Among these shattered exchanges we encounter bodies disintegrating and melding with the outstripped structures surrounding them, lost in the funhouse forever: The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.33 Preserved to no end and going nowhere, these corrupted human subjects are reformed through postmortem metamorphoses whereby ligaments become ‘wires’, faces become ‘boiled sheeting’, and teeth are reset as ‘yellowed palings’. The kinship forged between humans and the roadway resurfaces in the dead cauterised into the macadam by firestorms. At first, father and son encounter ‘the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers’.34 A mile down the road this breakdown of items into shapeless things expands to include human roadkill. ‘Everything melted and black’ morphs seamlessly, if horrifically, into the thingness of humans, with ‘[f]igures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling.… Like victims of some ghastly envacuuming’.35 Like the corpses, the road too has been mummified. Once the lifeblood of the region, the interstates have meta­ phorically been brought to life here in order to expose their deadness.

128  Daniel Cross Turner They are as so many empty veins in a cadaver, ‘cold coagulate’, now that the flows of commerce have dried entirely. McCarthy’s novel is a timely parable, and portentous premonition, of the future of global capitalism if ever there was one.

Coda: The Ends of Things We confront the often fractious, intractable presence of thingness when objects ‘stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily’.36 In the imploded world of The Road these circuits are beyond repair, perpetually on the blink. Much of the work of the novel – in spite or because of the father’s exceptional skill in crafting things back into objects – points up our sheer interdependence on things, including the very thingness of human beings. McCarthy’s narrative illustrates how profoundly and profusely ‘nonliving’ things influence social, economic and political formations. The posthumous is a vital upcropping of the posthuman, an insistent recrudescence of the vib­rancy of presumably dead matter, shifting in-between not simply spatialities but also temporalities. Thingness persists before and after human codes of objecthood. On the one side, the novel shows how things bear traces of ‘the amorphousness out of which objects are materialized by the (ap)perceiving subject, the anterior physicality of the physical world emerging, perhaps, as an after-effect of the mutual constitution of subject and object, a retroprojection’.37 As artefacts break down we see an anterior thingness emerging and encroaching on the human realm. On the other side, the undeadness of things gestures towards ‘what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects – their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence’.38 The array of thingness gives a sense of ‘the not yet formed or the not yet formable’ (latent thingness) that is coextensive with ‘what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects’ (excessive thingness).39 The undying thingness of objects splices chronologies. It  is a presence protruding through the undead forms of McCarthy’s unheimlich architectonics. The Road presses out the possibilities of a purely material universe, with human mindfulness only an afterthought. It is a sentiment unlocked in Judge Holden’s vatic aphorism from Blood Meridian: Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.40

Zombie South  129 There is no outside, no space for impartial vantage – the perceiver is always an integral part of the field, and language frames our perceptions of the nonhuman environs as much as we frame language. Or, if thought and language are seen as part of an automatic, posthuman pattern of repetition, then there is no unity ‘that would be other than each perceiving and affected point of view’ – that is, there is no objective distance between the perceptions and emotions of an individual being and the external world.41 Indeed, the world becomes ‘just this multiplicity of viewpoints, each of which is a truth of a whole that is nothing other than this expressive multiplicity’.42 To cite the father’s realisation near the conclusion of The Road and on death’s verge: ‘Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right’.43 That is to say, we are never above or apart from the material world we inhabit. The belief that we can master nature is not only false but potentially fatal. McCarthy’s fiction calls attention to anthropocentric hubris in exploiting natural resources and nonhuman ecology towards economic ends. It is an impetus that is both restorative (for the material world) and devastating (for the human reader). Richard Woodward comments that McCarthy’s work ‘restores the terror and grandeur of the physical world with a biblical gravity that can shatter a reader’.44 As strong as the compulsion to build or make might be, it is matched by the equal and opposite reaction of the nonhuman surrounds to remake made things via entropic reduction and other irruptions exercised within and beyond the human realm. Nevertheless, the other-directed reciprocity shared bet­ ween father and son and the world of things around them offers some hope for futurity. The architectural assemblages of undead matter reveal the infiltration of humanist accounts of individual agency, expanding to purportedly non-animated things the capacity for action. Thus we come to terms with our own materiality. In recognising and responding to what Bennett defines as a ‘political ecology of things’, we therefore confront the ‘goodness’ (a word repeated throughout the story) of the matter around us and the matter we are. The resetting of our psychologi­ cal investment in our physical environs makes us more keenly tuned to the presence of our surroundings as profoundly affective spaces, haunted less by loss than by excess. Faced with the blunt obduracy of the human position as not over and above but completely among the things of the world, father and son create a form of goodness, expressing a consciousness of our own otherness that may lead to a system of values that will enable us, if not to move forward – progression is illusionary along this destination-less road – then at least to act meaningfully in response to and in responsibility for others. Because of this newfound displacement of the human at the centre of the world, it’s not the end of the world. At the novel’s close the future is not closed, for the father dies but the son lives. The future, however dark, remains very much undead.

130  Daniel Cross Turner

Notes 1 Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood and Daniel Cross Turner, ‘Introduction’, in Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, ed. Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood and Daniel Cross Turner (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 1. 2 Peter Schwenger, ‘Words and the Murder of the Thing’, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 101. 3 Ibid. 4 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage International, 2006). 5 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 6 Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 18. 7 Claire Colebrook, ‘Queer Vitalism’, New Formations 68, no. 5 (2010): 77. 8 Daniel Tiffany, ‘Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity’, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 84. 9 Gregg Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: ­Stanford University Press, 2001), 97. 10 Leigh Anne Duck, The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006). 11 Ibid., 7. 12 Wesley Morgan offers a detailed description of the initial section of the probable path taken by father and son from Middlesboro, Kentucky through Knoxville and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, into western North Carolina. Although the journey is, on one level, archetypal and metaphysical, Morgan notes a number of geographic and biographical details of those locations that connect to the sites depicted in the novel, including the Newfound Gap overlook and the stone wall and gabled house in south Knoxville where McCarthy grew up. Dianne Luce picks up the trail from there, tracking the likely route father and son take from the mountain country of western North Carolina and down through the South Carolina upstate, midland, lowcountry and coastline: McCarthy surely became familiar with the roads of northwestern South Carolina through his research in Graniteville for The Gardener’s Son. And early on, the novel’s characters seem to follow the route McCarthy himself would have taken to Graniteville through the Piedmont. From Highlands, they seem to follow NC/GA 28 (Highlands Highway) south through the Chattahoochie National Forest to Seneca, South Carolina, a junction of the Blue Ridge and Southern rail lines, where near the train station they see the town’s “old wooden watertower bound with iron hoops”. See Wesley Morgan, ‘The Route and Roots of The Road’, The Cormac ­McCarthy Journal 6, no. 1 (2008): 39–47; Dianne Luce, ‘The Road to Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s Landscape of Loss’, conference paper (Savannah, Georgia: The American Literature Association Symposium on American Fiction, 2008). 13 Recent accounts that offer important ‘postsouthern’ critiques of essentialist or exceptionalist models of southern history include Scott Romine’s The Real South and Michael Kreyling’s The South That Wasn’t There. John Cant explores McCarthy’s fiction as engendering critiques of U.S. exceptionalist discourse, contending that the mythos of the American wasteland is driven to an all-time extreme in The Road, though Cant does see some hope for

Zombie South  131

14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

a reformation of community at the novel’s close. See Scott Romine, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction ­(Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Michael Kreyling, The South That Wasn’t There: Postsouthern Memory and History (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); John Cant, Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism (New York: Routledge, 2008). Romine, The Real South, 5. Vilashini Cooppan, Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), xvii. George Monbiot, ‘Civilisation Ends with a Shutdown of Human Concern. Are We There Already?’, The Guardian (30 October 2007), 1, accessed 12 November 2010, . Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York: Vintage Inter­ national, 2005), 304. This line of thought was inspired by Kathleen Amende’s conference presentation on post-apocalyptic narrative. See Kathleen E. Amende, ‘Daryl Gregory’s Southern, Gothic, Post-Apocalyptic, Unintentionally Parodic, Hyperreal Town of Switchcreek, Tennessee: An Examination of The Devil’s Alphabet’, conference paper (Savannah, Georgia: The American Literature Association Symposium on the Gothic, 2013); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (New York: Vintage, 2008). McCarthy, The Road, 90–91. Ibid., 287. Ibid., 183–184. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 261. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 105. John Crowe Ransom’s poem describes the imposing aura of the ‘Southern manor’, even in decay: It was a Southern manor. One hardly imagines Towers, arcades, or forbidding fortress walls; But sufficient state though its peacocks now were pigeons; Where no courts kept, but grave rites and funerals.

28 29 30 31

That the windows of McCarthy’s mansion are ‘oddly intact’ may suggest a further web of allusion, referencing ‘the vacant eye-like windows’ of the anthropomorphic manor in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) which, when decoded historiographically circa late 1830s, prophesises the internal decay and imminent splintering of the southern plantation economy. John Crowe Ransom, ‘Old Mansion’, in Selected ­Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 70; McCarthy, The Road, 105. McCarthy, The Road, 106. Ibid., 110. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (New York: Viking, 1997), ix.

132  Daniel Cross Turner 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4

McCarthy, The Road, 24. Ibid. Ibid., 190. Ibid., 191. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 4. Ibid., 5. Ibid. Ibid. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage International, 1985), 245. Colebrook, ‘Queer Vitalism’, 78, 79. Ibid., 79. McCarthy, The Road, 277. Richard Woodward, ‘Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction’, The New York Times (19 April 1992), accessed 20 December 2011, .

8 Double Exposure Rephotography and the Life of Place László Munteán

… the life of place is an afterlife, a reverberation that pulls the present into the past before throwing it back into the daylight. —Dylan Trigg1

Upon returning to a place we have not visited for a long time, we can be overwhelmed by the memories that take hold of the imagination. We may be surprised by the changes or perhaps the lack thereof. Objects remembered often shrink when we see them again years later. In such situations recollections are juxtaposed with new experiences of the materiality and immediacy of a place. Whether pleasurable or disquieting, we feel the air becoming dense with the lively presence of the past locked into that place. Here, photography plays a particularly important role in spatial memories. The photographic image assists us in mapping events and serving as testimony long after we have forgotten those occurrences. Instinctively viewing photographs as imprints of the past, we use them as reference points so that over time our memories crystallise around them. Upon returning to a place with a photograph in our hands that shows the same site many years earlier, the recognition of congruencies bet­ ween the image and the environment now conjures a different kind of thrill. This time the sensation of the past is less so a memory recalled than it is a potent trace of a bygone moment. Brought back to where it was made, the photograph evokes the captured event as a haunting presence permeating that place. This haunting is foregrounded in the burgeoning trend of personalised rephotography which juxtaposes past and present. This art form entails an old photograph superimposed on a new one, creating a peculiar time warp where photography’s potential to document reality is complemented, as well as complicated, by the experience of time that has elapsed between the two layers of the photographic palimpsest. M ­ obilising the notion of indexicality as an affective quality of photography I investigate rephotography through three case studies, each attesting to varying functions of the ghost as a catalyst for sentiments ranging from nostalgia to shock and discomfort.

134  László Munteán

Affective Indexicality The association between the photograph and its referent has been a subject of debate ever since the inception of the medium. In his theory of signs Charles Sanders Peirce describes the photograph as a tangible imprint of reality, underscoring the indexical relationship between the image and its referent. 2 Proceeding along the same lines Walter Benjamin fashions the camera after the psychoanalyst who excavates the hidden recesses of the human psyche. Within this psychoanalytical metaphor the photograph gives access to what Benjamin calls the ‘optical unconscious’, an alternative spatiality where formerly unnoticed or repressed details become visible.3 The photograph as optical unconscious is a container of memories stored but not remembered. Indexicality plays a similarly critical role in Roland Barthes’ theory of photography, which he developed in his seminal work Camera Lucida more than fifty years after Benjamin’s essay. As Barthes contends: The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.4 While Barthes’ emphatic use of the word ‘touch’ reiterates Peirce’s formulation of the indexical sign, the personal tone of this extract (which is sustained throughout the whole book) involves the viewer who partakes in the nexus of indexicality by way of beholding the image. Photography, Barthes suggests, is a ‘carnal medium, a skin I share’. 5 It cuts across time and allows one to be physically and emotionally affected by a presence that is at the same time an absence. Whereas Benjamin’s optical unconscious foregrounds a veiled dimension in the photograph, Barthes emphasises the absence of the referent that is concomitant with the illusory presence that photography offers. The simultaneity of presence and absence is essential to Barthes and provides the context for the terms studium and punctum. The studium engages our cultural interpretation of a photographic text and the connection between context, meaning and subjectivity. The studium is ‘an average affect’, an ‘application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment … but without special acuity’. 6 In a photograph of a protest, for instance, it is the viewer’s political ­affiliations, sympathies and awareness of the socio-historical forces that are activated in the studium. This reading is disturbed by the punctum which Barthes explicates as an ‘accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’.7 This accident is a kind of ‘intensity’ which can be triggered by a certain detail but more importantly

Double Exposure  135 occurs in the realisation of the irreversible passage of time arrested by photography.8 In Alexander Gardner’s 1865 photo-portrait of Lewis Paine sitting in shackles awaiting his execution, Barthes locates the punctum in the pastness of the boy’s death which in the photograph is still yet to come: The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence.9 The impending execution is already an event of the past for the ­present-day viewer.10 The anterior future denotes an ambiguous temporality emerging at the intersection of the ‘will be’ and the ‘has been’. However, this confluence would not ‘prick’ Barthes were it not for his conviction that photography is a ‘carnal medium’ that allows for a material bond to be forged between himself as beholder and the figure in the image. The anterior future bespeaks the boy’s death which the photo­ graph conveys as ‘still life’ in both senses of the term: a static image frozen in time and a life soon coming to an end. Barthes’ reading of Gardner’s portrait articulates an insight pertinent to photography at large. As much as photography permits the ‘return of the dead’, it also reveals the illusory nature of this return and renders the dead already out of reach, temporally severed from the viewer.11 In a way, the touch that Barthes describes is the touch of a spectre, a presence that is always already an absence. The boy’s demise is thus a metaphor for the absence that undermines all presence in photography. As Jacques Derrida attests in his reading of Camera Lucida, the spectre ‘is of the visible but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood’.12 In the age of digital photography one may argue that Benjamin’s and Barthes’ claims about the indexical quality of photography do not hold true any more. Writing in the early 1990s, William J. Mitchell even predicted the advent of a ‘post-photographic’ era in light of the radical transformation from the material quality of the photographic image into an abstract process of electronic inscription.13 Mitchell’s assertion implies that digital photography is not the kind of photography Peirce would deem ‘instantaneous’ or what Barthes would refer to as ‘carnal’ and is therefore devoid of the element of ‘touch’. In addition, it endorses the legacy of indexicality as being specific to analogue photo­ graphy. Rather than accentuating this division between analogue and digital photography, more recent works on the subject have commented instead on the ‘remarkable continuity of form and practice, despite a

136  László Munteán considerable technological leap’, as André Gunthert puts it.14 The lenses applied, perspective assumed, depth of focus, film used, framing and choice of exposure are all devices that make analogue photography no less or more instantaneous than its digital counterpart. Similarly, just as digital photographs are often sublimated through Photoshop or Instagram, its predecessor too was prone to such manipulation. This is exemplified by the so-called ‘spirit photographs’ of the late nineteenth century that, owing to the superimposition of two exposures resulting in a single image, purportedly captured the ghosts of the dead among the living.15 As the ontological footings of photographic indexicality crumble, indexicality itself needs to be rethought. The camera is not an objective instrument and yet, for all our awareness of its mediated nature, we still succumb to photography’s lure as a physical trace of the real. It is seldom that we entertain doubts about photographic truth when perusing images in a newspaper or a friend’s wedding album. As Gunthert reminds us, ‘although we now look through our family albums on a computer screen, we do not doubt these pictures any more than we did those that the local photographer took in times past’.16 Even if indexicality is not inherent to the photographic image it still informs our perception at an affective register. If there is any ‘truth’ to photography it is arguably to be found in the emotional disposition towards the image. Whether analogue or digital, the photograph feels, rather than works, as a true impression of the real. This is not to say that theorists like Benjamin and Barthes were oblivious to the phenomenological dimension of indexicality. On the contrary, when Benjamin describes photography in terms of the human unconscious, when Barthes talks about the punctum as an intensity that ‘pricks’ him or when André Bazin registers ‘the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith’, they already gesture towards an embodied experience that eclipses learned scepticism and a purely semiotic understanding of indexicality.17 Within such a discrepancy bet­ ween knowing and feeling, the latter still plays a significant role in our relation to photographic images. As Sarah Kember writes, ‘[t]he power of affect in photography seems to derive – perversely – from the “real” that critical languages can reason away but cannot finally expunge from the subject’s experience of photography’.18 If indexicality is an affective rather than an ontological property of photography, the spectre’s absent presence is rooted more in the viewer’s unwitting acceptance of the photo­graphic document as a trace of the real.

The Life of Place Initially a method of documentation employed in scientific surveys, rephotography was used to demonstrate changes in a landscape by repeatedly recording it from the same perspective over a period of time.19 The popularised version of this practice consists of superimposing an old

Double Exposure  137 photograph on the actual environment that it depicts in such a way that the viewpoint of the photograph corresponds with the spatial dimensions behind it. The result is a photograph within a photograph, with a time lag. While there is no official name for this trend, my use of ‘rephotography’ as opposed to ‘superimposed photography’ or ‘combined photographs’ acknowledges not simply the element of overlaying images but also the act of identifying the site of the original image which would in turn result in a new photograph. The first phase of rephotography requires searching for the place shown in the old photograph and, once discovered, the effort of assuming the perspective that matches that of the image. Things that are recognisable in the photograph and surroundings play a crucial role as reference points – landscapes, streets, buildings and certain household fixtures and furnishings tend to remain stationary and may have outlasted human lives. Their identification is key to the experience of place. Following the phenomenological distinction between space and place, the latter can be thought of as a crystallisation of the former. As Yi-Fu Tuan contends: “Space” is more abstract than “place”. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.… The ideas “space” and “place” require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Further­ more, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place. 20 Once the image is mapped on its original setting, the matching details constitute a pause as though in a virtual archaeological excavation. ­Perceived as an indexical trace the photograph punctures the flux of space and engenders the experience of place. What Barthes registers as an anterior future is here amplified by the embodied encounter with place as the empty husk of the event that has transpired there. The Barthesian reading of the photograph as proof of ‘this has been’ gains a new dimension: this has been here. What pricks me, to borrow Barthes’ word, is precisely this sense of ‘hereness’ of place. Corresponding details attain an aura, a uniqueness. Ironically, while Benjamin argues that the aura ‘withers’ as a result of techno­logies of mechanical reproduction such as photography, it is through the congruence of details in the photograph with those in physical space that objects acquire the halo of aura. No matter how mundane these details may be, rephotography renders them time capsules where the past lingers on (‘This brick wall here is the same that is in this picture’, ‘This is the same chair that my grandmother is sitting on in this photo’). To signify

138  László Munteán their potential to connect two temporal planes I call these auratic objects time-bridges. If the spectre is a modality of the viewer’s experience of the photograph as an indexical sign, time-bridges enable the spectre to infiltrate space and, by way of becoming a ghost, turn it into place. In Michael Bell’s definition, the ghost is ‘a felt presence – an anima, geist, or ­genius – that possesses and gives a sense of social aliveness to a place’. 21 In the context of rephotography the ghost manifests itself as a sensation of the materiality of the past in the present. That is to say, the ghost is the felt presence of the spectre in space. In Dylan Trigg’s words: Bodies that have touched the world before disappearing into darkness can redirect their direction through implanting themselves in space.… Lacking the means to communicate with the visible world, those otherworldly bodies commit themselves to disturbing the materiality of things through leaving things in their place. With this, things become experienced as places. 22 The touch that is central to Barthes’ conceptualisation of photography surfaces as a residue left in place by those who are no longer there. Trigg refers to this phenomenological experience of an afterlife as the ‘life of place’. While the first phase of rephotography involves spatial engagement with the old photograph and the process of place-making, in the second phase hereness is transferred to the new photograph. Time-bridges transform the experience of the life of place as here into there. The ghost, defined by the interstitial realm between the old photograph and the environment, is now re-spectralised within the new photo. As the old image blots out the landscape behind it, the time-bridges can only operate along the border of the old and the new picture (between temporalities) where continuities and discontinuities unfold. This liminal zone, as I will demonstrate in the following case studies, is imperative to the experience of the life of place as a photographic modality.

Dear Photograph Started in May 2011 as an experiment by twenty-one-year-old ­Canadian Taylor Jones, the website Dear Photograph had soon attracted so many followers that ABC News chose him as the person of the week two months later. 23 The idea behind Jones’ project was simple: find an old photograph to which you relate personally, track down the location where it was taken, hold up the photograph against the setting and take a new image as you hold it. Once the new photo has been uploaded on the website, write a caption with the address ‘Dear Photograph’. The Dear Photograph project combines two paradigms of photography.

Double Exposure  139 To comply with Jones’ instructions one needs to choose a photograph that has physical substance – a conventional photograph or a printed digital image. The majority of images derive from traditional family albums. Some of them are black and white, some feature colours that have already faded into shades of orange, while others sport the typical white frames from the Polaroid era. The second photograph, which finally appears on the website, is always a digital one.24 Implicitly attesting to the indexical power he ascribes to digital photography, Jones stipulates that the photographer’s hand remains visible so as to prove ‘that you stood at the original spot where the old photo was taken’. 25 As the colour tones of the old photo notably differ from the new digi­ tal image, the latter may be regarded less as a photograph and more like a window to the past. While the display of the old picture against its original setting leads us to perceive the photo as a visual representation of what is seen behind it, it simultaneously compels us to identify the digital representation of that same setting with the real thing itself. The discernible hand is not only a synecdochic sign of the rephoto­grapher – as though a fingerprint – but it also adds a corporeal aspect. The texture of the skin invites speculations as to the individual’s gender and age, funnelling our perception of the environment through meanings we read into the physical characteristics of a hand. The imperfections in the alignment of the old picture with the background only enhance the role of rephotography as a personal quest. The rephotographer’s corporeal experience of genius loci as ‘here’ strongly reverberates in the experience of the same place as ‘there’ transmitted through the new photograph. Uploaded images on the website need to be accompanied by a short text. These captions convey narratives of emotional ties and nostalgic or mournful reminiscences of temps perdu that may divulge the rephoto­g rapher’s relation to the people or the event portrayed in the old photo­g raph. They function as brief, epistolary confessions to a personified ‘dear photograph’, although it is ultimately the visitor to Jones’ website who reads them. The intimate tone cajoles the viewer into a territory of ghosts that stretches out in the rephotographer’s field of vision. The nexus of image, written text and space provides a ritualistic framework for pulling the present into the past and giving that past a life of place. In order to visualise this ritual in action, let me undertake a close reading of one of the photographs featured on Dear Photograph (Figure 8.1). Uploaded in December 2012, the colour picture frames a black and white photograph probably taken in the 1940s or early 1950s, which shows a young couple sitting in embrace on the stoop in front of their house. This old photo is held in such a way that the stoop, the door, the whitewashed planking of the façade and one of the windows smoothly aligns with the rest of the house in the new photo. The house in the upper right corner of the colour image is absent in the old photograph, while the little pine

140  László Munteán

Figure 8.1  Dear Photograph: Locating personal ghosts in rephotography. © Colleen and Taylor Jones, 2012

tree previously there has vanished. Inasmuch as these variances dramatise the passage of time by revealing transformations over the decades, they foreground those details that have weathered these years only to bear witness to what the rephotographer writes in the caption: Dear Photograph, You were taken one month before these two love birds [sic] were married. He was a decorated World War II Veteran and she was a wonderful mother to his nine wonderful children. If they’d been given just a few more moments to spend being wrapped up in each other’s arms, they would’ve celebrated  sixty-six years of marriage this year.  Still, every night before she falls asleep, she whispers “I love you” … to the empty space next to her in bed. Their loving grandchild, Colleen 26 By situating the superimposed image within the discourse of everlasting love, the caption reveals the rephotographer’s gaze as that of a grandchild lamenting the loss of her grandfather. The exercise allows her to pull the present into the past and revisit the house as a haunted place personed by both of her grandparents. For the viewers this place exists only in the photographic realm. The appeal of indexicality irresistibly drives us to sense the ‘here’ as we experience the unfolding materiality of place within the domain of ‘there’.

Double Exposure  141 For all the intensely private motivations of the rephotographer, once uploaded onto Dear Photograph the image is recycled on the internet for anyone to see and comment on. Although a comprehensive discussion of their afterlife in public discourse and social media falls beyond the scope of this chapter, Jones’ website and his recently published album of selected images from the site exert their influence on viewers indivi­ dually as well as collectively. While each is imbued with a particular life of place and constitute different sites of memory, there is a certain con­ sistency in their reiteration of the unwritten conventions of family pho­ tography which, ‘with its mutuality of confirming looks that construct a set of familial roles and hierarchies, reinforce the power of the notion of “family”’. 27 Be it a picture of an annual reunion or a child taking its first steps, mapping an old photograph onto its corresponding background spatialises what Marianne Hirsch calls the ‘bourgeois family romance’ – a set of traditions, norms, roles, rules, rituals and hierarchies that are perpetuated by the domestic or touristic settings, poses and gazes under­ lying the cultural practice of family photography. 28

Window to the Past In the same year Jones launched Dear Photograph, Hungarian photo­ grapher Zoltán Kerényi created a website for his own rephotography project entitled Window to the Past.29 While the content of Jones’ website is user-generated, Window to the Past is composed entirely of Kerényi’s work. For his photomontages he uses images from the online photo­ graphic archive Fortepan.30 When it was launched in 2010 F ­ ortepan consisted solely of found photographs and negatives that had been thrown away by their owners, only to be discovered by the curators of the website at house clearances and flea markets. In a matter of months it had earned wide recognition as a major online archive of private photo­ graphs that has prompted many contributors to put forward their own family albums for use in the public domain. According to the website the goal of Fortepan is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to offer insight into the spheres of everyday life in Hungary (largely under-­represented in the country’s photographic heritage) from about 1900 through to the 1990s. On the other hand, the initiators of the project wanted to make the pho­ tographs available for everyone free of charge, also with the intention of seeing how they would be incorporated for illustrative purposes in other publications and what projects they would inspire.31 Although Kerényi’s photographs are akin to those chosen by the con­ tributors to Jones’ site in that they often portray scenes of domestic life, leisure activities and holidays, they lack the close affiliation between rephotographer, photograph and location that inform the images of Dear Photograph. While the captions on Dear Photograph help view­ ers contextualise the old photographs within narrative and emotional

142  László Munteán frameworks, it is the absence of such an approach that makes Kerényi’s vintage image a ‘window to the past’, rather than a ‘dear photograph’. While the hand of the rephotographer in Dear Photograph attests to the tangibility of the old image as well as to one’s presence at a location, in the case of Window to the Past the archival images are digitally cropped and trimmed to fit into the new ones. Furthermore, Kerényi adds white frames to the old images to create the effect of conventional photographs. It is as though the old photos are literally superimposed on the new ones, evoking a glimpse of the past that took place there. As much as they separate the old and the new, the white frames allow our eyes to fill in the missing details and see continuities rather than discontinuities. Imperfections of matching up the image with the background are precisely what Kerényi avoids. In fact, one of the remarkable characteristics of his montages is that they are for the most part seamless. The clinical sterility conjures a kind of ghost that differs from the personal ghosts of Dear Photograph. Kerényi’s vintage photos are found items selected primarily on aesthetic grounds. Taken from an archive, the ghosts that re-enter the spaces they formerly inhabited are unmoored from intimate family ties, memories and stories. While the absence of these discursive structures undoubtedly gives them more freedom and perhaps an air of mystery, it also takes away the uniqueness they enjoy in the context of Dear Photograph. The more meticulous the superimpositions, the more we see figures rather than persons. The hierarchical division between the animate and inanimate dissolves into a democracy of objects and figures. The life of place that unfolds here is not so much anchored to the specificity of locations as it is rooted in a nostalgic representation of the city – primarily Budapest – in general. To see how nostalgia defines the appeal of Kerényi’s work, I refer to one of his recent pictures (Figure 8.2). Here, the old image Kerényi chose to rephotograph was taken around 1900 in which two women and two child­ ren are at one of Budapest’s riverside promenades with the Danube and the castle on the opposite side. Once this photo is superimposed on the new image of the same location, the cast iron railings, their stone footing and the nineteenth century castle bazaar stretching along the other side of the river serve as time-bridges connecting the temporal layers of the photo­ graphic palimpsest. The transition is so smooth that were it not for the white frame around the old photo, the black and white of the past would flawlessly morph into the colours of the present. Devoid of indivi­dual history, the figures come forth as historical characters: part and parcel of the world of objects and the panoramic scenery around them. As such, they serve aesthetic purposes insofar as they appear a counterpoint to the present-day young couple headed ‘towards’ them. The branchless tree on the right, though obviously not the same as the one whose branches we can see in the old photograph, generates the feeling of continuity. Moreover, the branches in the old photo co-ordinating – mysteriously or

Double Exposure  143

Figure 8.2  Window to the Past: Nostalgic re-imaginings of Budapest. © Zoltán Kerényi and Fortepan, 1900/2012

serendipitously – with the chunks in the new image adds a witty twist to the composition that is typical of Kerényi’s oeuvre. If nostalgia is ‘a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed’, as Svetlana Boym argues, both Dear Photograph and Window to the Past have their share of constructing that imaginary home.32 In the former, the lost home manifests itself in the rephotographer’s bodily and affective involvement in place-making which situates the ghost within the context of friendships and the familial. Place as a site of memory is realised through a spatial and textual enactment of longing, fomented by the experience of ghosts channelled through memories and fantasies. At a collective level, as we have seen, these images enable the nostalgic performance of a shared romance of family life. It exemplifies what Boym describes as ‘reflective nostalgia’ which thrives on ‘longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time’.33 While the nostalgia that Kerényi’s images elicit may likewise be reflective, instead of investing space with the sentimentality of social bonds they utilise the intimacy of private photographs as a way of applying a patina to urban landmarks. The events that these vintage photos depict are relevant as long as their background is recognisable and traceable. Instead of personing spaces, Kerényi spatialises persons by using them as props in order to assert the historicity of an urban setting.

144  László Munteán

Link to the Past Although nostalgia is a salient catalyst, not all rephotography projects cater to this feeling. Images of catastrophe and violence have inspired a number of works recently. Shawn Clover maps photographs of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake onto present-day San Francisco. 34 In Ghosts of History Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse overlays images of the allied liberation of Western European cities on their contemporary settings, while Nick J. Stone in his photo-series called Blitz Ghosts projects archival images of the bombing of Norwich onto the modern city. 35 Perhaps the most prolific in the group of artists that retrace the sites of Second World War photographs is Sergey Larenkov. His renowned website Link to the Past shares his ever-growing collection of superimposed photographs featuring his native St Petersburg under siege and war-torn Stalingrad and Berlin, to name only a few. 36 Like Kerényi, the aforementioned rephoto­ graphers employ digital technology to overlay images but the ways in which they do so, as well as the effects they create, diverge significantly. Most conspicuous is the blurring of boundaries in which the black and white tones of the vintage images infiltrate the colours of the new image. The absence of white frames that keep the past at bay in Kerényi’s compositions allow ghosts to haunt building walls, pavements and roads. With the visual evisceration of borders an uncertainty concerning the life of place settles in. It is as though the ghosts come uninvited, emanating menacingly from the nooks and crannies of urban space. As time-bridges disappear into the digital fog of spatio-temporal liminality, the viewer is lost as to where the past ends and the present begins. As the brutality of war gradually and insidiously blends with the mundane routines of modern life, the old picture feels less a photograph and more a pernicious force welling up from below the surface of the metropolis. The ghosts that manifest themselves are not unsettling because the past that they summon is in any way repressed or tabooed. On the contrary, many of the images that Larenkov, Stone and Teeuwisse use are well known and widely circulated. What is at stake here is that these photographs are used outside of their conventional interpretive frames of books, albums, films, museums and monuments. In the hands of these artists the old images come to defamiliarise the taken-for-granted textures of ­present-day cityscapes. In doing so, these projects constitute virtual sites of memory capable of resisting dominant (nationalist) narratives. As James Young explains, ‘monuments have long sought to provide a naturalizing locus for memory, in which a state’s triumphs and martyrs, its ideals and founding myths, are cast as naturally true as the landscape in which they stand’.37 While monuments centralise memory, counter-­monuments dramatise the ambiguities of memorialising the past by embodying ‘architectural forms that would return the burden of memory to those who come looking for it’.38 Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC

Double Exposure  145 and certain Holocaust memorials like Peter Eisenman’s design in ­Berlin exemplify this type of memorial. Injecting the photographic archive of the war into the contemporary built environment, Teeuwisse’s, Stone’s and Larenkov’s projects perform a cognate function. Larenkov’s Link to the Past is a case in point of the counter-­monumental potentials of rephotography. Considered one of the longest battles in the Second World War, the nine-hundred-day Siege of Leningrad has been commemorated by a number of plaques throughout the city, most noticeably by an imposing obelisk on Victory Square. Erected outside a broken ring, the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad is meant to symbolise the city’s perseverance in the face of the German blockade which ultimately collapsed. This edifice inscribes the event with the narrative of heroism which was (and still is) vital to healing the trauma caused by the loss of thousands of lives, two years of suffering and the large-scale destruction of the city.39 After decades of post-war reconstruction the monument, completed in the early 1970s, became the centre of national tribute and therefore a naturalising locus that absorbs painful memories and translates death into an honourable sacrifice that led to victory. Through his collages Larenkov unleashes the ghosts of the siege and unravels the blockade, as though materialising in the optical unconscious of the city. In one of his images of a church in the Peterhof we see the burnt-out walls and the absent dome emerging from within the rebuilt walls and roof (Figure 8.3). The ravaged building is a trace of the past

Figure 8.3  Link to the Past: Uncanny eruptions within present-day St P ­ etersburg. © Sergey Larenkov, 1943/2011

146  László Munteán lying in wait. The old photograph, as though a burn mark on the new one, diverts our attention from its eighteenth century heyday, which the restored façade seeks to revive. Were the two photographs positioned side by side, as is usually done in ‘then and now’ albums, the development from wreckage to reconstruction would suggest progress over time. By rendering the past hauntingly present in our midst, ­Larenkov’s image does not permit this interpretation. In a slight variation on Trigg’s claim (via Gaston Bachelard) that ‘what remains is defined by what is absent’, Larenkov exposes the debris as an absent presence that defines what remains visible to the naked eye.40 The mnemonic power of his work lies in what its title figuratively proclaims; it is a link, rather than a window, between the present and the past. Uncanny eruptions from within the present-day city tear open both psychological and physical wounds that have long been sutured by post-war reconstruction efforts. In Jones’ and Kerényi’s work the materiality of space unfolds as a romantic ruin where the bygone splendour of a distant past is idealised. Conversely, Larenkov’s Link to the Past visualises modern streetscapes as traces of past devastation. The counter-monumental potential of his project lies, ironically, in its ability to ‘restore’ the city as ruin and situate the violence that it signifies into the bustle of urban life.

Coda Budapest, 3 April 1944. The sound of the air raid siren at 10.15 am did not take people by surprise. They had heard it a number of times over the past weeks and nothing really happened afterwards. This time, however, the shrieking whine soon changed into the monotonous hum of the 15th U.S. Army Air Force headed towards the southern districts of the city. Despite the clear skies a high number of bombs fell on residential areas, including the suburban area where my mother and my grand­parents used to live, killing one thousand and seventy-three people. Once the water and gas pipes exploded, my grandmother grabbed my mother and ran out into the street – an instinctive move that probably saved their lives. Although my grandmother did not live to see me mature enough to fully comprehend her story, my mother has shared with me her account of that day on numerous occasions. In 2012 she also showed me the street and the house where she experienced the aerial assault as a seven-yearold. Although I have taken many photographs of the site while she was describing the events, I feel an irresistible urge to anchor her words and my pictures to official photographic records as a way of reconnecting with memories that are not mine but to which I feel inextricably tied. Be  it a photo from a contemporary newspaper, documentary footage from a newsreel, or an aerial shot taken from a bomber releasing its payload, I try to map them onto the current environment.

Double Exposure  147 Sharing a great deal with the personal quest that underpins the images on Dear Photograph as well as Larenkov’s efforts to spatialise history, my project creates an interface between my mother’s memories, the physical location and photographic records of the blitz. While the official archive discloses the devastation left behind by the onslaught of bombers, I have not yet discovered any photographs of my mother’s house before or after the air raid. Rather than conveying the thereness that is so central a component to the rephotography examples discussed in this chapter, my endeavour entails a series of archival images matched up with the present-day neighbourhood but never of the exact location I am looking for. It is a sequence of approximations that I have internalised. At its core is therefore an absent photograph, an image that has probably never existed. Haunted by inherited memories and lacking the means to give closure to my quest, I sense the afterlife of this place as an echo of the past resonating through the fresh plaster on the walls and the asphalt covering the street. In this unassuming domestic space marked by absent signs of war, there is ‘a reverberation that pulls the present into the past before throwing it back into daylight’.41

Notes 1 Dylan Trigg, Body Parts (London: 3:AM Press, 2012), 56. 2 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotics: The Theory of Signs’, in Philo­ sophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 106. 3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, ed. Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Edmund Jephott and K ­ ingsley Shorter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 511–512. 4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), 80. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 26. 7 Ibid., 26–27. 8 Ibid., 96. 9 Ibid. 10 See Lior Levy, ‘The Question of Photographic Meaning in Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida’, Philosophy Today 53, no. 4 (2009): 395–406. 11 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 9. 12 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 115. 13 See William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-­ Photographic Era (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992). 14 André Gunthert, ‘The Digital Imprint: The Theory and Practice of Photo­ graphy in the Digital Age’, in The Weight of Photography: ­Photography ­History Theory and Criticism, ed. Johan Swinnen and Luc Deneulin ­(Brussels: Academic and Scientific Publishers, 2010), 428. This claim is also held by Tom Gunning, ‘What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking P ­ hotographs’, Nordicom Review 25, no. 1/2 (2004): 39–49. 15 See Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

148  László Munteán 16 Gunthert, ‘The Digital Imprint’, 424. 17 André Bazin and Hugh Gray, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 8. 18 Sarah Kember, Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 31. 19 See Mark Klett, ‘Repeat Photography in Landscape Research’, in The Sage Handbook Visual Research Methods, ed. Eric Margolis and Luc Pauwels (London: Sage, 2011), 114–132. 20 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6. 21 Michael Bell, ‘The Ghosts of Place’, Theory and Society 26, no. 6 (1997): 815. 22 Trigg, Body Parts, 56. 23 John Donvan, Christie Brouwer and Bradly Blackburn, ‘Person of the Week: Dear Photograph Blog Fuses Past and Present’, ABC News (29 July 2011), accessed 18 March 2015, . 24 Taylor Jones, Dear Photograph (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 5. 25 Ibid. 26 Taylor Jones, ‘Dear Photograph’ (6 December 2012), accessed 18 March 2015, . 27 I use the phrase ‘site of memory’ in Pierre Nora’s sense, where a material ‘site’ (lieu) is invested with symbolic importance by a ‘will to remember’. See Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989): 19. 28 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 41–77. 29 Zoltán Kerényi, ‘Window to the Past/Ablak a múltra’ (2011), accessed 18 March 2015, . 30 Szepessy Ákos and Tamási Miklós, ‘Fortepan’ (2010), accessed 18 March 2015, . 31 As the website of the 12th International Festival of Photography in Łódź, Poland asserts, Fortepan is ‘aimed at the creation of a new archiving paradigm, based on openness, dialogue and participation, which stands in contrast with the traditional values associated with archives, such as discretion, permanence and immutability’. This is not to say, however, that Fortepan is completely immune to the restrictions of the conventional archive. The curators of the site exercise full control over the selection of the material that gets digitalised. Fortepan, ‘Fotofestiwal’ (2013), accessed 18 March 2015, . 32 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii. 33 Ibid., 41. 34 Shawn Clover, ‘San Francisco and the World’ (2010), accessed 18 March 2015, . 35 For a Public Radio International interview with Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse and a selection of her rephotography project, see ‘The Ghosts of History’ (6 December 2012), accessed 18 March 2015, . For Nick J. Stone’s work, see ‘Blitz Ghosts: The Baedeker Blitz on Norwich’ (2011), accessed 18 March 2015, . 36 Sergey Larenkov, ‘Link to the Past’ (2010), accessed 18 March 2015, .

Double Exposure  149 37 James Young, ‘Memory and Counter-Memory: The End of the Monument in Germany’, Harvard Design Magazine 9, no. 1–10 (1999): 2. 38 Ibid., 9. 39 Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 40 Dylan Trigg, ‘The Place of Trauma: Memory, Hauntings, and the Temporality of Ruins’, Memory Studies 2, no. 1 (2009): 95. 41 Trigg, Body Parts, 56.

9 Ghosts on Screen The Politics of Intertemporality Alison Landsberg

At the end of 1916 Cecil B. DeMille made what was, in his words, his ‘first big historical picture’ about Joan of Arc, entitled Joan the Woman.1 This film’s action, however, begins not in the early fifteenth century but in the present. An intertitle explains: ‘1916: An English trench somewhere in France’. Opening onto two soldiers in their quarters, one of them, Eric Trent (Wallace Reid), notices an object buried in the wall, and calls his companion over to see. Trent reaches in and pulls out a sword; he turns it over in his hands and reflects on its provenance. The soldiers are then summoned to speak with the captain who is seeking a volunteer to carry a bomb to the enemy trench. ‘Think it over’, they are told, for ‘the man who goes will not come back’. With the weight of the decision on their shoulders they retreat to their quarters. A single word flashes on the screen: ‘MEMORY’. Alone in the room lit only by a single candle, Trent lifts the sword as if feeling the power in it. Sensing a presence, he turns to see the apparition of Joan of Arc (Geraldine Farrar) before him. He shies away, but then reaches for her. She raises her hand to quiet him. An intertitle reads: ‘The time has come for thee to expiate thy sin against me’. The soldier is agitated, shakes his head, but then as he leans towards her she slowly fades out of view. Intertitle: ‘INTO THE PAST’. In the next scene we are transported to a small town in fifteenth-century France. Via this ‘historical flashback’, DeMille has linked the present with the past through the figure of a ghost. In this chapter I connect two visual texts separated by one hundred years: DeMille’s Joan the Woman and the contemporary television series Mr. Robot. 2 These generically and medially distinct texts seem like strange bedfellows, but they share a particular investment in spectres and their corporealisation. Joan the Woman is the first historical film to feature a ghost, and as such it stages dramatically the way the medium enables a certain kind of serious play with temporality. The historical flashback posits the interdependence of two time periods – the ­fifteenth-century past and the twentieth-century present of the First World War – through the hauntings of Joan of Arc. This is reinforced by the intertitle immediately preceding the aforementioned narrative action: ‘Joan of Arc is not dead. She can never die – and in the war-torn

Ghosts on Screen  151 land she loved so well, her Spirit fights today’. Similarly, the ghost in Mr. Robot arrives with a mission for the living that will bring about an alternative future. These entities, in other words, have not returned as avengers of past transgressions so much as catalysts in the present that might change the course of history. Cinematic or televisual ghosts work on two levels – on the characters and on the viewers – and are simultaneously destabilising and compelling. The experience is at first affective in that it invokes shock and fear or disbelief, but it also has a cognitive dimension. A ghost is a provocation to rethink the limits of knowledge and truth. One could even say that it stirs us, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, from our passive existence in a reified world to see it as it truly is: a prison world. This is pointedly the case in Mr. Robot in which the ghost’s presence urges both the protagonist and the audience to wake up from their complacency in order to instigate an economic and social revolution. In this chapter I underscore the power of cinematic technology to materialise ghosts – a fundamental ontological impossibility – as a mechanism for forcing those in the present to confront the past and its legacies on behalf of the future.

Theorising Spectral Presences Identifying the proliferation of the phantasmic in film, television and literary theory, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock attributes the current ‘spectral turn’ to ‘a general postmodern suspicion of meta-narratives accentuated by millennial anxiety’.3 The ghost, in Weinstock’s account, challenges ‘received history’, pointing to alternative and long-silenced narratives that ‘[call] into question the veracity of the authorized version of events’.4 Haunting represents ‘the tenacious tendrils of a past we cannot shake’, and the ghost the agent for assuring that grievances of the past will be redressed in the present.5 While the ghosts that I will examine here do also seek reparation, I propose that their role is more complicated and ambitious. I will begin by charting what theorists of spectrality have suggested about the work that ghosts do, the notions of temporality they instantiate, and finally the implications of their affective mode of address. Some scholars of haunting have emphasised that revenants return with a mission. Perhaps the earliest and most influential of such texts is Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination which conceptualises ghosts and hauntings as manifestations of repressed or unresolved social and political realities. Gordon writes that haunting is: one way in 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 in free labor or national security).6

152  Alison Landsberg Gordon’s description invokes the disorientation associated with the unheimlich, ‘when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view’.7 The ghost emerges at precisely the moment that the trouble of which it is a symptom becomes visible, no longer suppressed; it ‘has a real presence and demands its due, your attention’.8 For this reason the ghost, or more precisely the act of haunting, has an ethical imperative. In Specters of Marx, a text meant to reconcile Marxism with deconstruction, Jacques Derrida commences with, and continually circles back to, the ghosts in Karl Marx’s writings. For Derrida, a discussion of ghosts is always ‘in the name of justice’.9 To even begin to imagine ethics or politics of any kind, one must begin with ‘those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born’.10 It is not simply that the ghost embodies the injustices of the past – and here Derrida cites the victims ‘beyond all living present’ of violence and violations including war, nationalism, colonialism, sexism and capitalist imperialism.11 Rather, by intruding into the space of the present this haunting figure indicates that there is work to be done to prevent further injustices in the future. Herein lies the complex temporal dimension of haunting. While Weinstock contends that ghosts represent an inability to let go of the ‘tendrils of the past’, Gordon and Derrida emphasise its futurity. Unlike trauma, which obsessively rehearses the past, haunting is, according to Gordon, ‘distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done’.12 This something-to-be-done is ‘emergent’, ‘not given in advance’, something to be reached for.13 The ghost thus instantiates an intertemporality that is always already political, and in which the promise that it demands from those who perceive it must be anything but ephemeral. As Derrida asserts, it must ‘produce events, new effective forms of action, practice, organization, and so forth’.14 Fredric Jameson, in an essay on Derrida’s text, articulates even more explicitly the futurity implicit in the arrival of a ghost: These motifs [of ghosts and haunting] correspond to what I would myself be tempted to call the Utopian … spectrality is here the form of the most radical politicization  and that, far from being locked into the repetitions of neurosis and obsession, it is energetically ­future-oriented and active.15 These phantoms from the past resurface in the present, but are hovering at the threshold of a different future. They cast their gaze forward, not back; they do not engage in repetition-compulsion, but in relentlessly future-oriented action. While the ghosts these theorists discuss are not, for the most part, those we associate with haunted houses and horror films, they nevertheless operate on an affective register. Their presence is usually disturbing,

Ghosts on Screen  153 even if it is not frightful. Gordon argues that when we are confronted by a haunting we feel an affective pull, ‘sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition’.16 This can have either positive or negative valences. Indeed, as Sara Ahmed points out, negative affects can serve progressive or affirmative social ends: A concern with histories that hurt is not then a backward orientation: to move on, you must make this return. If anything we might want to reread melancholic subjects, the ones who refuse to let go of suffering, who are even prepared to kill some forms of joy, as an alternative model of the social good.17 Affects, even those that invoke pain, have the potential to move bodies towards new orientations, orientations that might be socially progressive even if they do not at first blush feel good.

Ghosts on Film What I want to demonstrate in this chapter is that cinema has a privileged relationship with the ghost, enabling its representation as corporeal and yet decorporealised – often signalled by its semitransparency – in a way that was not possible before the advent of the technology. As  Murray Leeder observes, tricking the viewer and representing the incorporeal have been projects of film since its first days.18 Early filmmakers experimented with optical illusions and substitutions that largely derived from cinema’s origins in photography. In his groundbreaking work on the spirit photography popularised in the late nineteenth century that endeavoured to capture ghosts and spirits, Tom Gunning has noted that the ‘convergence of modern media and the spirit world revolves, at least in its visual manifestation, around a phantasmatic body – visible yet insubstantial, an image, separated from its physical basis or somehow strangely rarified, become transparent – a phantom, almost’.19 Spirit photographs were made possible by the long exposure time necessary for early cameras: a person could move into the frame and then move out of it, creating a ghostly impression. Gunning describes the ‘shadowy ontological status of the ghost as a virtual image, a visual experience that somehow differs from common perception’. 20 The photographic image, understood as a tool of science, was thought to be able to prove or literalise the existence of ghosts. But this was paradoxical, for ‘a photograph renders visible in objective form the immaterial phantasms that the optical revolution had exorcized’.21 In other words, the belief in magic banished by empiricism and rationalism sneaks in the back door here. Crucial to Gunning’s understanding of the power of spirit photography,

154  Alison Landsberg that is, its authenticity, is how the photograph operates as both an iconic and indexical sign. It is iconic in that the representation looks like what it is signifying, but it is indexical in that it was actually there at the same time as the original and it captured something of that space and moment on the photographic paper. The spectral quality of modern photographic technology was also accredited to the way it enabled a confrontation between humans and the supernatural, between ‘the free-floating phantasm … and a world of flesh and blood creatures’. 22 The ability to perceive a ghost poses a challenge to our faculties and interferes with linear temporality. It represents ‘a return of the past not in the form of memory or history but in a contradictory experience of presence’. 23 It is precisely this experience of presence, a palpable pressure, that Gordon attempts to articulate. The spectre is the past materialised in the here and now, in the world of humans, that commands space and demands interpretation. Motion pictures offered a new set of possibilities for the depiction of spectres. The virtuosity of the medium could animate what in photo­ graphy was only a still ghost. The French filmmaker and illusionist Georges Méliès, most famous for his trick films and innovations in special effects, celebrated the medium’s ability to create the fantastical and render the unreal real. Katherine Kovács describes his various conjuring techniques: Méliès would film the apparition before or after shooting the scene on a white background, stop the camera, wind the film back, and reshoot in order to obtain superimposition. Sometimes he would place a piece of muslin gauze over the lens to give a hazy, indistinct appearance to the image. 24 Méliès’ films are emblematic of what Gunning has called ‘the cinema of attraction’. 25 Films made before 1906, Gunning argues, revelled in their ability to thrill the spectator; lacking a narrative impulse, they revolved instead around spectacle. Through cinematic trickery, film visualised the impossible – humans the size of a thumb, a person vanishing into thin air. 26 The movie camera, in the hands of some of its first practitioners, was uniquely able to also materialise ghosts. In order to fully appreciate the cultural work performed by the ghost it is necessary to explore its role beyond the discourse of horror.27 Perhaps the first instance of a filmic ghost manifesting a moral imperative was in the screen adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), which was made and remade multiple times over the first two decades of the twentieth century. The apparitions in this story are themselves temporally marked beings – the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future – that come with warnings for the miser Ebenezer Scrooge. In the 1910 film version, a ghost presents Scrooge (Marc McDermott) with

Ghosts on Screen  155 ‘Visions of the future’. 28 The protagonist and the viewer observe quite literally through the entity a prophetic vision of the old man on his deathbed, followed by an image of his tombstone upon which is inscribed: ‘Ebenezer Scrooge: He Lived and Died Without a Friend’. A v­ isibly distraught Scrooge, on his knees with hands folded in prayer, seems to plead with the spirit to prevent such an outcome. 29 Even in these earliest incarnations, ghosts foster an affective response that moves the indivi­ dual and instigates change. Though Scrooge knows them to be spirits he reaches out to them, tries to touch them, and then recoils. Ghosts unsettle precisely because we know that they should not logically exist, and yet we are faced with empirical, sensuous evidence of their presence that cannot but transform us. Shown the suffering of Tiny Tim (the crippled son of his employee Bob Cratchit), and an image of his lonely death – instances of what Ahmed would term ‘negative affects’ – this prompts Scrooge’s reformation that will alter the trajectory of his life. Beyond a narrative device that propels the story forward, more importantly the ghosts serve an ideological and moral function.30 Joan the Woman Like A Christmas Carol, Joan the Woman employs the ghost to catalyse a course of action in the present, but it applies this approach to the genre of the historical film. The spectre of Joan of Arc is instrumental to the film’s structure as she links the dominant frame narrative – the story that takes place in the trenches of the First World War – with the story of Joan of Arc’s life. The nexus between the past and the present is made all the more forcibly by the fact that Trent, in a previous incarnation, was an English soldier with whom Joan has many encounters. The frame narrative mobilises history in the service of the needs of the present. This was not lost on contemporary viewers of the time. Many reviews refer to the relevance of the story to audiences. An article in the Chicago Defender in 1917 states, ‘[t]here is a certain timeliness about the story of Joan of Arc, as it has been repeated frequently from France that public interest in the Maid of Orleans never was so keen as at the present time’.31 An article in the Washington Post goes so far as to declare that it will do more ‘patriotice [sic] work than a dozen recruiting sergeants’, set as it is ‘in the midst of a modern story of the trenches’.32 This sentiment was conveyed perhaps most starkly in a piece in the Los Angeles Times about the Allied governments negotiating over using the film ‘as part of an advertising campaign … to secure more recruits for their armies’.33 Representatives of the French government were keen to screen Joan the Woman all over France, while the British government stated that they had ‘used the cinema in various ways as a means of gaining volunteers. But this will be the first time, it is said, a photodramatic story in its entirety, dealing with history, has ever been used in this manner’.34

156  Alison Landsberg Much of the influence the spectre of Joan of Arc has over us, though, is derived from our connection to her, in both physical and ephemeral forms. We witness her fifteenth-century self choosing to fight for the ideals she believes in, right up to her ultimate sacrifice for the nation. As her story unfolds it literally fleshes out (in the sense of imbuing ‘life’ and granting personhood to) the phantasmic entity that she returns as. We become invested in the ghost because we have spent time with her as an embodied person, in DeMille’s words, ‘a woman of flesh and blood, whose heroism was as much a victory over herself as a victory over the English’.35 As DeMille himself admits, the ghost alone would not be an effective device without the impassioned story of Joan that the film portrays: The most spectacular action or photographic effects will not carry a weak or poorly constructed story. The audience is interested in people, not masses of anonymous people, but individuals whom they can love or hate, in whose fortunes they can feel personally involved.36 The ghost generates an affect that is channelled into commitment as a result of the audience’s growing affinity to Joan as the narrative progresses, coupled with outrage over her violent and untimely death. Virtually all of the reviews of Joan the Woman mentioned its capacity to move the spectator. Peter Milne, writing for Motion Picture News, proclaims, ‘[a]s you sit in your chair you are alternately swayed by the grim struggle of battle, the thrill of conquest, the tragedy of the unjust death meted out to Joan of France’; and through the inspired performance of its lead actress ‘you feel inspired yourself’.37 The film thus performs what Leslie Midkiff DeBauche has called ‘practical patriotism’, serving first and foremost, in DeMille’s words, ‘the great good to the men’.38 Joan’s life is made to matter to us affectively for the purpose of motivating a specific outcome. Following Baruch Spinoza, one strain of current scholarship on affect emphasises the idea that it functions like potential, the ‘not yet’, which in turn is crucial for thinking about political activation. Because affect is never fixed, it moves through and between bodies. Its transmission need not be imagined only as moving from live body to live body for it can also shift from object to person. ‘We are moved by things. And in being moved, we make things’, proposes Ahmed.39 When we are brought into proximity with something, she suggests, it has a greater capacity to move or affect us. And of course this is part of the project of cinema: to bring distant things close to us. It is the horror of Joan’s death – her torturous and graphic burning at the stake – that is responsible for rendering her a spectre in the twentieth century, and it is our closeness to that horror that makes her a formidable agent for change in the present. Ghosts after all have an ethical

Ghosts on Screen  157 gravitas – they come forth on behalf of those who have died wrongly. As Colin Davis avers, ‘[a]ttending to the ghost is an ethical injunction’.40 Joan of Arc’s death by fire is long and gruesome, generating strongly negative affects in the spectators within and outside of the diegesis. The film cuts between Joan and the villagers who are watching the spectacle in order to emphasise their terror. As she burns the smoke wafts up to the stands, and even the bishop who sentenced her has to avert his gaze. The crowds are sickened. Trent cries, ‘God forgive us – we have burned a saint’, and then collapses to the ground. Joan is engulfed in smoke, but stretches her arms towards us. The scene goes to blackness and we are returned to the English soldiers in the trenches. Trent awakens, and looks at his clock. He kisses the sword, puts on his hat, and goes to see his commanding officer. He accepts the bomb and embarks on his suicide mission. As he crawls across no-man’s land he is shot but manages to throw the bomb into enemy territory. Huge curls of smoke echo Joan’s death. As Trent lies dying on the ground, the spectre of Joan appears in the centre of the screen, looming above him. She reaches to him and then brings her hands together as if in prayer. Her presence is an instance of the politics of intertemporality. Though a harbinger of the past, the ghost is able to incite Trent to act in the present to ensure a particular future, not to rectify the crime of the past. For the contemporary viewer, the affect and cognitive work stirred by the ghostly encounter demands reflection on our own moral positioning, as well as an accounting of the relationship between the nation’s past and present. Mr. Robot While the contemporary media landscape is replete with ghosts, I draw attention here again to the use of a ghost not for the purpose of instilling horror but for conveying a moral and political imperative.41 The television series Mr. Robot is essentially a narrative about hacktivists in present-day New York City. But its timeliness goes well beyond its concern with cybersecurity. Arriving in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, amid the concerns raised by the Occupy Movement about the vast social and economic disparities in the United States, the series registers the continued outrage over the ‘1 percent’ and the unbridled greed and power of multinational corporations. In light of the polarising presidential election in the U.S. and the fallout from Brexit in 2016, Mr. Robot’s depiction of political and economic uncertainty seems like a vision of haunted futures. The central character, Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), is a computer genius with a social anxiety disorder who is employed as a programmer by the cybersecurity firm, Allsafe. There is an irony to this: Allsafe’s largest client is E Corp, a company that was responsible for his father’s death. Elliot describes E Corp, ‘the largest conglomerate in the world’,

158  Alison Landsberg as ‘so big, they’re literally everywhere. A perfect monster of modern society. The “E” might as well stand for “Evil”’. In the opening minutes of the first episode, it is established that he is troubled by the gross injustices around him: Sometimes I dream of saving the world. Saving everyone from the invisible hand. The one that brands us with an employee badge. The one that forces us to work for them. The one that controls us every day without us knowing it. But I can’t stop it. I’m not that special. I’m just anonymous. I’m just alone. Nevertheless, he does try to ‘save everyone from the invisible hand’ in a small way: by night he is a vigilante hacker, seeking to expose the corruption and immorality he sees in society and protect the people he cares about. For instance, in that first episode he exposes a child porno­ grapher, and later he hacks into his therapist’s life, uncovers that her partner is married and lying to her, and forces him to confess to her. Ironically, because of his social awkwardness, hacking is Elliot’s primary way of connecting with others. Also in the first episode, while Elliot is on the subway he is addressed by a somewhat dishevelled man (Christian Slater) wearing a uniform with a patch that reads ‘Mr. Robot’ sewn onto the chest. The man says, ‘Hey! Hey, you! Hey, kiddo. What’s happening?’ Elliot turns to look at him and the man continues, ‘Exciting time in the world right now. Exciting time’. Elliot is baffled by this brief encounter, unsure who Mr. Robot is, and what he wants. Later, after being called in to Allsafe to fix a breach in the E Corp security system, Elliot is once again accosted by Mr. Robot who takes him to an old, unused arcade on Coney Island where he meets the hacker group known as fsociety. Afterwards, Mr. Robot takes Elliot up in the Ferris wheel and lays out his agenda: Let me tell you why you’re really here. You’re here because you sense something wrong with the world. Something you can’t explain. But, you know it controls you and everyone you care about.… Money. Money hasn’t been real since we got off the gold standard. It’s become virtual. Software, the operating system of our world.… And, Elliot, we are on the verge of taking down this virtual reality.… What if you could take down one conglomerate? … What if I told you that this conglomerate just so happens to own seventy percent of the global consumer credit industry, huh? If we hit their data centre just right we could systematically format all the servers, including backup.… All the debt we owe them. Every record of every credit card, loan and mortgage would be wiped clean.… The single, biggest incident of wealth redistribution in history.

Ghosts on Screen  159

Figure 9.1  G hostly encounter: Hacker Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) with Mr.  Robot (Christian Slater) in Mr. Robot. © Universal Cable Company, The Kobal Collection and David Giesbrecht, 2015

Mr. Robot urges Elliot to join fsociety in their large-scale hack of E Corp in order to revolt against the hegemonic superstructure, fundamentally transforming society by eradicating all debt. Against the backdrop of a boisterous and pervasive discourse about economic inequality in the U.S., Mr. Robot’s entreaty here resonates not just with Elliot but with the audience as well. But what has all of this to do with ghosts? As the first season draws to a close, we find out that Mr. Robot is actually Elliot’s deceased father, and thus, for all intents and purposes, a ghost. Elliot comes to this awareness gradually. First he realises that Darlene (Carly Chaikin), one of the fsociety hackers, is his sister; fragments of memories flash before his eyes. Worried that he is losing his mind, he decides to hack himself only to discover a cache of family photos and that Mr. Robot is the father he lost to leukaemia twenty years earlier. Then, Mr. Robot arrives at his door and promises to explain it all to him; together they visit his childhood home and then a cemetery. There, Mr. Robot tells Elliot that ‘they’ are trying to get rid of him and Elliot, confused, asks why. At this point, Darlene and his friend Angela (Portia Doubleday) approach, looking puzzled and concerned: Darlene:  Elliot, who are you Elliot:  You didn’t see him? Darlene:  Who?

talking to?

The camera cuts to the tombstone of Edward Alderson, Elliot’s father. At this moment both the audience and Elliot learn definitively that

160  Alison Landsberg Mr. Robot is not actually there, and has not been. This is profoundly destabilising for we, like Elliot, have been seeing him with our own eyes but have been tricked, our senses rendered unreliable. The ghost, played by an actor well known for portraying subversive types, was there in flesh and blood, and yet we infer that it was an illusion.42 Why, we must ask, does the series employ a ghost, and one who we do not recognise as such until the end of the first season? This ghost does not provoke fear, exactly, and yet the experience of it is strongly affective and cognitively challenging. The experience of shock and disorientation compels both the character and the viewer to perform intellectual work, which is ultimately crucial to the ghost’s mission to motivate action. We must consider the effect of the ghost on Elliot, and the effect of the ghost on us, and how this precipitates a dramatic (social) shift. As the scene on the Ferris wheel makes clear, Mr. Robot appears with the message that there is, in Gordon’s words, a ‘something-to-be-done’. The series employs a variety of narrative strategies and cinematographic techniques that affect how and what we as viewers understand about Elliot’s world and his relationship to us. The opening scene of Mr. Robot offers an overt instance of this, beginning with a black screen and a direct address: Hello, friend. “Hello, friend?” That’s lame. Maybe I should give you a name. But that’s a slippery slope. You’re only in my head. We have to remember that. Shit. It’s actually happened. I’m talking to an imaginary person. What I’m about to tell you is top secret. A conspiracy bigger than all of us. There’s a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I’m talking about the guys no one knows about. The guys that are invisible. The top one percent of the top one percent. The guys that play God without permission. Elliot frequently addresses the audience, breaking the fourth wall, intruding into our space. We are summoned into the action of the drama, not through identification as a character but as ourselves. We are denied a position of anonymity and security outside the frame. Furthermore, these strategies sometimes trick us. For example, in an appointment with his therapist Krista (Gloria Reuben), she asks Elliot what it is about society that disappoints him so much. He responds with a long monologue, which we hear him speak, but it is only when she points out that ‘you’re not saying anything’ that we understand that we were hearing the voice in his head. The sensation of disorientation produced by the mechanics of the storytelling approximate the unsettling experience of the ghostly encounter itself. We might argue that the revenant in Mr. Robot poses an ontological problem for Elliot, and an epistemological one for the viewer. Elliot must reckon with this figure, and what its existence or non-existence means

Ghosts on Screen  161 for the agenda it has set. Viewers, however, face a different conundrum: what does the knowledge that Mr. Robot is a ghost, not really there at all, mean for our investment in the political agenda he represents? That he is there before our eyes implies, in Derrida’s words, that this ghost is to be ‘lived with’. But his presence also signals that, in Mr. Robot’s words, ‘There’s more work to be done’ – and not just for Elliot. We, too, are forced to cast our mind back over all of the events, to question and reassess prior knowledge, and to willingly understand them in a completely different light. Like the breaking of the fourth wall, this rupture snaps us out of the narrative, out of our passive position. It requires cognitive work to make sense of what is happening that is somewhat analogous to the work that Elliot must do.

Coda Mr. Robot and the hackers in fsociety are committed to a revolution, to the overthrow of capital and capitalism. The spectre in this series, like the spectre Derrida identifies in Marx, is a radical appeal for an economic revolution that implicates us in this project. Mr. Robot, in other words, creates ghostly resonances of its own with the economic inequality in the U.S., and the socio-political instability caused by terrorism and other threats to the security of Europe. But it is particularly important to note the kind of haunting at work. In the texts I consider, both Mr. ­Robot and Joan of Arc were wronged when alive – the former exposed to toxic radiation by the large conglomerate for whom he worked, the latter burnt at the stake as a heretic – but neither has returned from the dead with a simple revenge fantasy. They register an inequity, connecting temporalities to enable justice. That is where the political potential, the responsibility they ask us to take on, comes from. Furthermore, they cast their eyes towards the future, compelling, through their material presence a contradiction that we must reconcile. And it is in forcing this reconciliation that the ghost has done its job, mobilising all those who have witnessed it to a new intellectual understanding. The series’ treatment of Mr. Robot as a character even after he is revealed to be an apparition, visible only to Elliot and us, dramatises Derrida’s point about the value of living with the ghost. As María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren write, ‘rather than being expelled, the ghost should remain, be lived with … the ghost ceases to be seen as obscurantist and becomes, instead, a figure of clarification with a specifically ethical and political potential’.43 Of course there is nothing inherently progressive in either the filmic or televisual medium; people can be motivated, affectively engaged by moving images for both reactionary and radical causes. However, what I am suggesting is that when this affective prompting happens at the hands of a ghost, always a literal embodiment of a wrong committed that cannot

162  Alison Landsberg (and will not) go away, the demand is an ethical one. But this obligation is not so much to the past as to the future. In this way the ghost plays a messianic role, but messianic in the cautious, guarded sense that ­Benjamin describes. Jameson writes: The very idea of the messianic then brings the whole feeling of dashed hopes and impossibility along with it: and it is this that it means in Benjamin as well. You would not evoke the messianic in a genuinely revolutionary period, a period in which changes can be sensed at work all around you; the messianic does not mean immediate hope in that sense, perhaps not even hope against hope; it is a unique variety of the species hope that scarcely bears any of the latter’s normal characteristics and that flourishes only in a time of absolute hopelessness.44 The spectre in Mr. Robot signals a last-ditch effort, a call to strike out against the injustices around Elliot and indeed around us. And as Jameson and Benjamin suggest, the promise here is not readily apparent; it is a long shot, with only a glimmer of a hope for redemption. The cinema as a technology lends itself to the corporealisation of ghosts as a device for bridging the past and the present in the service of a future yet to pass, but also for demonstrating the way in which the ghost is to be lived with, responded to. By representing the impossible, by jarring us in precisely this way, its presence figures as nothing less than a call, through the screen, to action.

Notes 1 Cecil B. DeMille, The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, ed. Donald Hayne (London: W. H. Allen, 1960), 154. 2 Joan the Woman, dir. Cecil B. DeMille (USA: Paramount Pictures, 1916); Mr. Robot, created by Sam Esmail (USA: Universal Cable Productions, 2015–present). 3 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ‘Introduction: The Spectral Turn’, in Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press/Popular Press, 2004), 3, 5. 4 Ibid., 5. 5 Ibid., 6. 6 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), xviii. 10 Ibid.

Ghosts on Screen  163 11 Ibid. 12 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi. 13 Avery Gordon, ‘Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity’, borderlands 10, no. 2 (2011): 3. 14 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 112. 15 Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 59–60. 16 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8. 17 Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 50. 18 Murray Leeder, ‘Introduction’, in Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era, ed. Murray Leeder (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 4. 19 Tom Gunning, ‘To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision’, Grey Room 26 (2007): 102. 20 Ibid., 103–104. 21 Ibid., 111. 22 Ibid., 112. 23 Ibid., 117. 24 Katherine Singer Kovács, ‘George Méliès and the Féerie’, in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 254. 25 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8, no. 3/4 (1986): 63–70. 26 See, for instance, Cheese Mites, or Lilliputians in a London Restaurant (dir. Walter R. Booth, 1901) and The Finish of Bridge McKeen (dir. Edwin S. Porter, 1901). 27 In her discussion of M. Knight Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, Katherine A. Fowkes explores the use of spectres in melodramatic films as catalysts to romance that markedly depart from the horror and Gothic traditions. Simi­ larly, I suggest that the appearance of ghosts in non-horror films can compel intellectual processing and interpretation. See Katherine A. Fowkes, ‘Melodramatic Specters: Cinema and The Sixth Sense’, in Spectral ­A merica: Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed. Jeffrey Andrew ­Weinstock (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press/Popular Press, 2004), 185–206. 28 A Christmas Carol, dir. J. Searle Dawley, Charles Kent and Ashley Miller (New York: Edison Studios, 1910). See also Scrooge (or Marley’s Ghost) (dir. Walter R. Booth, 1901) and A Christmas Carol (dir. Harold M. Shaw, 1914). 29 In the 1910 screen adaptation of A Christmas Carol, the character of Tiny Tim is absent and the three spirits are represented by the one ghost. 30 Audrey Jaffe has argued that the Dickens tale interpellates its readers into a particular relationship to capitalism that links consumerism with sympathy, thereby reinforcing a dominant economic discourse. Scrooge’s failure to partici­pate in commodity culture, as emblematised in the narrative by his parsimonious actions, is suggestive of his failure to contribute meaningfully to society and the greater good. What he learns from the ghosts by projecting into the past and the future is quite literally the ‘spirit of capitalism’, the conditions under which humanitarianism became possible. Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 42–43. 31 ‘Joan the Woman’, The Chicago Defender (7 July 1917), 4.

164  Alison Landsberg 32 ‘Joan the Woman’, The Washington Post (25 September 1917), 8. 33 ‘May Use Picture to Aid Recruiting: Foreign Governments Much Interested in Big Films’, Los Angeles Times (28 January 1917), III19. 34 Ibid. 35 Robin Blaetz, Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 54. 36 DeMille, The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, 154. 37 Peter Milne, ‘Joan the Woman’, Motion Picture News (6 January 1917), 111. 38 Cecil B. DeMille quoted in Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 30. 39 Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, 33. 40 Colin Davis, ‘État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’, French Studies 59, no. 3 (2005): 373. 41 See, for example, Being Human (BBC Three, 2008–2013; Syfy, 2011–2014), The Ghost Whisperer (CBS, 2005–2010), Ghost Hunters (Syfy, 2004–­present), Ghost Hunters Academy (Syfy, 2009–2010), and Ghost Hunters International (Syfy, 2008–2012). 42 By casting Christian Slater in the role of Mr. Robot, creator Sam Esmail is perhaps channelling the actor’s earlier role as a pirate radio DJ in Pump Up the Volume (dir. Allen Moyle, 1990). The character of Mark Hunter (‘Hard Harry’), too, was a vocal critic of the political and economic landscape of America. In this sense, Slater himself appears as a ghostly resonance. 43 María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, ‘Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities’, in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 7. 4 4 Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, 62.

10 ‘Our Monuments Shall Be the Maws of Kites’ Laura Oldfield Ford and the Ghosts of Psychogeography Past Christopher Collier The stark depictions of contemporary cities produced by English ­artist Laura Oldfield Ford have frequently been associated with the term ‘psycho­ geography’. In the introduction to the 2011 collected edition of her Savage Messiah zine however, theorist and cultural critic Mark Fisher rejects the label, proposing that Oldfield Ford moves beyond the ‘increasingly played out discourses of psychogeography’.1 He favours ‘hauntology’ as a way to think through her mournful, angry portrayals of a mid-­twentieth century architectural Modernism. For Fisher this architecture, typical of post-war public building programmes in Great Britain, evokes an urban vision that has been eclipsed by neoliberal capitalism’s spatio-­temporal colonisation since the 1980s. In describing O ­ ldfield Ford’s work as hauntological, he implies that her cityscapes represent the ghosts of an unrealised faith in social progress, shared solutions and optimism for the future that function in dyschronic relation to a contemporary culture of cynicism, individualisation and a crippled futurity. While Fisher’s is a powerful interpretation, in discarding psycho­ geography he restricts one potentially useful reading of Oldfield Ford’s practice and its poignant commentary on the haunted quality of space within the neoliberal city. I aver that a renewed thinking of psycho­ geography and hauntology together could lead us back (and forward) to their radical capacity for suggesting the fundamental spectrality of urban space, and thus the limits of capitalist enclosure. A primary achievement of Oldfield Ford’s work is that it enables psychogeography to be once again reanimated as a critical practice, via a hauntological approach. Her psychogeographic ghosts offer neither the metaphysical closure of a stable historicism, nor the restored teleology of a utopian future. Instead, they threaten with the constant, spectral possibility of violent eruption, the fear of which troubles the securitised, neoliberal city unremittingly.

Telling Ghost (Hi)stories: Derrida’s Hauntology and its Cultural Reinterpretation Jacques Derrida introduced the term ‘hauntology’ in his 1993 book Specters of Marx.2 The volume represented his long-anticipated, arguably overdue, direct encounter with Marxism and continued his philosophical

166  Christopher Collier project of deconstruction. Derrida’s intervention can be contextualised specifically in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumphalism heralded by right-wing thinkers, notably Francis Fukuyama, who posited that history, as a pseudo-Hegelian process of progressive unfolding, was at an end, with (neo)liberal capitalism standing as its ultimate expression.3 In typically Derridean fashion, hauntology destabilises its own origin by pointing to its non-identity with itself. Derrida coined this neologism as a play on the word’s near homophone (in French) ‘ontology’. It contains a pun primarily discernible in written text, disrupting the hierarchical division that privileges speech (as  the immediate conduit of meaning) over writing (as representation), and the assumed pre-­eminence of presence over absence.4 Hauntology deconstructs the concept of pure presence, or self-identity, for it implies that any ontology is always already unstable. Simon Skempton usefully summarises ‘pure presence’ as that identified with ‘fullness, simplicity, identity, closure, essence, substance and form’.5 He continues: [Derrida] identifies presence as the basis of consciousness, subjecti­ vity, the fullness of life and linear temporality. What Derrida means by the term “presence” is the fullness and closure of identity; identity without any trace of the other, any opening to non-identity.6 Against this set of metaphysical assumptions, Derrida argues that onto­ logy, presence, is constituted and haunted by an absence/non-presence of the spatial and temporal other. This ‘spectre’ is thus neither fully present nor absent – ‘[i]t does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or the essence of life or death’ – and is concurrently a first appearance and a return (‘it begins by coming back’).7 This spectral other is furthermore the prophecy of an open future in that its inherent drift, the impossibility of ontological delimitation, is the very possibility of other futures. In Specters of Marx, Derrida deconstructs the linear chronologies of historicism in as much as past, present and future remain intermingled and indeterminate. Drawing on and redeploying Derrida’s term, a number of cultural commentators gave hauntology fresh impetus during the mid-2000s. Authors such as Fisher on his k-punk blog and Simon Reynolds writing in The Wire and on so-called ‘retro’ culture appropriated it, associating the word with a genre of electronic music that was partially characterised by its quasi-nostalgic evocations of the past.8 The music achieved this effect through a number of aesthetic devices, from the use of deliberately archaic samples, library music, vintage instrumentation or the addition of a vinyl ‘crackle’ to recordings, to a particular style of packaging and promotional material. For Reynolds, such music could call to mind a mid-twentieth century moment in which cities in the United Kingdom were transformed through the widespread implementation of public

‘Our Monuments Shall Be the Maws of Kites’  167 planning and administered social welfare programmes. This was a postwar situation epitomised by ‘the spirit of technocratic u ­ topianism … a wistful harking back to the optimistic, forward-looking, benignly bureaucratic Britain of new towns and garden cities, comprehensive schools and polytechnics’.9 The hauntological classification inferred a tension in these compositions, between the spectral summoning of a bygone futurism distinguished by a belief in social improvement, and a present in which such a belief in the future had been forestalled. For Fisher, experimentation with this sense of temporal disjuncture and nostalgia was evident in the music of artists such as Burial and those on the Ghost Box label like The Advisory Circle or Belbury Poly who have been at the forefront of cohering the aforementioned aesthetic devices into something approaching a genre. As a loose stylistic current in early twenty-first century culture, hauntology problematised the ontology of aesthetic artefacts in a neoliberal era. It was a complex re-rendering of the pastiches of postmodernism in which playful intertextual ironies no longer seemed quite so liberating. Instead it resonated with the melancholic ghosts of a left politics stripped of revolutionary agency, divested of any utopian promise, coming to terms with the fact that even its former victories had been found hollow, built as they were upon spectres, absences and omissions – the gendered division of labour, or colonialism, to name a few examples. It is this self-conscious exploration of what Fredric Jameson labelled ‘the nostalgia mode’ that differentiates hauntological artefacts from more conventional postmodern texts and practices that expunge their own nostalgic borrowings.10 Jameson explains postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism – a designation one might equate here with neoliberalism. Retrospection and parody are expressions of the diffuse homogeneity offered by the purported ‘end of history’, when any opportunity of true alterity is extinguished in the fiction of limitless co-presence. According to Fisher, the hauntological diverges in that it points up absence through its dyschronia and dialogue with the unfulfilled ambition of advancement ostensible in the futuristic conceptions of a Modernist past. It does so as a sombre reflection on neoliberalism’s postmodern condition and its temporal finality: Hauntology is the counterpart to this nostalgia mode. The preoccupation with the past in hauntological music could easily be construed as “nostalgic”. But it is the very foregrounding of temporality that makes hauntology differ from the typical products of the ­nostalgia mode, which bracket out history altogether in order to present themselves as new…. [In hauntology] we can hear the time-wound, the chronological fracture, the expression of the sense, crucial to hauntology, that “time is out of joint”. Dyschronia.11

168  Christopher Collier In acknowledging its retrospection, hauntology foregrounds the prospect for qualitative shifts through disjuncture with the past (whereas postmodern capitalism reduces the past to a quantitative smorgasbord of equivalence between discrete, exchangeable occurrences). It is this dimension that Fisher maintains is provoked by Oldfield Ford’s elegiac illustrations of Modernist post-war architecture. I propose that her art also operates in a similarly hauntological fashion with regards to pre-­ existing instances of psychogeographic practice operative during the height of the neoliberal counter-revolution. It is to this that I now turn.

Twin Phantoms: Psychogeography’s Concurrent Re-Emergence It is perhaps not coincidental that, at the same time Derrida was raising the notion of hauntology, a cognate concept came back from the dead. Having attracted relatively little interest since it was first coined in France several decades earlier, the practice of psychogeography made a remarkable comeback in the 1990s, this time principally in Great ­Britain. Psychogeography had been codified by Guy Debord and the Letterist International (LI) in the mid-1950s as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals’.12 It was subsequently developed by their successor organisation, the Situationist International (SI), during the late 1950s and early 1960s and entailed drifting through urban space, engaging with its affective and psychological dimensions, including its historical resonances, in order to negate existing spatialised apparatuses of domination. In exploring the ways in which architecture and urbanism could be used to control and elicit certain behaviours and subjectivities, psychogeography was a means to transform spaces that indicated the prospects for new, revolutionary subjectivations. As Debord noted, by studying and appropriating these environmental influences it would be possible to create ‘a mass of desires whose fulfilment is not beyond the capacity of humanity’s present means of action on the material world, but only beyond the capacity of the old social organization’.13 Psychogeography was seen as a critical and prefigurative practice towards the generalised dismantling of capitalist subjectification. The UK reinvention of psychogeography took place in a dramatically changed milieu to its predecessors. It was inescapably influenced by the rise of economic liberalism under Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, a period marked by policies of deregulation, privatisation, the privileging of individual responsibility and supply-led economic reforms. This not only impacted on experience, notions of subjecthood, and time and space, but furthermore urban conditions and modes of oppositional poli­tics. As opposed to strategic planning, the immediacy and ‘immanent’ mode

‘Our Monuments Shall Be the Maws of Kites’  169 of resource allocation of a digitised, globalised marketplace collapsed the idea of the future, or a collective project of social transformation. Post-Fordism saw even the most intimate subjective and affective experiences being deployed in the valorisation of capital, with the cognitive and emotional life of the population put to work as never before. This erased historical depth, as hitherto uncommodified aspects of every­day life were drawn into a flattened system of increasingly frictionless exchange. In addition, deindustrialisation coupled with market-driven redevelopment activated a homogenisation of space exemplified by the gentrification of working-class districts. The steady privatisation of urban spaces subjected them to the strictures of the value-form in which they became interchangeable and exchangeable. As Jameson puts it, ­cities experienced ‘historical transformation from a locus of nascent capitalism to a subordinate feature in a capitalist world system … in terms of the transition from the use value of space and buildings to their exchange value’.14 The physical manifestation of this change is palpable in the uniform business parks, coffee chains, half-empty investment properties and staged ­photo-op ‘destinations’ that have come to characterise cities across the globe, from London to M ­ umbai, Sydney to Rio. Arising from this neoliberal context, the trajectories feeding the 1990s renewal of psychogeography were multifaceted and opaque. They self-consciously called to attention (and often radically reappropriated or disavowed) their situationist lineage, while drawing in external influences. It was largely underground publishers such as Tom Vague and Stewart Home who went beyond the minimal engagements with pychogeography undertaken by the UK post-/pro-situ groupings of the 1970s and 1980s (for example, King Mob, Here and Now or Anti Clock Wise), contributing to its creative reimagining and proliferation in the early 1990s. London writer Iain Sinclair, the figure who has become the most well-known name in Anglophone psychogeography, attributes the revitalised popularity of the practice to this underground resurgence.15 His books, such as Lights Out for the Territory (1997) and Liquid City (1999) – with their elegant and evocative prose, at once packed with matter-of-fact sociological detail and dark, occult undertones – have become synonymous with what were then emergent subcultural streams. Sinclair’s prose, poetry and filmmaking feature a distinctive style of writing and speaking about place and its various affects, part local history, part autofictional travelogue, for which the refashioned term psycho­geography provided a convenient label. While Home had come across the SI through various political groupings, it was through his connections with a neo-avant-garde underground around mail art and Neoism that he effaced an apparent gap between political and artistic involvement with the SI’s legacy, translating psychogeography for a new context.16 Through the London Workers Group, Home met a wider situationist-influenced subculture.

170  Christopher Collier It included those who would go on to make up part of Class War, an ultra-left collective espousing an irreverent attitude, militant action and a lively, self-produced punk zine-inspired journal.17 Among these was Fabian Tompsett who, through his reprised London Psychogeographical ­Association (LPA), would be integral to the psychogeographic revival, even more so than Home.18 Appearing just after Thatcher’s premiership, the LPA and the asso­ ciated psychogeographical outfits that emerged in its wake were a response to the fractious class politics of their time, particularly the apparent exhaustion of the left and its failure to prevent the 1990–1991 Gulf War. Employing the pseudonym Richard Essex, Tompsett and the LPA reinterpreted psychogeography, utilising convoluted occultist narratives that were conjoined with a humorous appropriation of revolutionary tropes and language. The result was ‘Magico-Marxism’ or what Home has labelled an ‘avant-bard’ movement.19 This ‘mythopoesis’ was a ‘satirical deconstruction’ of esoteric conspiracies and the dogmatic adherence to leftist political ontologies or grandiose, teleological posturing.20 The effect is complex. It mocks the SI’s more totalising rhetorical excesses at the same time as serving to inoculate their practice against academic recuperation.21 In this respect it could be cast as a kind of ‘guerrilla ontology’, echoing the style of Robert Anton Wilson whose conspiratorial narratives provided an ambiguous, if notable, influence on the 1990s psychogeographical scene.22 It might also be tempting to construe it as exemplifying the ‘ontological anarchy’ and ‘poetic terrorism’ called for by the situationist-influenced anarchist Hakim Bey whose writing on Temporary Autonomous Zones was prominent among a 1990s counter-culture.23 However, as provocative interventions against Bey show, the LPA’s critique is equally levelled at the hidden vanguardism characteristic of such anarchist pretensions as at any pseudo-­Marxist ­onto-eschatology.24 The activities of the LPA clearly parodied the archaic rhetoric of an ‘old left’ clinging to a nostalgic Bolshevism, while showing an equal distrust of those contemporary leftist currents emanating from anarchism, the ecological movement and so-called ‘New Age’ tendencies. The central effect of this ‘guerrilla ontology’ was to critique a programmatic leftism of the kind that granted positive solidity to the categories of identity politics, or indeed to ‘communism’ itself, and the conception of history as an inevitable forward march towards all-­ embracing totality. In attacking totalising identities and systems, the 1990s psychogeographers saw the dangers of a left politics deteriorating into mere metaphysics, yet they too endeavoured to circumvent the counter-risk of individualisation and relativism that their critique posed. They did so through experiments with innovative forms of collectivity. For example, Brian Holmes writes of the tactical use of multiple names, communicative connectivity and collective personalities evident in the Luther Blissett project and similar initiatives. 25 He relates that when the

‘Our Monuments Shall Be the Maws of Kites’  171 neo-fascist Lega Nord Mayor of Milan declared that squatters would henceforth be no more than ghosts wandering the city, he provoked a demonstration that took the form of a kind of inverted ‘Black Bloc’ as hundreds used new technologies to co-ordinate a flash demonstration of ‘ghosts’ in white boiler suits. These experimental forms of collectivity, for which Holmes borrows the term ‘collective phantoms’, reimagine a resistive, post-Fordist political subject without falling back upon stable ontologies, such as a metaphysical, humanist idea of the self – that traditional conception of a fixed, unified and self-sufficient, fully present being, bounded within the individual.26 These collective phantoms attempted to find new forms able to defy the depersonalised, fractalised conditions of much contemporary labour – what Franco Berardi identifies as the cellular and recombinant fragments of networked connectivity made possible by the internet.27 Much 1990s psychogeography sought to address challenges posed to traditional revolutionary agency by post-Fordism precisely through this construction of an interconnected, transindividual subject. It is by bringing forth the ghosts of this iteration of psychogeography, and of psychogeography more generally, that ­Oldfield Ford’s work operates in a fundamentally hauntological manner as a political intervention.

A Ghost at the Feast: Oldfield Ford’s Hauntological Psychogeography Laura Oldfield Ford (b.1973, Halifax, UK) is an English artist who creates drawings, fly-posters and photo-realist paintings in a style she has previously described, perhaps in a tongue-in-cheek way, as ­‘anarcho-realism’. 28 Rendering monochrome and lushly coloured imagery on a variety of scales, her output regularly portrays urban decay, a post-war architectural inheritance, dispossessed subjects and insurrectionary atmospherics. Self-portraits proliferate in semi-­fictionalised settings of dilapidated blue-collar and immigrant districts of a post-Thatcherite London increasingly ghettoised, defunded and threatened by the state. Often traces of intoxication, eroticism and vicious class conflict wilfully intrude upon these careful studies. This imagery is frequently juxtaposed with luridly rendered visual quotations from the glossy advertising material of gentrifying developers along with cut-up text, scraps of punk or avant-garde ephemera, graffiti-style scrawlings or monochrome photographs. As stated earlier, according to Fisher, Oldfield Ford’s spectral depictions of post-war architecture generate a sense of disjuncture in the present. As he notes in his introduction to the collected edition of her zines, ‘[t]he brutalist tower blocks that feature on so many pages of Savage Messiah recall the abandoned promises of what Owen Hatherley has called militant modernism’.29 I want to go further and argue that the

172  Christopher Collier hauntological operations cannot be fully comprehended without anchoring the work to its psychogeographic ancestry, to which it exhibits a similar dyschronia. To divorce it from such is to disregard its primary temporal function. To illustrate this I refer to Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah zine that was produced in regular instalments from 2005 to 2009. Of her various works, it appears the most concerned with psychogeography. Its format recalls a punk fanzine and the avant-garde mail art and political pamphlets of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In 2011, the zines were published as the book Savage Messiah to notable acclaim.30 Focus will be on the first two issues that were released in June and ­October/November 2005 (hereon referred to as #1 and #2 respectively). Savage Messiah is psychogeographical in that it involves drifting through the city, exploring the effects of the environment upon behaviour and emotion. It presents the splintered remains of countless autofictional journeys through rapidly vanishing sectors of working-class London in which the author’s own experiences suffuse textual and visual descriptions of its architecture and inhabitants. The zine’s diaristic, spliced-up style is reminiscent of the reports of the LI/SI and the fragmentary, idiosyncratic narratives that typify the majority of 1990s psychogeography. In contradistinction, Oldfield Ford’s accounts adopt neither the staid, pseudo-scientific distance of the LI/SI, nor the ironic distance of, for example, the LPA. Her accounts are vivid, poetic and, seemingly, personal. Indeed, detractors might decry the apparently painful hopes for authenticity grasped at in her exactingly executed sketches – the e­ laborate yet almost adolescent earnestness, scratched in a biro so visceral one can almost feel the artist’s hands frenetically spinning across the page. However, here authenticity is deployed to contrast with the ironies and whimsical humour of 1990s psychogeography now inappropriate in the face of neoliberalism’s acrimonious victory. Their laughter lingers in Savage Messiah like scattered debris in a silent, empty room, the morning after a party. Savage Messiah #1, which centres on the Isle of Dogs and Limehouse in London’s former docklands, contains a number of references to its psychogeographic antecedents and points towards my proposition that Oldfield Ford’s work operates hauntologically in respect to the discourse of psychogeography itself. It places itself within a more expansive preservationist colouring that characterises psychogeography from at least the LI’s 1950s polemics concerning proposed demolitions and urban renewal, right up to the 1990s in the UK. 31 Oldfield Ford’s inclusion of the Limehouse district is an apt choice in this regard. Historically a poor area, Limehouse was a site of notorious opium dens in the nineteenth century. This was likely the source of its appeal to the LI when they lauded its insalubrious backstreets and protested against its redevelopment in a 1955 letter to The Times newspaper.32 It, too, was the choice for the SI’s 1960 London conference and the setting for the 2003 Cartographic

‘Our Monuments Shall Be the Maws of Kites’  173 Congress (of which Tompsett was one of the participants). 33 Oldfield Ford’s representation of the area is doubly haunted by its working-class past, eclipsed by 1980s efforts at ‘regeneration’, and the importance of the locality within psychogeography. The intertwining of architecture, insurrection and affect in Savage Messiah is in keeping with psychogeography. Aggressive graffiti – ‘loot Asda, burn Barratts’ – is depicted and rioting alluded to.34 A litany of ghosts from class conflicts is conjured up like a necromantic spell – ­‘ Tottenham, Beanfield, Wapping … miners, printers, travellers’. This forms a counter-magic to the arcane geometry of the London Docklands Development Corporation and the ‘Masonic henge’ of neoteric skyscrapers in the former docks, now the financial centre, of Canary Wharf. These developments are iconic of a post-1980s gentrifying enclosure of working-class neighbourhoods and replacement of heavy industry with the urban machinery of financial capitalism. For Oldfield Ford this space is figured as a locus of malign, supernatural power. This strongly recollects the LPA’s discussion of the area in their newsletter as the location of the ‘omphalos’ – a supposedly potent, magical talisman – and a leyline that allegedly bisects East London, as well as similar interventions by The Preliminary Committee for the Foundation of a New Lettrist International (primarily Tompsett and Home).35 Savage Messiah #1 repeatedly features a particular leyline map, containing a line traced across the Isle of Dogs, that is a direct visual citation from earlier LPA material. 36 In announcing a ‘solstice skag bonanza’ and ‘leyline yuppie bashing’, Oldfield Ford evokes that curious combination of class war and occultism that was a trait of the group’s writings. Oldfield Ford’s ‘occult geometry and architectural control’ is a conscious summoning of spectres of her psychogeographic forebears. On another page, one can just about make out the figure of Tompsett himself, reclining languorously in the shadows of a dark, monochromatic photograph, perhaps simulating an opiate trance. The dislocated words ‘skag’ and ‘rituals’ recur across the pages like quotations whose meanings have become indistinct. Throughout Savage Messiah #1, this psychotropic sensibility is indicated through ‘pills and powders’ and a ‘Garden of poppies’. The ghosts of Limehouse opium dens and proto-psychogeographer and opium-eater Thomas De Quincey reverberate as explicit or oblique references through the text.37 Likewise carrying with them intoxicating associations, tempestuous lovers Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine materialise, conceivably via psychogeographic filmmaker Patrick Keiller and his 1994 filmic portrait of the city in London: Money and power, the air thick with a heady confection of cinnamon, tobacco and rotting wood. De Quincey. Warm opiates. V ­ erlaine and Rimbaud intoxicated by glyphs. Dizziness, inner ear malfunction, swaying like I’m out at sea.38

174  Christopher Collier The Rimbaudian derangements of the senses mirror the linguistic and visual derangements of the zine and the fragmented city. The anarchic effect of Oldfield Ford’s cut-and-paste technique is a reappropriation of the piecemeal redesigning of London under neoliberalism’s refutation of democratic planning. Savage Messiah #1 is a collage of memories that discharges a barrage of half-recalled quotes, interspersed with a semi-fictional account of Oldfield Ford’s experiences. In this respect she speaks to and breaks with the psychogeographic tradition. The psychosexual component of her narrative no longer inheres in romantic elegies for feminised and colonised space. It is not a psychogeography of what Doreen Massey called (pertaining to the allegedly phallocentric practices of the SI, and before them, the Surrealists) ‘laddish thrills’ and ‘rushing about down dark passages’, an ‘eroticised colonisation of the city’. 39 If the city is Oldfield Ford’s lover then it is also her equal. They have both been unfaithful and yet there is an implicit trust. Conspiring together, they are partners in crime. Space is no longer made available, mapped and present in Savage Messiah. Neither are the locales Oldfield Ford describes presented as some locus of sublime or elusive otherness, ripe for exotic adventure, in the way those lauded by the Surrealists or their situationist inheritors were. Instead she focuses on those parts of the city in which she lives and moves, is intimate with, understands, trusts. These spaces are vulnerable, incomplete, appearing through hallucinatory reiterations and fleeting sexual encounters that destabilise the presence of the city. They are read as open again, that is, as the shifting confluence of networks of absence, the hidden and repressed ghosts through which they are constituted. Savage Messiah #2 expands upon these themes, throwing itself into a clash over temporality on two fronts. On the one hand it takes up arms against the regressive ‘phantom of an imagined England’ and its hijacking by ‘NF [National Front] hyperactivity’.40 On the other it fights back against the ‘creative destruction’ of neoliberal development and its attendant erasure of the past, for example, the conservationist spirit ­Oldfield Ford articulates in lines such as ‘haunted by the demolished Odeon … two days before it was to be listed’. Oldfield Ford rails against local fascists and their recourse to historical fiction, as well as neoliberalism’s global myth of immanent market presence and denial of history – the spatial effect of which is actualised in the demolition and private ‘regeneration’ of former working-class or communal spaces. This is something felt acutely in the Elephant and Castle district of ­L ondon, on which this issue of the zine concentrates. Here Oldfield Ford produces numerous drawings of the Heygate Estate, one of Europe’s biggest social housing projects, in the process of having its tenants evicted in order to make way for luxury flats, unaffordable to those living in the area. Savage Messiah #2 examines the tensions

‘Our Monuments Shall Be the Maws of Kites’  175 resulting from Britain’s Thatcherite liquidation of longstanding social bonds that went hand in hand with a barely sanitised co-option of extreme nationalistic nostalgia.41 In doing so, the zine recaptures the force of a mythic yet visceral past from the far right while undoing the ontological stitch-up of global capital that has encompassed the whole world in its virtual networks of pure presence. While she grieves for that embodied politics of the streets made impotent by globalisation and financialisation, Oldfield Ford also warns against its re-emergence as a neo-fascist, conservative temporality. This two-pronged attack becomes clearer when Oldfield Ford speaks of a Faraday cage, a scientific device that serves to block electrical currents and hence many types of communication signals from its interior. She uses this metaphor to describe a semi-derelict electricity substation covered in ‘luminous runes and glyphs’.42 In the uncanny contrast of technology and magic she calls forth the spectre of the LPA as a secession, a gap, a space of autonomy from the globalised economy. The grid of occult power from Savage Messiah #1 resurfaces in #2 as a grid of infrastructural, logistical power that is manifested as ‘invisible circuitry’, ‘transnational capital’ and ‘information flows’. As an apparatus for shutting out the signals of communicative capitalism, the Faraday cage becomes ‘a space to channel, for other selves to come through’. These are not the interlinked, fractured subjects arising from digitised interfaces. Rather the empty space of the cage is haunted by absent ontologies, of erotic, violent flesh – the depictions of skinhead aggression, sexual trysts and sensual intoxications of the area’s former inhabitants, the artist among them. This viscerality, experienced as the unruly spectre, disturbs capitalism’s aspirations towards a disembodied, transhuman presence, for in its destruction of workers’ housing in favour of investment property capital, it had sought to eliminate the bodies of labour altogether from its dream of frictionless valorisation. A withdrawal from such circuitry seeks agency in the Faraday cage’s desertion. It is a kind of psychic strike against the dissolution of embodied subjectivity within these flows of capital and information. In this, Oldfield Ford’s work displays a certain rehabilitated Luddite tendency. It is akin to punk’s ‘No Future’ rallying cry, an extraction from the grid and a refusal to seamlessly merge with the infrastructure of capitalism. This strategy is reflected in Savage Messiah’s aesthetic, from its DIY style and analogue status as a zine in a world of digital publishing, to its handdrawn and typewritten tales of violence, drugs, sex and corporeality in an increasingly online culture. No longer optimistic, transindividual phantoms, Oldfield Ford’s ghosts appear as this highly personal, doleful viscerality. The effect is thus a hauntological dyschronia of architecture and psychogeography. It is as much the unrealised promises of the 1990s collective phantoms as it is the Modernist idealism of the 1960s that inhabits her creations.

176  Christopher Collier Thinking somewhat allegorically, one might revisit Specters of Marx where Derrida draws into question Karl Marx’s own determined endeavours in The German Ideology to dispel a Stirnerean metaphysics of the self.43 Derrida actually aims to extend Marx’s own critique of metaphysics, turning it back on him, claiming that in his unyielding efforts to exorcise and remove ‘ghosts’ (in this instance, metaphysical idealisms) Marx seeks a world that could only be, in Jameson’s words, ‘ontology itself, a world of pure presence’ – which is itself nothing but an ideal construct.44 Jameson is referring to Derrida’s observation that: Marx does not like ghosts … He does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else. He believes rather in what is supposed to distinguish them from actual reality, living effectivity. He believes he can oppose them, like life to death, like vain appearances of the simulacrum to real presence.45 Likewise, the 1990s psychogeographers tried to dispel a notion of the self as the discrete, fixed and self-contained subjectivities of liberal capitalism. Yet their struggles to recast the anti-capitalist subject as a collective phantom sometimes inadvertently veer towards that same metaphysical idealism with which Derrida charges Marx – the idea of pure, immediate presence. The hauntology of Oldfield Ford’s work is the return of the spectre, whereby the past cannot be reduced to a pure presence, but remains haunting the present with its absence. Savage Messiah consequently stands in dyschronic relation to the failures of social democracy and postwar Modernist urban planning, but also to the collapse of the psycho­ geographic revival. It is in mourning for both. Thus the haunto­logy of Savage Messiah is predicated on its own auto-referential dialogue with psychogeography. The two cannot be separated. Moreover, Oldfield Ford’s embodied, gendered, hauntological psychogeography threatens to simultaneously undermine both the myths of an unmediated politics evident in the collective phantoms’ attempts at pure presence, and those humanist abstractions which hold that subjective spatial experiences can be unproblematically generalised into something approaching the transcendental that persist in the psychogeography of the SI, despite their bids to evade them.46 Such notions resurfaced more intensely during the 1990s and 2000s in the predominantly white, male and middle-class literary psychogeography, which co-existed with and interpenetrated the more underground expressions I have been discussing and from which Fisher seeks to distance Oldfield Ford’s zines. However, Fisher does so without appreciating that it is the affinity Oldfield Ford bears to such discourses that permits her practice to unsettle ‘psychogeography’ as such, that is, to prevent it solidifying into a series of metaphysical abstractions, or a pure abstraction itself. Her work is the spectre that denies

‘Our Monuments Shall Be the Maws of Kites’  177 psychogeographic practice total presence or self-identity; that keeps it amenable to multiple futures through its incessant returns to the past. Where Derrida spins his speculations upon the Shakespearean spectre of Hamlet’s murdered father, Oldfield Ford’s ghosts do not implore the living to enact their laments. They bear witness. In bearing witness they speak. And in speaking, act. They reanimate psychogeography, building Faraday cages of spectral common ground inside the neoliberal network. These ghosts are more akin to that of Banquo whose apparition so spooks the megalomaniac Macbeth. They startle by their very appearance. In her obsessively recurring self-portraits Oldfield Ford glares out of the pages like a ghost at the feast, grabbing her seat at the table to spite the diners, to ruin their smug banquet and displace their mirth with a most admired disorder. ‘If charnel-houses and our graves must send / Those that we bury, back, our monuments / Shall be the maws of kites’ howls Macbeth, driven beyond his wits in the face of such a spectre.47 Taking a scalpel to the tatters of a lost London in Savage ­Messiah, Oldfield Ford’s ghosts do not return solely to challenge the city but rather, like Banquo, to prophesise, to speak of their own inhe­ ritance. ‘Monuments’ do become mouthpieces, de-tuning and re-tuning our attention, picking up ghostly voices from the static. In appropriating her psychogeographic ancestry, Oldfield Ford enables its ‘dead’ to speak in their moment of dissolution, as the cut-up pickings of this carrion scavenger, tearing scraps from bones that corpses may speak. These scraps form a dense web of references, as the hauntological ghosts of a psychogeographical past. ‘Art is dead. Desecrate and consume its corpse, spit it out, like the punks spat out rock and roll’ seems to be the message in Savage ­Messiah. Here lies the spectral promise that things might be otherwise. In 1967, Raoul Vaneigem infamously proclaimed: ‘Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle … without grasping what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints – has a corpse in his mouth’.48 ­Oldfield Ford does not go down this situationist back-alley. She is cogni­ sant that love and refusal are valorisable in the post-Fordist context of the neoliberal city. In an age of ubiquitous marketing and social media, lifestyles and affect have been reduced to commodities as more and more instances of autonomous experience are incorporated into capitalism’s expansive reach. Yet to acknowledge what is already lost is not to give up fighting. The corpse in Oldfield Ford’s mouth speaks, as the text does for Derrida, of the constituent nature of absence and the limits of that essential fiction of boundless co-presence. Neoliberalism could be considered as a capitalism whose ideology claims it has exorcised all ghosts and achieved pure presence through the world market. It is without an outside and without a past, what Fisher has called ‘capitalist realism’, that obscures all alternatives.49 Above all, Oldfield Ford shows that this is a lie.

178  Christopher Collier

Coda: Living with Ghosts Specters of Marx is not, in my view, an especially radical book in political terms. Its engagements with the complexities of Marxist thinking are narrow and at times disingenuous. If one can take something from it, however, it would not only be the dangers of a faith in metaphysics, or spirits, but also in believing one can expel them completely (or has already done so). It would be the refusal of conclusiveness or a closure of the past, the repudiation of Thatcher’s mantra that ‘there is no alternative’. Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah demonstrates this potential through its approach to the failed Utopias of a Modernist architectural aesthetic, and to psychogeography’s collective phantoms and Magico-Marxist conjuring tricks. Its hauntology inheres within its reiterations and returns. It is the ghost of ghosts. In conceiving the neoliberal city as a space in which all barriers to capital expansion and expropriation are relentlessly liquidated, Oldfield Ford’s hauntological psychogeography forms a blockage. It acknow­ ledges that the ‘forward’ focus of dominant socio-political narratives is in many ways the ideological correlate of capitalist growth.50 Instead the artist explores an escape from the twenty-first century by the backdoor. The politics of loss in Savage Messiah expresses the revenge of a suppressed undercurrent haunting twentieth-century radicalism. Oldfield Ford understands the avant-garde as the arena not simply for playing out Modernity’s visions of the future but also the ghosts of the past. These spaces of commonality and alterity marginalised and subsumed by a teleo­logy of ‘progress’ momentarily re-emerge when linear temporality is broken down. Oldfield Ford’s hauntological psychogeography might be a work of mourning, but it is one that vows to unearth new passageways out of the dead time of neoliberal capitalism.

Notes 1 Mark Fisher, ‘Introduction’, in Savage Messiah, ed. Laura Oldfield Ford (London and New York: Verso, 2011), xiv. 2 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 3 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History’, The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18. 4 See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 5 Simon Skempton, Alienation After Derrida (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 10. 6 Ibid. 7 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 63, 11. 8 Mark Fisher, ‘k-punk’, k-punk (2003–), accessed 1 September 2015, ; Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London and New York: Faber & Faber, 2011).

‘Our Monuments Shall Be the Maws of Kites’  179 9 Simon Reynolds, ‘Society of the Spectral’, The Wire 273 (2006): 26–33. 10 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 18–19. 11 Mark Fisher, ‘No Future 2012’, k-punk (2008), accessed 1 September 2015, . 12 Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 8. 13 Ibid., 10. 14 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 347. 15 Steven Barfield and Lawrence Phillips (eds), ‘Psychogeography: Will Self and Iain Sinclair in Conversation with Kevin Jackson’, Literary London 6, no. 1 (2008), accessed 1 September 2015, . 16 Stewart Home and Karen Goaman, ‘Marx, Christ and Satan United in Struggle: Stewart Home Interviewed by Karen Goaman’, Variant 1, no. 7 (1990): 19–23. Mail art was a popular (anti)artistic movement deriving from Fluxus in the 1950s and 60s. Correspondents sent small-scale pieces and publications through the post that consolidated international networks of cultural practitioners. Neoism was an often overlapping, diffuse group of international, experimental practitioners who innovated various cultural interventions, pranks, happenings and the use of collective pseudonyms. Both networks contributed to an ‘underground’ subculture in which the seeds of situationist revival found fertile ground. 17 Stewart Home, Jean Baudrillard and the Psychogeography of Nudism ­(London: Sabotage Editions, 2001), 58. 18 Fabian Tompsett’s London Psychogeographical Association was a supposed revival of a largely fictional organisation of which English situationist Ralph Rumney was the original and sole member. It was invented as a vehicle to further bolster the impression of internationalism when it was supposedly amalgamated with the Letterist International and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus to form the Situationist International in 1957, and so immediately ceased to exist, if it ever had. 19 Alastair Bonnett ascribes the expression ‘Magico-Marxism’ to a review in Transgressions journal in 1996. See Alastair Bonnett, ‘The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography’, Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 1 (2009): 61; Dusty Bin, ‘Review of London Psychogeographical Association Newsletter and Manchester Area Psychogeographic’, Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration 2/3 (1996): 120–121; Stewart Home, ‘Mondo Mythopoesis’, Variant 2, no. 2 (1997): 9. 20 Home, ‘Mondo Mythopoesis’, 9. 21 Stewart Home, ‘ON THE MIND INVADERS ANTHOLOGY A Talk Origi­nally Entitled “Mind Bending, Swamp Fever and the Ideological Vortext: How Avant-Bard Satire Blisters the Cheeks of the Aparatchiki”’, Stewarthomesociety.org (1998), accessed 1 September 2015, . 22 Stewart Home and Florian Cramer, The House of Nine Squares: Letters on Psychogeography and Epistemological Trepidation (London: Invisible Books, 1997), 57. 23 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003). 24 In 1996, Roberto Bui (of the counter-cultural conspiracy Luther Blissett) as Fabrizio P. Belletai/Luther Blissett conducted an audacious hoax in

180  Christopher Collier

25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

which he published a fake Italian translation of a number of non-existent Bey texts, satirising and undermining the superficial uptake of Bey by certain sections of the anarchist, rave and squatting scenes. The texts that he passed off as Bey included a piece by Joseph Stalin, and notably a piece by the LPA (A Conspectus on the Evolution of Cyberspace, published here as ­Albigensis Postscript) suggesting Tompsett was in on the scam. See ‘Hakim Bey’/­Roberto Bui, A ruota libera: miseria del lettore di TAZ: Autocritica dell’ideologia underground (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1996); Luther Blissett, ‘Why I Wrote a Fake Hakim Bey Book and How I Cheated the Conformists of Italian Counter-Culture’, Lutherblissett.net (1996), accessed 1 September 2015, . Brian Holmes, ‘Unleashing the Collective Phantom (Resistance to N ­ etworked Individualism)’, Mute 1, no. 24 (2002): 32. Ibid. Franco Berardi, After the Future (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 35. The Foundry, ‘Foundry – We Get Restless’, foundry.tv (2003), accessed 1 September 2015, . Fisher, ‘Introduction’ (Savage Messiah), xv. See also Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (London: Zero, 2009). Owen Hatherley, ‘Books of the Year 2008’, New Statesman (13 November 2008), accessed 1 September 2015, ; Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘AvantPulp Psychogeography’, American Book Review 34, no. 2 (2013): 6–7; Greil Marcus, ‘The Believer – Real Life Rock Top Ten’, The Believer 10, no. 6 (2012), accessed 1 September 2015, . Letterist International, ‘On détruit La Rue Sauvage’, Potlatch 7 (3 August 1954): 54–55; Nottingham Psychogeographical Unit, ‘An Appeal to Stop Building Altogether’, Nottingham Psychogeographical Unit Stories 3 (1998): 1–2. Michèle Bernstein, Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, ‘To the Editor of The Times’, Potlatch 23 (13 October 1955), accessed 1 September 2015, . Mute, ‘The Cartographic Congress’, Mute 1, no. 26 (2003): 92–94. Laura Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah 1 (London: self-published, 2005). London Psychogeographical Association, Nazi Occultists Seize Omphalos (n.d.); London Psychogeographical Association, ‘Omphalos Under Fire!’, London Psychogeographical Association Newsletter 2 (1993); Preliminary Committee for the Founding of a New Lettrist International, Caer Ruis (1995). London Psychogeographical Association, Nazi Occultists Seize Omphalos, 1. Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah 1, n.p. London, dir. Patrick Keiller (United Kingdom: BFI Production, 1994). Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 46. Laura Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah 2 (London: self-published, 2005). See, for example, Margaret Thatcher’s comments to ITV’s World in Action programme on 30 January 1978 regarding Britain being ‘swamped’ by immigrants in an appeal to NF supporters. The NF fell into decline soon afterwards as adherents shifted allegiance (back) to the Conservative Party. Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah 2, n.p. In the collection of texts that would become known as The German Ideo­ logy (1932), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels go to great lengths to dispute Max Stirner’s The Ego and its Own (1845). Stirner had claimed that all

‘Our Monuments Shall Be the Maws of Kites’  181

4 4 45 46 47 48 49 50

abstractions or goals that sought to transcend the individual, from religion to nationalism to humanism, were metaphysical forms of oppression, or what he called ‘spooks’. Marx and Engels critiqued him on the basis that by anchoring his approach in ‘the individual’, he was extrapolating from something that was itself an intensely metaphysical construction. Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 58. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 57. David Pinder, ‘Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City’, Environment and Planning A 28, no. 3 (1996): 405–427. William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act 3, Scene 4, lines 70–72) (Minneapolis: First Avenue Editions, 2014), 60. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald ­Nicholson-Smith (Oakland, CA: PM, 2012), 11. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2009). For a similar idea concerning the ideological notion of ‘the future’, see ­B erardi, After the Future, 44–50.

11 From Spectres of Horror to ‘The Beautiful Death’ Re-Corporealising the Desaparecidos of Argentina Sonia M. Tascón Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question “where?” “where tomorrow?” “whither?” —Jacques Derrida1

In Argentina between 1976 and 1983, as occurred in neighbouring Chile from 1973 to 1989, a military regime – unlike any other previously – methodically removed individuals, tortured and executed them.2 Some thirty thousand people, most of whom were political opponents, were inhumanely disposed of.3 Many of their bodies were never recovered and the state negated all responsibility for them. What happened cannot be easily forgotten because such events keep returning as spectres of atro­ cities committed throughout history, forming a chain of horror across time and space. Moreover, as Jacques Derrida indicates in the opening quote the remembering of these other places, other times, other peoples has an ethical imperative. Unless we remember and speak of those who are no longer, or not yet present and living, there can be no assurance that acts of injustice will not be repeated, visited on our bodies, in the future. In this chapter, I want to remember not only the disappeared but furthermore the women who refused complicity with the great ‘disappearing act’ of the Argentine state. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo), and later Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (­Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo), re-corporealised their lost family members and in doing so reinstated the desaparecidos (‘the disappeared’) into the social body that had denied them as full human beings.4 In destroying the dreamlike aura of the state’s magic trick, the desaparecidos were allowed to die and be re-­ membered and returned to the nation in stories of heroism. In exploring the ways the Madres managed to sustain and entrench their loved ones in the public imagination, I draw upon Argentine films as instances where the work of transforming the desaparecidos from monstrosities of fear to those worthy of remembrance continued.

From Spectres of Horror to ‘The Beautiful Death’  183

Disappearing Bodies: From Magic Trick to Spectres of Horror What took place in Argentina can be framed within the discourse of ‘state magic’.5 Pierre Bourdieu postulates state magic as a ‘field of power’ that functions through a system of titles to institute and reproduce a specific class, that of the ‘state nobility’, that wields economic, political, legal and social influence within their administrative and distinguished positions.6 Although he is describing a specific process and system that naturalises the rule of a dominant group, it is the generalisability, naturalness and acceptability of that field of power that interests me. The state as ‘the central bank of symbolic credit … guarantees and consecrates a certain state of affairs, a relationship of conformity between words and things, between discourse and reality’ through practices that authenticate and officially record events, thereby causing that ‘situation to undergo a genuine ontological promotion, a transmutation, a change of nature or essence’.7 In the case of the desaparecidos the forcible extraction of individuals was invested with symbolic meaning that legitimated the practice to the point that the disappearances, body after body, transpired without question. It depended on the permission of its citizens through their inaction or paralysis because, as is common with all magic tricks, it could not be performed without an audience.8 A disappearing body requires a witness. A disappearing body performs one task: to put on display the conjuror’s artistry in playing with words, refracting light and confusing our senses. His skill lies not in the ability to disintegrate particles but in inducing a temporary moratorium of the belief that no one has this power. In effect, the magic act is a contract between conjuror and watcher that a falseness will take place and that our faculties of comprehension will be confounded. Once the trick is complete we are left with only a niggling trace of a doubt that we were indeed deceived. Trust in our cognitive perceptions is never actually diminished since assimilation into the trick logic involves a complicated othering of rationality in a time-defined and space-confined event, after which order is restored. The suspension of ordinary time and space exemplifies what Giorgio Agamben terms a ‘state of exception’.9 Such a state installs a regime that functions similarly to the power invested in a magic trickster. The magic in which the watcher is enveloped is the logic of the ‘trick’ as ‘emergency’. In both, normal (cognitive) operations are held in abeyance and the extraordinary is allowed to happen. The systematic acts of arrest in Argentina took place openly, often occurring as people were going through their daily routines at work or at home, and conducted by plainclothed officers. As Emilio Crenzel writes, most of these people: were taken to illegal prisons – known as clandestine detention centers and located primarily in military or police facilities – where

184  Sonia M. Tascón they were tortured and, for the most part, killed. Their bodies were then buried in unmarked graves, incinerated, or thrown into the sea. The state denied any responsibility in the disappearances when it was confronted with denunciations brought by the human rights organizations.10 The disappearance of bodies is no easy feat and requires the collusion of a great number of people, institutions and bureaucratic machinery. Diana Taylor offers percepticide as an explanation for the consent of the wider population, the disappearances as terrifying spectacles that ‘forced people to look away’11: The military spectacle made people pull back in fear, denial, and tacit complicity from the show of force. Therein lay its power. The military violence could have been relatively invisible, as the term disappearance suggests. The fact that it wasn’t indicates that the population as a whole was the intended target, positioned by means of the spectacle.… To see without being able to do disempowers absolutely. But to see without the possibility of admitting that one is seeing further turns the violence on oneself. Percepticide blinds, maims, kills through the senses.12 I would argue that both cases – seeing without doing, seeing without admitting to the very act of witnessing – were in place simultaneously. A bond forged in fear was created between the military and the national citizenship, premised on a belief that this was a time-out-of-time, a moment of magic. Observing the removal of bodies was enabled by the chant of the por algo será (‘it must have been for a reason’). The phrase emerged in the public imaginary as a means of placating those who used it while implicating them. It became a type of exorcism which reinforced the horror with its incomprehensibility. The phrase explained all by explaining a nothing, a ‘must have been’. The desaparecidos were dematerialised so completely that when some of their corpses washed up on beaches, this ‘something’ suggested no-thing, no-body had been found.13 Their social disembowelment became part of the trick that had not ended and therefore did not demand the general populace respond on their behalf. It was rendered an exceptional thing beyond the reach of ordinariness, a state that could/would be restored at any moment. The exemption of ethical responsibility was akin to the belief that the bodies were simply out of view, inaccessible to our senses. The desaparecidos’ apparent extraction signalled an obvious deception while the chant punctuated its incomprehensibility. To disappear is to defer corporeal presence rather than to categorically not-be. To disavow the removal of a body is a double denial of responsibility: the repudiation of the removal, and of responsibility itself. In this situation the body is

From Spectres of Horror to ‘The Beautiful Death’  185 regarded as merely not presently there, yet does not (and cannot) make a claim. It is a peculiar form of disowning that is characterised by an existence in limbo, in a kind of ethical no-man’s land in common with the asylum seeker in detention.14 This liminal state of being could only be reversed through acknowledging the disappeared as being either in life or in death. Recollection of the dead, Søren Kierkegaard argues, is the purest, most unselfish work of love.15 As he states, ‘if you want to test if you love freely, just watch how over a period of time you relate yourself to one who is dead’.16 Remembering re-fleshes those who are no longer there. While Kierkegaard posits memory of the deceased as a work of love, for Johann Baptist Metz it is a necessary aspect of a communal bond that recollects past actions in order to prevent their recurrence. As Metz comments, ‘a solidarity in memory with the dead … breaks the grip of history as a history of triumph and conquest’.17 It was not until the political acts of love of the Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (hereon in referred to collectively as ‘Madres’) that the desaparecidos were severed from the state’s magic trick and the grip of a tyrannical history. Grounded in intimate unions, the Madres’ actions were more than private acts as they confronted an entire country with absent presences.

‘The Beautiful Death’: The Madres’ Politics of Embodied Love The work of the Madres commenced in 1977 in the early days of the dictatorship. A group of women – mothers of the desaparecidos – ­organically and with little organised intent came together to appeal to the authorities for information about their missing children. As their requests were ignored they decided to regularly convene in a central Buenos Aires plaza, Plaza de Mayo, which had been a site of political significance since the May Revolution of 1810 in the process of independence from Spain. The plaza’s location in the city gave the women’s actions visibility and brought them in contact with large numbers of people as it is a highly frequented space. The women congregated once a week at Plaza de Mayo and circled its perimeter silently in pairs for several hours, holding photographs of their disappeared offspring and wearing a triangle of white cloth on their heads to symbolise childhood (a nappy). Their maternal roles as mothers and grandmothers, revered in most Latin American cultures, protected them from open retaliation and their non-violent approach initially immunised them as their actions were not deemed insurrectionary and threatening.18 Their activism intentionally excluded men in order to draw attention to themselves as women who had suffered familial loss. The Madres’ actions in the Plaza did eventually draw the attention of the military. A number of them were arrested in 1977 and 1978,

186  Sonia M. Tascón including one of the leaders Azucena Villaflor, all of whose bodies were later found washed up on beaches.19 Around the same time their cause was gaining recognition in the international community by way of high-profile events, such as the 1978 Football World Cup held in Buenos Aires, and the aid of activist groups. For example, in the Netherlands the Support Group for the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Argentina (SAAM) formed specifically to raise awareness and provide funding to support them, an initiative that grew to include other European countries.20 In 1979, A ­ mnesty International invited the Madres to travel as their guests to nine countries in Europe and the United States to speak about their situation in Argentina. As Hebe de Bonafini, one of the founders of the Association of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, said, without inter­ national aid ‘I’m not sure we would have been able to go on, as we were three years without a place to meet’. 21 Meghan Gibbons mentions that the funding provided by SAAM and the Amnesty invitations enabled the Madres to approach ‘heads of state, the pope, the United N ­ ations, the Organization of American States – anyone who would receive them’. 22 The Madres’ early use of human rights language strategically positioned their cause, emphasising how their embodied love was deeply political. The human rights discourse gained currency during the time of the Madres’ activism and is an association that has continued to the present day. It was a major element in reclaiming the desaparecidos for the nation, both in memory and body. While the body is the site of the performance of the magic trick, so too is it the site of its undoing. In countering the paralysis induced by percepticide and the magic trick, the Madres’ actions were part of a ‘corporeal politics’ that recognises the body not simply as ‘a mediator of social relationships … a kind of mute anchor of intentions, actions, desires, and projects’ but as shaping and circumscribing social relations.23 This differs slightly from the Foucauldian conceptualisation of biopolitics in which a body is ‘directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’.24 Here the body is submerged by power that restricts creativity and subversion. ­Although there can be no refuting that bodies exist in a historically contingent set of circumstances which always already reduce their capacity for agency, they (re)act to change these conditions. They present a formidable encounter in the flesh, a vessel that forces and opposes its submission. Material beings leave traces. Where there is no somatic presence they reside in the memory of those living, or as tentative, inexact questions that disturb the collective order. The desaparecidos left in their wake a horror that originated from the inescapable fact that what was transpiring was not mysterious. The situation required bodies to replace them, to retrace them from horror to human being within a network of loving and loved relationships. Standing in for those that had been disappeared,

From Spectres of Horror to ‘The Beautiful Death’  187 the Madres’ own flesh re-presented the victims to a nation under the spell of magic. These risky embodied presences connected to the desaparecidos and to all others who did not own them. Because bodies matter, the traces they become matter. The reference point of a spectre is, after all, always corporeality; bodies made absent and those they haunt in order to claim an existence, ‘for it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition’. 25 The Madres performed their loved ones’ absences as presences of their bodies. One of the most distinctive practices was to hold large photographs of the missing against themselves, usually at chest level. These two-dimensional models were given ‘flesh’ and three-dimensionality through maternal bodies from which they came and were now being represented through. The children’s mediated faces were crystallised expressions of their being, a question held up for others in material form and unquestionable in their searing gazes. Laurent Herbiet’s film Mon Colonel (The Colonel), ostensibly about the Algerian War of Independence of the 1950s but also alluding to the possibility of disappearing people under recent international ‘terrorism laws’, directly references the Madres.26 In a final scene, the father (Charles Aznavour) of the protagonist murdered for his idealism accosts a commanding officer for information about Rossi’s (Robinson Stévenin) death. 27 Significantly, the father positions a photo of his son at chest level as he faces Duplan ­(Olivier Gourmet); an action that had already become identified with the Madres of Argentina. Through this gesture the film collapses time – the Madres not yet having happened historically and the ‘war on terror’ even further away – unshackling it from its linear fetters to connect a past and a present, and many points in between. It is a reminder of the spectres that linger among us, owed responsibility not yet fully granted. Another ritual of the Madres was to call out the individual names of the desaparecidos after which a united reply would be given. A response of presente (‘present’) mirrored a classroom roll call. The repetition summons the person named, in death, and relocates them among the community of the living. Countering the por algo será, they are given substance by their social recognition. To speak someone’s name is to call them forth and attest to the legitimacy of their presence. Yet this was undesirable for many who regarded the Madres’ efforts as that of ‘the crazy mothers who were looking for people who were nowhere’. 28 For that reason the Madres’ invocation of the unwanted was intrinsic hospitality as Derrida considers it: The absolute arrivant must not be merely an invited guest, someone I’m prepared to welcome, whom I have the ability to welcome. It must be someone whose unexpected, unforeseeable arrival, whose visitation – and here I’m opposing visitation to invitation – is such an irruption that I’m not prepared to receive the person.29

188  Sonia M. Tascón In that unexpectedness lies true hospitality, as unattainable as it always is. The invocation was for the ‘nowhere’ beings to arrive unannounced and be received. The women attempted to interrupt the magic trick so that ‘the work of love recollecting the one dead’ could begin.30 In this regard they sought for the desaparecidos what Jean-François Lyotard describes as ‘the beauti­ful death’.31 This death is permitted because the state regulates the excess produced, ‘not by prohibiting rites of mourning altogether but by controlling, converting, or transforming these rites, or … sublating them into the beautiful death, or, indeed, into a philosophical death’.32 The beautiful death, then, becomes that which occurs ‘for a reason’ and can be situated within wider networks of meaning. Although regulated and assisted by the state in order to avert a descent into chaos, importantly it is a magic that enfolds and welcomes within rather than excludes and exiles.33 As Derrida writes: What Lyotard calls “the beautiful death” or the “magical death” is the one that gets meaning.… This death has meaning because it is preferable; and since it is preferable, it is … as if it did not take place and thus can do without mourning.34 ‘Doing without mourning’ is the mechanism whereby the dead live, ‘the exchange of the finite for the infinite … the Die in order not to die’.35 When the death is outside the bounds of the state’s sanctions, as occurs in Lyotard’s example with criminals, the beautiful death and the possibility of memorialisation are refused. The Madres’ gift of death to the desaparecidos was to allocate them a space in the national imagination that signified their welcome, acknowledgement and acceptance. Although many of their bodies were never located and many others lie in unmarked graves, there are now numerous cultural events that sustain the desaparecidos in (our) life and (their) death. The work of love of the Madres has contributed significantly to this, and I now turn to two films as examples of ongoing collective memorialisation.

Re-membering Through Cinema During the oppressive rule Argentina’s national cinema had been decimated largely for political reasons. After 1983, film became a primary means for the dissemination of the socio-historical meanings of the desaparecidos. The narratives form a continuous link between an unspeakable past that needed telling and more recent recollections that critically examine aspects of that history. Luis Puenzo’s La Historia O ­ ficial (The Official Story) was the first motion picture to emerge from the dictatorship and received international acclaim, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1986.36 La Historia Oficial

From Spectres of Horror to ‘The Beautiful Death’  189 commenced production in 1983 but due to threats was halted, then shot clandestinely before being released two years later. It addresses the tragic repercussions of the country’s Dirty War through the genre of a family drama set in Buenos Aires in the 1980s with the military regime in its final throes. The protagonist is a history teacher named Alicia (Norma Aleandro) who embarks on a personal quest to uncover the parentage of her adopted daughter. Belonging to a privileged class disconnected from the suffering of the country’s political dissidents, once she emerges from her ‘obligatory amnesia’ (and there are many instances when her reactions imply that she had suspected but had not admitted) Alicia is compelled to research her daughter’s background. She discovers that Gaby (Analia Castro) was one of the many children born to pregnant women who were disappeared, and handed over to prominent business and military officials. Her husband Roberto (Héctor Alterio), a government agent, is complicit in that knowledge and attempts to keep it from her. La Historia Oficial climaxes with Roberto’s vicious assault of Alicia that mirrors the torture of Gaby’s biological parents. The quiet complacency that turns to latent violence and then real violence in the scene shifts from a portrait of the idyllic family/nation to a confrontation with a past that compels one to look not away but at the consequences of institutionalised brutality. Alicia’s atonement is finally achieved when she meets Gaby’s maternal grandmother, Sara (Chela Ruíz), and returns the child to her rightful family. Much of La Historia Oficial’s strength lies in the straight denunciation of Argentina’s immediate past in which it alludes to the actions and

Figure 11.1  Spectres of violence: Alicia (Norma Aleandro) and Roberto ­(Héctor Alterio) in La Historia Oficial (The Official Story). © Historias/ Progress and The Kobal Collection, 1985

190  Sonia M. Tascón human rights discourse employed by the Madres. In the opening scene Alicia is conducting a class and one of the first words heard is ‘presente’ as she calls out the roll. The word derechos, which in Spanish is both ‘law’ and ‘rights’, frequently appears throughout the narrative and invokes a language that has become almost exclusively associated with the dictatorship and the desaparecidos. As an allegorical film the adoptive mother personifies a nation in a state of amnesia coming to terms with its history. In this sense La Historia Oficial endeavours to forgive a nation that witnessed unassailable crimes and had predominantly explained them away with the por algo será. As a result it has attracted some criticism for its supposed subdued condemnation.37 However, its personalised politics need to be read in the context of its production and reception. La Historia Oficial was produced and released when reports such as Nunca Más (Never Again) had just disclosed the full extent of the crimes committed by the military junta, and during which time the generals were still free to wield political influence. It entered a society burdened with guilt, exhaustion and trepidation that these events could reoccur. Furthermore, combative revolutionary politics were being delegitimised globally and neoliberal politics of ‘the private’ were on the ascendance.38 The film, as well as others that followed, aligned less with ‘conventional political film, appealing instead to a kind of “unveiling”’.39 Even one of the more aggressive films censuring the dictatorship, La Noche de los Lapíces (The Night of the Pencils), explores individual trauma rather than state terrorism as a solely socio-political issue.40 It can be argued that the approach taken by the filmmakers resonated with the indirect, non-militant activism of the Madres. La Historia Oficial was important domestically and internationally because it opened the floodgates to discussions that until then had been disabled. While La Historia Oficial and other films produced around the same period tended to convey similar themes of the injustices of state against citizen, more contemporary ones have taken steps to explore the complexities surrounding truth, history and memory of Argentina’s difficult past. Los Rubios (The Blondes) was produced almost twenty years after the country’s restoration of democracy but is indicative of the legacy of trauma and the gradually more nuanced discussions of events.41 Los Rubios tells the tragedy of the desaparecidos through the eyes of one of their offspring. Director Albertina Carri’s parents were disappeared in 1977 when she was three years old. She initiates the story by asking: ‘Why did you choose to leave me behind living?’ While the documentary is a self-reflection on this haunting, unanswerable question, moreover it is a treatment on truth. Carri appears on screen as two separate people: filmmaker and daughter represented by an actor. She is ostensibly piecing together the events that led to her parents’ arrest and disappearance, but all she has are fragments of others’ accounts. Los Rubios employs a

From Spectres of Horror to ‘The Beautiful Death’  191 diversity of narrative strategies to forward Carri’s argument that truth is always partial and positioned. It is conveyed through multiple perspectives that include Carri herself as a child, friends and colleagues of her parents, and siblings whose words she retells. This creates an intentional confusion to highlight her own during her childhood – not understanding the reason for her parents’ absence and wishing repetitively for them to come home, particularly for her birthday. Truth as an uncertain landscape styles the film. The secondhand nature of stories is exposed as Carri hands over her ‘part’ in the film to an actress so that her identity is split. In a voiceover she states: ‘All I have is a diffuse memory contaminated by all these versions. I think that with every attempt to get closer to the truth I end up becoming more distant’.42 As Carri makes clear, her parents exist only as stories told by others. They are spectres hovering over her present. But it is Carri’s life that is on hold now. Los Rubios was made when there was a marked increase in first-­ person reflexive documentaries which ‘began to ask hard questions about the motivation that drove their parents’ political activism. Most children agreed with the ideology, but question why their parents preferred militarism over safe family life’.43 This shift was prompted by the children of the desaparecidos growing up and subsequently challenging their parents’ decisions to deploy methods that put themselves and their families at risk.44 This is a phase that begins to undermine the certitudes represented by films like La Historia Oficial, which had tried to counter the dictatorship’s silencing of ‘the subversives’. As Pablo Piedras asserts, ‘[i]n these last documentary films, the doubts, questions and tentative propositions about Argentine history replace the speeches of certainty displayed by documentary films of the nineties’.45 While Joanna Page sees in this trend a corrective to the construction of the left-wing acti­ vists and militants as without blemish, they nevertheless force us ‘to see the symmetries of violence at both ends of the political spectrum’.46 For Page, the political can function as a filter through which violence may be experienced on varying levels. Los Rubios represents a stage in ­A rgentine society, and by extension its national cinema, willing to question the knowability of its past. Its uncertainties, however, do not translate into the need to forget. The dictatorship and the desaparecidos have not disappeared. Instead, they have remained to generate different sorts of questions and meditations on history.

Coda The desaparecidos of Argentina during the 1976–1983 dictatorship were people that were given the status of ‘no-body’ in ‘nowhere’. When their disappearances required explanation there was none, only a vague sense that these were extraordinary times and that the state knew best. In this sense Mon Colonel was accurate, these are configurations that can and

192  Sonia M. Tascón have reoccurred. The disappearances transformed into spectres of horror, representatives of a percepticide of which anyone could become a part. It was the courageous actions of the Madres and Abuelas that invited the nation to be visited by these spectres as beautiful in death, full members of that community once again. They would pave the way for collective welcome and commemoration beyond the perimeter of Plaza de Mayo. The haunting representations of the desaparecidos, whether in quiet marches or dramatic and at times conflicting images in cinema, are part of an ongoing duty to not forget and to seek justice for: certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us.… No justice … seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.47 The Madres resisted the state’s efforts to repudiate their missing loved ones but more generally brought into focus the responsibility of human beings to act for one another, whether they be present or dead. Love for others, the work of love for humanity, does not end with the physical vanishing of a body but is intensified. The measure of love is recollecting one dead, as Kierkegaard said, and it is a justice, as Derrida believed. And as Hebe de Bonafini and her cohorts did, circling the Plaza ­anti-clockwise, they were turning back time and signalling to us that those of the past, the present and the future deserve justice, responsibility, remembrance and our embodied actions.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), xviii. 2 CONADEP, Nunca Más (Never Again), Report of CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) – 1984 (Buenos Aires: ­E ditorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1984), accessed 13 January 2014, . 3 CONADEP reported nine thousand people but others have disputed this, including human rights organisations such as Amnesty International. 4 The Madres were the first group to meet at the Plaza. Later another group, grandmothers claiming the children born to their offspring in prison and ‘adopted’ without consent, also came to meet at the Plaza. 5 Pierre Bourdieu, State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power ­(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996 [1989]), xviii. 6 Bridget Fowler, ‘On Fetishism, Ghosts and State Magic: The ­C ommunist Manifesto, Derrida’s The Spectres of Marx and Bourdieu’s The State ­Nobility’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 203. 7 Bourdieu, State Nobility, 376.

From Spectres of Horror to ‘The Beautiful Death’  193 8 Hugo Quiroga suggests that some form of consent by the wider population was crucial. Hugo Quiroga, El tiempo del ‘proceso’: conflictos y coincidencias entre políticos y militares, 1976–1983 (Rosario: Editorial Fundacion Ross, 2004), 37. 9 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1. 10 Emilio Crenzel, Memory of the Argentina Disappearances: The ­Political History of ‘Nunca Más’, trans. Laura Pérez Carrara (New York and A ­ bingdon: Routledge, 2011), 8. 11 Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 122. 12 Ibid., 123–124. 13 These disappearances had involved detainees who, after being tortured, were drugged and carried into airplanes from which they were dropped into the ocean while still alive. Vladimir Hernandez, ‘Painful Search for Argentina’s Disappeared’, BBC News Latin America and Caribbean (24 March 2013), accessed 13 February 2014, . 14 Sonia M. Tascón, ‘Australia’s New Other: Shaping Compassion for Onshore Refugees’, Journal of Australian Studies 27, no. 77 (2003): 5–14. 15 Søren Kierkegaard, ‘The Work of Love in Recollecting One Who is Dead’, in The Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 346. 16 Ibid., 353. 17 Johann Baptist Metz cited in Louise Carroll Keeley, ‘Loving “No One”, Loving Everyone: The Work of Love in Recollecting One Dead, in Kierkegaard’s Work of Love’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Works of Love, Vol. 16, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), 245. 18 Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The M ­ others of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 244; Meghan Gibbons, ‘Political Motherhood in the United States and ­A rgentina’, in Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse, ed. Jocelyn Fenton Stitt and Regeen Reichert P ­ owell ­(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 253–277. 19 The National Security Archive, ‘US Declassified Documents: Argentine Junta Security Forces Killed, Disappeared Activists, Mothers and Nuns’ (8  December 2002), accessed 13 February 2014, . 20 Gibbons, ‘Political Motherhood in the United States and Argentina’, 258. 21 Luis Iramaín and Gerardo Nielsen, ‘Entrevista a la Presidenta de la Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo’, Página Digital (12 February 2002), accessed 20 February 2014, . 22 Gibbons, ‘Political Motherhood in the United States and Argentina’, 268. 23 Rodrigo Parrini, ‘Bodyscapes: Globalization, Corporeal Politics, and Violence in Mexico’, Social Text 28, no. 3/104 (2010): 70. 24 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 25–26. 25 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 5. 26 Mon Colonel (The Colonel), dir. Laurent Herbiet (France: KG Productions, 1986). 27 The protagonist Rossi is an idealist lawyer who enlists in the French army and is posted to Algeria. He is eventually killed and no explanation is ever given to his family as to how or why.

194  Sonia M. Tascón 28 Ministerio de Educación, ‘El Surgimiento de la Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo’ (n.d.), accessed 20 February 2014, . 29 Jacques Derrida, ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, trans. Gila Walker, Critical Enquiry 33, no. 2 (2007): 451. 30 Keeley, ‘Loving “No One”, Loving Everyone’, 211. 31 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 153. 32 Michael Naas, Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 173. 33 Lyotard, The Differend, 153, 157. 34 Jacques Derrida, ‘Lyotard and Us’, in Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak and Ken Still (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 20. 35 Lyotard, The Differend, 100. 36 La Historia Oficial (The Official Story), dir. Luis Puenzo (Buenos Aires: Historias Cinematograficas Cinemania, 1985). 37 Clara Kriger, for example, comments that the film ‘lacks a radical voice. It  does not make a social denunciation because it is not directly focussed on the victims … Neither does it contain proposals for the future’. Clara Kriger, ‘La Historia Oficial/The Official Story’, in The Cinema of Latin ­A merica, ed. Alberto Elena and Marina Díaz López (London and New York: ­Wallflower Press, 2003), 181. 38 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 39 Kriger, ‘La Historia Oficial/The Official Story’, 181. 40 La Noche de los Lapíces (The Night of the Pencils), dir. Héctor Olivera (Buenos Aires: Aries Cinematográfica Argentina, 1986). 41 Los Rubios (The Blondes), dir. Albertina Carri (Buenos Aires: Primer Plano Film Group, 2003). 42 My own translation of original Spanish dialogue in the film. 43 Jacob Edelstein, ‘Conversation with Pablo Piedras and Javier Campos’, Learning Cluster: Argentina 2012 (January 2012), accessed 29 January 2014, . 4 4 Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 176. 45 Pablo Piedras, ‘Considerations on the Appearance of the First Person in Contemporary Argentine Documentary’, Hispanet (3 December 2010): 22, accessed 20 February 2014, . 46 Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 162. 47 Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii.

List of Contributors

Elly Bavidge is Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Academic Advisor for Study Abroad and Erasmus students at Kingston University, UK. Her research interests include memory and popular culture. She has published work in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, The Philo­sopher and The Journal of War and Culture Studies. Christopher Collier is completing a doctorate in the School of Philo­ sophy and Art History at the University of Essex, UK. His research examines the re-emergence of psychogeography during the 1990s, and he has published several articles and chapters on the topic. Lisa Hill is a Researcher at the University of Bristol, UK. Her work can be found in publications such as cultural geographies journal, Risk Assessment and Uncertainty for Natural Hazards and Reanimating Industrial Spaces. Alison Landsberg is Professor of History/Art History and Cultural ­Studies at George Mason University, USA. She is the author of Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge and Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Her research on film and television has focused on the modes of engagement they solicit from individuals and the possibilities therein for the production and acquisition of empathy, memory and historical knowledge in the public sphere. Christina Lee is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Australia. Her areas of research include cultural memory, spaces of imagination and spectrality, fandom and popular culture. She is the author of Screening Generation X: The Politics and Popular Memory of Youth in Contemporary Cinema, and the editor of Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema. Liz Millward is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Her research is in the area of transportation and mobility history. She is the author of Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922–1937, and her work can be found in

196  List of Contributors publications including Australian Feminist Studies, Journal of Transport History and Mobility in History. László Munteán is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and ­A merican Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the ­Netherlands. His research revolves around the juncture of literature, visual ­culture and cultural memory. He is the co-editor of Landscapes of M ­ onstrosity (with Hans Christian) and Materializing Memory in Art and ­Popular Culture (with Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik). Pippa Tandy is a teacher, writer and photographer who lives in Victoria, Australia. Her book Alice Street: Images and Memories, published by Brown Art in 2015, was based on her six-month sojourn in an empty house. Her essays can be found in the 2014 and 2016 volumes of Deep Ends: The J. G. Ballard Anthology (edited by Rick McGrath). Pippa’s next book project is on nocturnes. Sonia M. Tascón is Lecturer in Social Work at Western Sydney U ­ niversity, Australia. She is the author of H ­ uman Rights Film F ­ estivals: ­Activism in Context, and her work can be found in ­publications such as ­Human Rights Quarterly, ­Whitening Race: ­E ssays in Social and Cultural ­Criticism and Ethics and Value ­Perspectives in Social Work. John Tulloch is Professor Emeritus at Charles Sturt University and ­Adjunct Professor at the University of Newcastle, both in New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of twenty books in the fields of Risk Sociology, Media, Communication, Film, Cultural, Literary and Performance Studies. His most recent publications Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (with Andrew Hoskins) and The Real-Sex Film: Risk, Intimacy and Cinema (with Belinda Middleweek) focus on notions of risk and interdisciplinarity. Daniel Cross Turner is Associate Professor of English at Coastal ­Carolina University, USA. His research focuses on theories of undeadness and the gothic, modes of cultural memory, object-oriented ontology and interactions between emergent media. He is the author of Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South. He is also the co-editor of Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in ­Southern Literature and Culture (with Eric Gary Anderson and Taylor ­Hagood) and the poetry anthology Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry (with William Wright).

Index

ABC News 138 absent presences 2–3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 20, 97, 166; Goldsworthy (WA) 51–66; Mirabel Airport 110, 112, 113, 114; photographs 136, 146; roadside memorials 86, 89–95; ‘disappeared, the’ (Argentina) 185, 187–8 Abu Ghraib prison 30 Adey, Peter 5, 104 Advisory Circle, The (musician) 167 affect 30, 58, 87; affective indexicality 134–6; concepts of 4–5, 109, 156; Joan the Woman 156–7; photography 126, 134, 136; Road, The 117, 118, 120, 126; Savage Messiah 173, 177 afterlife 59, 91, 117; rephotography 133, 138, 141, 147 Agamben, Giorgio 183 agency 4, 186; Goldsworthy 65; revolutionary 167, 171, 175; Road, The 118, 119, 129; roadside shrines 11, 91, 93, 94, 96; 7/7 terrorist attack (London, 2005) 9, 12, 21, 22, 29, 30, 36, 37 Ahakista (Ireland) 111 Ahmed, Sara 153, 155, 156 Air Canada 108 Air India Flight 182 111, 114; memorials 111, 114 airports: abandoned airports 105–7; airports and loss 103, 104, 105, 114; airports and modernity 103–5, 108, 110; Baltimore Washington International 107; Charles de Gaulle (Paris) 109; Chek Lap Kok (Hong Kong) 106; Croydon (London) 105–6, 107; Dallas-Fort-Worth International

109; Dorval (Montreal) 107–8, 112; Friendship International (Baltimore) 107; Heathrow (UK) 106, 113; Idlewild (NY) 104; James Armstrong Richardson International (Winnipeg) 112; John F. Kennedy (NY) 104, 109; Kai Tak (Hong Kong) 106, 107; Liverpool (UK) 104; Malton Airport (Toronto) 112; Mirabel (Montreal) see Mirabel International Airport (Montreal); Montréal-Dorval International 112; Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International 112; O’Hare (Chicago) 113; Pearson International (Toronto) 112, 113; Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam) 113; Schönefeld (Berlin) 106; Stevenson Field (Winnipeg) 112; Tegel (Berlin) 106; Tempelhof (Berlin) 106, 112; Toronto International 112; Washington Dulles International 107, 108, 109; Winnipeg International 112 Aldgate bombing see 7/7 terrorist attack (London, 2005) Aleandro, Norma 189 Algerian War (1950s) 187 Alice Street house 10, 40–9 Alterio, Héctor 189 amnesia 5, 11, 60, 65, 87, 90, 96, 97, 189, 190 Amnesty International 186 anarchism 170, 171, 174 Ang, Ien 52 anima 57, 138 architecture 3, 12, 13, 104; Savage Messiah 165, 168, 171, 172, 173, 175, 178; undead see Road, The (novel)

198 Index archive: memorialisation, and 30–6, 40–1; photographic 41, 59, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147 Argentina (films) 13, 188–91; La Historia Oficial 188–90, 191; La Noche de los Lapíces 190; Los Rubios 190–1 Armbrust, Tony 64 Art Deco movement 77 Augé, Marc 103–4 Aznavour, Charles 187 Bachelard, Gaston 40, 41, 42, 44, 96, 146 Balodis, Eric 64 Baltimore Washington International Airport 107 Barthes, Roland 134–6, 137, 138 Batten, Jean 106 Baudelaire, Charles 87 Bauer, Christine 64 Bavidge, Elly 6, 11, 85–97, 195 Bazin, André 136 BBC radio 35 BBC television 28 Beacham, Jeff ‘Yammy’ 56 Bearman, James 79 Belbury Poly (musician) 167 Bell, Michael 51, 57, 63, 138 belonging 7, 22, 29, 94, 111, 119, 189; Goldsworthy 51, 60, 61, 63, 66; see also identity Beloved (novel) 7 Benjamin, Walter 87, 134, 135, 136, 137, 151, 162 Bennett, Jane 118, 129 Berardi, Franco 171 Berger, John 122 Berlin 106, 144, 145 Berlin Airlift (1948–49) 106 Berlin Wall 19 ‘Between Memory and History’ (essay) 40 Bey, Hakim 170 BHP Billiton 54 BHP Iron Ore 56 BHP Minerals 55 Black Rock Stakes (race) 51–2, 63, 65, 66; Flying Fleas team 51–2, 53, 63, 66 Blair, Tony 24–5, 28, 29, 30 Blaise, Clark 111 Blanchot, Maurice 119

Blanco, María del Pilar 2, 161 Bletchley Park (UK) 79 Blissett, Luther 170 Blitz Ghosts (photo collection) 144 Blondes, The (film) see Los Rubios (film) Blood Meridian (novel) 128 Bonafini, Hebe de 186, 192 Bourdieu, Pierre 183 Boyer, M. Christine 87 Boym, Svetlana 65, 143 Branswell, Brenda 108 Brexit (2016) 157 Bridgwater (UK) 73 Bridgwater and Taunton Canal 73 Bristol Channel (UK) 73, 74, 77, 81 Brown, Steven 28–9, 30 Bruce, Kathleen 78 Budapest (Hungary) 142, 143, 146 Bulger, James 96 Burial (musician) 167 Bush, George W. 30 Butler, Judith 21–3, 30, 32, 35, 36; ‘Tracking the Mechanisms of the Psychosocial’ 21 Cadbury Bros. Ltd (UK) 76, 77, 81 Camera Lucida (book) 134, 135 camera obscura 10, 41 Canadian Tragedy, A (report) 111 Canal Company (UK) 70, 73–4, 75, 76 Canary Wharf (London) 173 Cape Keraudren (WA) 61 capitalism 7, 114, 128, 161, 169, 173, 175, 176, 177; late capitalism 7, 120, 122, 125, 126, 167; neocapitalism 12, 19, 36, 178; post-capitalism 3 Carmody Groarke 26 Carri, Albertina 190–1 Cartographic Congress (2003) 172–3 Castro, Analia 189 cemeteries 88, 89, 92, 95, 159 Chaikin, Carly 159 Chapman, Jessica 96 Charles de Gaulle Airport (Paris) 109 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack (Paris, 2015) 1; memorial, and 1, 2, 3 Chartist demonstrations (Hyde Park) 28 Chechnya repression 30

Index  199 Chek Lap Kok Airport (Hong Kong) 106 Chicago Defender (newspaper) 155 Christmas Carol, A (film) 154–5 cinema see films Citizen, The (newspaper) 75 citizenship 119, 184 class war 6, 173 Class War (group) 170 Clover, Shawn 144 Cobham, Alan 106 Collier, Christopher 8, 12–13, 165–78, 195 Collins, Catherine 90–1 Colonel, The (film) 187 commemoration 9, 21, 59, 89 Condini Landing (WA) 61 connectivity studies 21, 36 corporeal politics 186 counter-monuments 29, 30, 36, 87, 144–5, 146 Crenzel, Emilio 183–4 Cresswell, Tim 11 Croydon Airport (London) 105–6, 107 Cullis, A. J. 70 Cyclone Amy (Aust, 1980) 60 Dallas-Fort-Worth International Airport 109 dark tourism 5 Davidson, Tonya 109 Davis, Colin 157 Dean, Mitchell 37 Dear Photograph (website) 138–41, 142, 143, 147 DeBauche, Leslie Midkiff 156 Debord, Guy 168 De Cauter, Lieven 97 De Certeau, Michel 2, 3 deconstruction 86, 170; Derrida, by see Specters of Marx (book) De Grey River (WA) 56, 61 Dehaene, Michiel 97 DeMille, Cecil B. 12, 150, 156; see also Joan the Woman (film) De Quincey, Thomas 173 Derrida, Jacques 4, 7, 13, 135, 187, 188, 192; hauntology, and see hauntology: Specters of Marx see Specters of Marx (book) desaparecidos see ‘disappeared, the’ (Argentina) Diana, Princess 96

Dickens, Charles 154 digital media 30, 31–2, 37, 153, 175; see also social media ‘disappeared, the’ (Argentina) 4, 7, 13, 182–92; absent presences 185, 187–8; beautiful death 185–8; disappearing bodies 183–5; human rights discourse 184, 186, 190; justice/injustice 183, 190, 192; Madres see Madres/Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Buenos Aires); percepticide 184, 186, 192; re-remembering through cinema see La Historia Oficial (film); Los Rubios (film); state magic 183–4, 186, 188; state nobility 183 disorder see world disorder documentaries 58, 146, 190–1; see also films Dorval Airport (Montreal) 107–8, 112 Doubleday, Portia 159 Duck, Leigh Anne 119–20 dyschronia 167, 172, 175, 176 dystopia 113, 124; see also utopia earthquake (San Francisco, 1906) 144 Edensor, Tim 43, 57, 105, 110, 112, 113 Edgware Road station (London) see 7/7 Memorial (Hyde Park) Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The (essay) 19 Eighty Mile Beach (WA) 61 Eisenman, Peter 145 Elephant and Castle district (London) 174–5 emergent media see digital media; social media Entrikin, J. Nicholas 58 Essex, Richard 170 ethics 35, 121, 124; ghosts, responsibility to 6, 7, 152, 156–7, 161–2, 183, 184; see also justice/ injustice Expo 67 (Montreal) 108, 109 Facebook 96 Faraday cage 175, 177 Farrar, Geraldine 150 filmmakers 153, 169, 190; Carri, Albertina 190–1; DeMille, Cecil B. see DeMille, Cecil B.; Keiller, Patrick 173; Marker, Chris 41;

200 Index Mélies, Georges 154; Reeve, Simon 58 films 12, 29, 144, 161; Argentine see Argentina (films); Christmas Carol, A 154–5; ghosts in see ghosts on screen; historical see Joan the Woman (film); horror in 152–3, 154, 156, 157; Joan the Woman 12, 150–1, 155–7; La Jetée 41; London 173 Finucane Island (WA) 51, 54, 55 Fisher, Mark 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 176, 177 Fong, Andrea 62 Fong, Eddie 62 Football World Cup (1978) 186 Forest of Dean (UK) 72, 81 Fortepan (archival website) 141, 143 Foucault, Michel 22; heterotopia, concept of see heterotopia; ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ 87 Frers, Lars 110, 112 Freud, Sigmund 7 Friendship International Airport (Baltimore) 107 Fukuyama, Francis 6, 166 Fuller, Buckminster 108 Gardner, Alexander 135 geist 57, 138 German Ideology, The (manuscripts) 176 GFC see Global Financial Crisis (GFC) ‘ghost of the collective’ 63 ghost towns 10, 56, 58, 108, 120 ghosts, ethical responsibility to 6, 7, 152, 156–7, 161–2, 183, 184 Ghosts of History (photo collection) 144 ghosts on screen 151–62; ghosts on film 153–7, 161–2; ghosts on television see Mr. Robot (TV series); intertemporality 12, 152, 157; Joan the Woman see Joan the Woman (film); justice/injustice 7, 152, 158; theorising spectral presences 151–3 Gibbons, Meghan 186 Gilroy, Paul 126–7 Gleneagles (Scotland) see G20 meeting/rallies (Gleneagles)

Global Financial Crisis (GFC) 6, 21, 28, 120, 157 globalisation 5, 11, 57, 103, 105, 107, 121, 126, 128, 158, 175 Gloucester (town, UK) 10, 70–82 Gloucester and Berkeley Canal 79 Gloucester and Dean Forest Railway Company 72 Gloucester and Sharpness Canal (UK) 10–11, 70–82; barges 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80–2; ‘Big Freeze’ (1963) 74; Canal Company 70, 73, 75, 76; Frampton-on-Severn 76–8; Gloucester Docks 71–4; Monk Meadow and Hemstead 74–5; Quedgeley and Hardwicke 75–6; Saul Junction 76; ships’ graveyard see Purton ships’ graveyard (UK); Slimbridge 78–9; Splatt Bridge 77, 78; tugs 74, 75, 76, 81; warehouses 71, 73–4 Gloucester Ferro-Concrete Shipbuilding Co. Ltd 75 GML see Goldsworthy Mining Limited (GML) gold rushes (Aust. 1850s) 52 Goldsworthy (WA) 10, 51–66; agency in 65; belonging 51, 60, 61, 63, 66; Black Rock Stakes see Black Rock Stakes (race); imperceptible hearth 52–9; loss 52, 57, 66; memorabilia 59–60; My Balloons Will Fly Over Goldsworthy 60; Our Babbling Brook 60; survey responses 54, 60–2, 64–5; traces and placemaking 52, 59–65 Goldsworthy Mining Limited (GML) 54, 55, 60 Gompertz, Peter 64 Gone with the Wind (novel) 126 Gordon, Alastair 104, 106 Gordon, Avery 7–8, 12, 59, 65, 151–3, 154, 160 Grace, Tina 61 Great Depression (1929–39) 120 Greenmount National Park (WA) 43 grief 8, 29; roadside shrines 85, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96; see also loss; mourners/mourning G20 meeting/rallies (Gleneagles) 24, 28, 29 Guardian, The (UK) 26, 78 Gulf War (1990–91) 170

Index  201 Gunning, Tom 153, 154 Gunthert, André 136 Hallam, Elizabeth 96 Hallett, Justice 31 Hamersley Range (WA) 54, 58 Hamlet (play) 6, 13, 119, 177 Hartmann, Mario 58 Hatherley, Owen 171 haunted/haunting places 2–6, 9, 10, 11, 56, 57, 65, 114, 140, 150, 151 hauntology 13, 165–8, 176, 178; spectres 166, 167, 173, 175, 176, 177 Heathrow Airport (UK) 106, 113 Herbiet, Laurent 187 heterotopia: Foucault’s concept of 87–9, 96–7; heterochrony 94; principles of 87–8, 89–95, 97; roadside shrines 11, 85–97; utopia, distinguished from 87 Heterotopia and the City (case studies) 97 Hetherington, Kevin 1, 8–9 Hill, Lisa 2, 10, 70–82, 195 Hirsch, Marianne 141 La Historia Oficial (film) 188–90, 191 Ho, Angela 64 Hockey, Jenny 96 Hold Everything Dear (essays) 122 Holmes, Brian 170–1 Holocaust memorials 145 Home, Stewart 169–70, 173 horror 12, 24, 33, 122, 124, 135; films, in 152–3, 154, 156, 157; ‘disappeared, the’ (Argentina) 13, 182–92 Hoskins, Andrew 20, 22, 28–9, 30, 31, 32, 37; see also Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (book) Hubert, Alyssa 61 Huis Clos (play) 126 humanism 117–18, 121, 122; see also posthumanism human rights discourse 184, 186, 190 Hunt, Murray 65 Huyssen, Andreas 5 hypermnesia 87 identity 7, 10; individual 92, 119, 125, 166, 177, 191; national 12, 52, 86, 121; politics 170; see also belonging

Idlewild Airport (NY) 104 Imperial Airways 106 industrial landscapes 13, 58, 62, 86, 105, 110, 112; Gloucester Canal see Gloucester and Sharpness Canal (UK) injustice see justice/injustice Instagram 136 internet 5, 141, 171 intertemporality 12, 152, 157 Iraq War 6, 24, 29, 30; Abu Ghraib prison 30; Sydney rally (2003) 20 Isle of Dogs (London) 172, 173 James, Anthony 79 James Armstrong Richardson International Airport (Winnipeg) 112 Jameson, Fredric 152, 162, 167, 169, 176 La Jetée (film) 41 Joan of Arc 150, 155, 161 Joan the Woman (film) 12, 150–1, 155–7; affect in 156–7 John F. Kennedy Airport (NY) 104, 109 Johnson, Amy 106 Jones, Taylor 12, 138, 139, 140, 141, 146; Dear Photograph see Dear Photograph (website) Jowell, Tessa 26 Jung, Carl 7 justice/injustice 7, 8; Coroner’s Inquest (7/7 terrorist attack) 9, 25, 31–2, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37; film, on 7, 152, 158; Mr. Robot 161, 162; ‘disappeared, the’ (Argentina) 183, 190, 192; see also ethics Kai Tak Airport (Hong Kong) 106, 107 Keiller, Patrick 173 Kember, Sarah 136 Kerényi, Zoltán 12, 141, 142–3, 144, 146; Window to the Past 141–3 Kermode, Frank 122 Khan, Mohammad Sidique 9, 23, 25, 31, 33, 34, 36 Kierkegaard, Søren 185, 192 Knoxville (Tennessee) 122, 127 Kovács, Katherine 154 k-punk (blog) 166

202 Index Lacan (Jacques) 22 Lachine (Montreal) 111 l’Allier, Jean-Paul 110–11 Landsberg, Alison, 4, 7, 12, 150–62, 195 landscapes 9, 57, 61, 70, 71, 74, 77, 109; decay and ruin 9, 11, 13, 70, 72, 77, 81, 105, 107, 110, 111, 112, 121, 122, 123, 127, 171; industrial see industrial landscapes; photography, and 136–7, 138, 144; roadside shrines 86, 87, 89, 91 language 20, 57, 60, 66, 92, 121, 124, 125, 129, 136; haunting, of 2, 56; human rights 184, 186, 190; Road, The 121, 124, 125, 129 Larenkov, Sergey 12, 144, 145, 146, 147; Link to the Past 144–6 LaRue, Monique 108 Latour, Lisa 108 Laurin, Suzanne 109–10, 114 Le Bon, Gustave 87 L’Échiquier de Mirabel (book) 110 Lee, Christina 1–13, 51–66, 195 Lee, Jason 56 Lee, Josephine 63 Lega Nord (political party) 171 Leningrad siege (WW II) 145 Letterist International (LI) 168, 172, 173 LI see Letterist International (LI) lieux de mémoire 40, 42, 86, 97 Lights Out for the Territory (book) 169 Limehouse district (London) 172, 173 Lin, Maya 144 Lindburgh, Charles 106 Lindt Café siege (Sydney, 2014) 29 Link to the Past (website) 144–6 Liquid City (book) 169 Liverpool Airport (UK) 104 Llanthony Secunda Priory (UK) 72 London (film) 173 London Blitz (WW II) 29, 144, 147 London Docklands Development Corporation 173 London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) 170, 172, 173, 175 London Tube terrorist attack see 7/7 terrorist attack (London, 2005) London Workers Group 169–70 Los Angeles Times (newspaper) 155

loss 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 42, 73, 79, 129, 178, 185; airports 103, 104, 105, 114; Goldsworthy 52, 57, 66; rephotography 140, 143, 145; roadside shrines 85, 92, 94, 95, 96; 7/7 terrorist attack 22, 26, 30; see also grief LPA see London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) Lyotard, Jean-François 188 Macbeth (play) 13, 177 Maclean’s (magazine) 108 Maddern, Jo Frances 5 Maddrell, Avril 89, 90–1, 92, 93 Madres/Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Buenos Aires) 13, 182–8, 190, 192; SAAM (Support Group) 186 Maid of Orleans see Joan of Arc; Joan the Woman (film) Malek, Rami 157, 159 Malton Airport (Toronto) 112 Manifesto of the Communist Party (book) 19 Marcuse (Herbert) 22 Marker, Chris 41 Martin Place siege (Sydney, 2014) 29; memorial, and 29 Marx, Karl 6, 19, 20, 21, 22, 28, 161, 176; Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The 19; German Ideology, The 176; Manifesto of the Communist Party 19; see also Specters of Marx (book) Marxism 19, 37, 152, 165 Massey, Doreen 174 Massumi, Brian 4 materiality 4, 13, 24, 41, 81, 89, 92, 129, 133, 138, 140, 146; vibrant 118, 119, 122 McCann, Madeleine 96 McCarthy, Cormac 11–12, 118–22, 123–5, 128–9; Blood Meridian (novel) 128; No Country for Old Men (novel) 121–2; Road, The see Road, The (novel) McCorry, Megan 60 McDermott, Marc 154–5 media 3, 22, 37; digital media 30, 31–2, 37, 96, 153, 157, 175; mainstream 24, 25, 30, 31–2, 33; mass media culture 36, 86, 91, 96; ‘mediation’ 9, 28, 57; mediatisation

Index  203 see mediatisation (7/7 terrorist attack); premediation 28, 29, 30–1; remediation 28, 30–1; social media 5, 6, 31, 96, 141, 177 mediated images 24–5 mediatisation (7/7 terrorist attack) 9, 21, 25, 33, 36, 37 Meilleur, Hubert 111 Mélies, Georges 154 memento mori 92, 123 memorabilia (Goldsworthy, WA) 59–60 memorialisation 92, 125, 144; archiving and memorialisation 30–6; collective see Argentina (films); Coroner’s Inquest (Law Courts) 9, 25, 31–2, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37; ghosts of memorialisation 32–3; roadside shrines see roadside shrines; 7/7 Memorial see 7/7 Memorial (Hyde Park); 7/7 terrorist attack 9, 23, 25 memorials: Air India Flight 182 111, 114; Charlie Hebdo site (Paris) 1, 2, 3; Holocaust 145; Martin Place siege (Sydney, 2014) 29; Road, The (novel) 123, 125; roadside see roadside shrines; 7/7 terrorist attack (London, 2005) 9, 25–30; Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington) 144–5; see also countermonuments; monuments memory: collective memory 29, 52, 86, 96, 122, 143, 188, 192; cultural 28; ‘culture of memory’ 5; heterotopias of memory 89–95; lieux de mémoire 40, 42, 86, 97; mediated 23, 25, 59; milieux de mémoire 40, 42, 86, 97; placing memory 86–9; sites of memory 40, 86, 88, 95, 111, 141, 144 memory studies 5, 8, 86, 97 Menezes, Jean Charles de 29 metropolis 106, 144 metro system (Montreal) 109 Metz, Johann Baptist 185 Meyer, Morgan 91 Midland Junction Railway Workshops (WA) 42 Midland Railway (UK) 72 milieux de mémoire 40, 42, 86, 97 Millward, Liz 8, 11, 103–14, 194–5 Milne, Peter 156

Mirabel International Airport (Montreal) 11, 103–14; abandoned airports 105–7; absent presences 110, 112, 113, 114; airports and modernity 103–5, 108, 110; failure of modernity 110–11; intrusions into the present 112–13; L’Échiquier de Mirabel 110 Mitchell, John 65 Mitchell, William J. 135 modernity 5, 11, 86, 87, 122, 126, 127; airports 103–5, 108, 110; architecture 165, 168, 171, 172, 173, 175; militant see Savage Messiah (zine/book); post-modernity 3, 5, 11, 97; supermodernity 104, 109, 113, 114 Monbiot, George 121 Mon Colonel (film) 187, 191 Monorail (Sydney) 113 Montréal-Dorval International Airport 112 Montréal-Mirabel (booklet) 109 Montreal-Mirabel International Airport see Mirabel International Airport (Montreal) Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport 112 monumentalisation see 7/7 Memorial (Hyde Park) monuments 5, 77, 95, 125, 144, 145, 177; counter-monuments 29, 30, 36, 144–5, 146; see also memorials; 7/7 Memorial (Hyde Park) Morrison, Toni 7 Mothers/Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo see Madres/Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Buenos Aires) Motion Picture News (trade paper) 156 Mount Goldsworthy (WA) 54, 63 mourners/mourning 6, 42, 117, 139, 165, 176, 178, 188; roadside shrines 90, 91, 94, 95, 96; see also grief Mozakka, Saba 26 Mr. Robot (TV series) 12, 150, 151, 157–62; justice/injustice 161, 162 Mukherjee, Bharati 111 multiculturalism 86, 110, 121 Mulyie Pool (WA) 61 Munteán, László 2–3, 12, 133–46, 196

204 Index My Balloons Will Fly Over Goldsworthy (anthology) 60 Myers, Fred R. 61 National Front (political party) 174 neocapitalism 12, 19, 36, 178 Neoism 169 neoliberalism 6, 8, 13, 19, 20–1, 22, 28, 36, 37, 190; neoliberal city 165, 167–8, 169, 172, 174, 177, 178 Never Again (report) 190 Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) 85, 90, 95 Newman (WA) 54 new media see digital media; social media Newton, Peter 54 New York Times, The (newspaper) 108 Night of the Pencils, The (film) 190 9/11 terrorist attack (NY, 2001) 33, 35 La Noche de los Lapíces (film) 190 No Country for Old Men (novel) 121–2 non-human 117–18, 121, 129 non-places 103–4 Nora, Pierre 40, 41, 86, 97; ‘Between Memory and History’ 40 nostalgia 64, 65, 107, 133, 142, 143, 144, 167; nationalistic 175; ‘nostalgia mode’ 167; reflective 65, 143; restorative 65 nuclear weapons 20, 35 Nunca Más (report) 190 objecthood 117, 126, 128; thingness, distinguished from 117 object matter 118 occult 169, 170, 173, 175 Occupy Movement 157 Official Story, The (film) see La Historia Oficial (film) ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ (essay) 87 O’Hare Airport (Chicago) 113 Oldfield Ford, Laura 12–13, 165–8, 171–7, 178; Savage Messiah see Savage Messiah (zine/book) ‘Old Mansion’ (poem) 126 Olympic Stadium (Montreal) 108 One Day in July: Experiencing 7/7 (book) 25 Opie, Alexandra 91 Ottawa (Canada) 111 Our Babbling Brook (anthology) 60

Page, Joanna 191 Paine, Lewis 135 Paraburdoo (WA) 54 paramnesia 87 Park, Anne Marie 57 Park, Ondine 109 Pearson International Airport (Toronto) 112, 113 Peeren, Esther 2, 161 Peirce, Charles Sanders 134, 135 percepticide 184, 186, 192 phantasm/phantasmagoria 2, 22, 36, 71, 111, 151, 153–4, 156 phantoms 45, 74, 111, 152, 153, 175; collective 171, 175, 176, 178; phantom states 20, 174 philosophy 20, 117 photography 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9–10, 12, 133, 187; affect in 126, 134, 136; Alice Street house 40–9; Barthes, Roland 134–6, 137, 138; digital 135–6, 139; punctum 134–5, 136; 7/7 terrorist attack (London, 2005) 24–5, 28, 30; spirit photographs 136, 153; studium 134–5; see also rephotography Photoshop 136 Piedras, Pablo 191 Pilbara region (WA) 51, 54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 62 Pile, Steve 58 Pintupi people (WA) 61 place: life of place 136–8; memory, and 2, 87; non-places 103–4; sense of 61, 71, 137; space, distinguished from 137 placelessness 11, 85, 96 place-making: Goldsworthy (WA) see Goldsworthy (WA); rephotography 138, 143 Port Hedland (WA) 51, 54, 55 post-apocalypse 3; Road, The see Road, The (novel) post-capitalism 3 posthuman 117, 119, 124, 128, 129 posthumanism 117–18, 119, 124, 128, 129; see also humanism post-industrialisation 3, 10, 71, 86 post-modernity 3, 5, 11, 97 post-traumatic stress disorder 3, 4, 23, 62, 117 premediation 28, 29, 30–1 presence: absent see absent presences; pure 166, 175, 176, 177; undead see Road, The (novel)

Index  205 Proust, Marcel 87, 96 psychogeography 5, 13, 165–78; hauntology 13, 165–8, 176, 178; London Psychogeographical Association 170, 172, 173, 175; Oldfield Ford’s hauntological psychogeography 171–7; re-emergence of 168–71; Savage Messiah see Savage Messiah (zine/ book); spectres 166, 167, 173, 175, 176, 177 Puenzo, Luis 188 punctum (photography) 134–5, 136 Purton ships’ graveyard (UK) 10–11, 79–82; Dispatch 81–2; Dursley 80–1; New Dispatch 81, 82; Severn Collier 81–2 Putin, Vladimir 30 Quealy, Kerry 60 Quebec (Canada) 108, 109, 110, 114 Ransom, John Crowe 126 Read, Peter 52 Reagan (Ronald) 37 Reeve, Simon 58 Reid, Wallace 150 remediation 28, 30–1 rephotography 2–3, 12, 133–47; affective indexicality 134–6, 154; afterlife 133, 138, 141, 147; Blitz Ghosts 144; counter-monuments 29, 30, 36, 144–5, 146; Dear Photograph 138–41, 142, 143, 147; Ghosts of History 144; landscapes 136–7, 138, 144; life of place 136–8; Link to the Past 144–6; loss 140, 143, 145; place-making 138, 143; spectres 135, 136, 138; time-bridges 138, 142, 144; Window to the Past 141–3 Reuben, Gloria 160 revenants 6, 20, 71, 118, 151, 160; see also spectres; spirits revolution 76, 162, 167, 168, 170, 171, 190; economic 12, 151, 161; social 151, 177 Reynolds, Jack 20 Reynolds, Simon 166 Richardson, Nancy 65 Rimbaud, Arthur 173, 174 Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (book) 20–1, 31 risk theory 9, 21, 30, 36, 37

rites 88, 117, 188 rituals 10, 11, 21, 29, 44, 45, 59, 63, 88, 90, 91, 92, 139, 141, 173, 187; roadside shrines 88, 90, 91, 92 River Parratt (UK) 73 River Severn (UK) 10, 70–82 Roach, Joseph 94 Road, The (novel) 3, 8, 11–12, 117–29; affect in 117, 118, 120, 126; agency in 118, 119, 129; ends of things 128–9; humanism 117–18, 121, 122; memorials 123, 125; non-human in 117–18, 121, 129; objecthood 117, 126, 128; object matter 118; post-apocalypse 11, 12, 118–19, 120, 124; posthuman in 117, 119, 124, 128, 129; posthumanism 117–18, 119, 124, 128, 129; thingness 117–18, 121, 124, 127, 128; undead architectonics 12, 119, 120, 121, 123–8; undead South 119–22; vibrant matter 118, 119; zombies 117, 122 roadside shrines 3, 6, 11, 85–97, 125; absent presences 11, 85–95; agency in 11, 91, 93, 94, 96; grief 85, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96; heterotopias of memory 11, 85–95; landscapes 86, 87, 89, 91; loss 85, 92, 94, 95, 96; mourning 90, 91, 94, 95, 96; placing memory 86–9; ritual 88, 90, 91, 92; trauma 91, 93; victims 91, 92, 94, 95 Romine, Scott 120 Rothwell, Nicolas 56 Royal Courts of Justice (Law Courts) see memorialisation Los Rubios (film) 190–1 Ruíz, Chela 189 R. W. Davis & Son Ltd (UK) 76 Ryle, Bob 62 Saarinen, Eero 108 San Francisco (US) 144 Sartre, Jean-Paul 126 Savage Messiah (zine/book) 165, 168, 171–8; affect in 173, 177; architecture 165, 168, 171, 172, 173, 175; Faraday cage 175, 177; occult 169, 170, 173, 175; working-class districts 169, 172, 173, 174–5 Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam) 113 Schönefeld Airport (Berlin) 106 Scott, Lady Philippa 78–9 Scott, Robert Falcon 78

206 Index Scott, Sir Peter 78 Sebald, W. G. 70, 71 secondhandedness 8–9 Sense of an Ending, The (lectures) 122 7/7 Memorial (Hyde Park) 9, 25–30; mediatisation 28–30; people’s park 26–8 7/7 terrorist attack (London, 2005) 9, 19–38; Coroner’s Inquest see memorialisation; embedded/ affective images 23–4; Khan, Mohammad Sidique 9, 23, 25, 31, 33, 34, 36; loss 22, 26, 30; mediatisation see mediatisation (7/7 terrorist attack); memorial see 7/7 Memorial (Hyde Park); memorialisation see memorialisation: photographs 24–5, 28, 30; television 25, 28, 31, 33; torn up/subjective time 21–3; tunnel victims 23–5 Severn Wildfowl Trust 78; see also Wildfowl and Wetland’s Trust (WWT) Shakespeare see Hamlet (play); Macbeth (play) Sharpness Canal (UK) see Gloucester and Sharpness Canal (UK) Shay Gap (WA) 54, 55 Shields, Meg 60 Shields, Rob 109 Shufflebotham, Gabriella 55 SI see Situationist International (SI) Siddique, Haroon 26 Simmel, Georg 87 Sinclair, Iain 169 Situationist International (SI) 168, 169, 172, 174, 176 Skytrain (Vancouver) 113 Slater, Christian 158, 159 slavery 7, 126, 151 Smith, P. 54 social media 5, 6, 31 141, 177 South Manchester Loop Line 110 space: place, distinguished from 137; public 9, 13, 21, 36, 37, 89, 95 see also 7/7 Memorial (Hyde Park) space-time 70, 75, 86 spatiality 4, 5, 59, 61, 63, 96, 109, 114, 120, 121, 128, 133, 134, 137, 138, 141, 143, 147, 166, 168, 174, 176 Speakers’ Corner (Hyde Park) 26 Specters of Marx (book) 1, 6–7, 12, 13, 19–38, 70–1, 152, 161, 165–6,

168, 174, 176, 177, 183, 187, 188, 192 spectrality 4, 7, 13, 70–1, 73, 120, 121, 151, 152, 165 spectres 33, 34, 73, 75, 105, 113; horror, of see ‘disappeared, the’ (Argentina); locating spectres 1–13; psychogeography and hauntology 166, 167, 173, 175, 176, 177; rephotography 135, 136, 138; screen, on see ghosts on screen; see also revenants; spirits Spielrein, Sabina 7 Spinoza, Baruch 4, 156 spirit photographs 136, 153 spirits 2, 52, 71, 94, 95, 111, 153, 155, 178, 187; see also revenants; spectres Stalingrad (USSR) 144 Staniforth, Craig 24, 35 Stévenin, Robinson 187 Stevenson Field Airport (Winnipeg) 112 Stibbon, Emma 81 Stoke Newington (UK) 92 Stone, Nick J. 144, 145 St Petersburg siege (WW II) 144, 145 Streetcar Named Desire, A (play) 126 Stroudwater Canal (UK) 76 studium (photography) 134–5 Sunday Trading Bill riots (Hyde Park) 28 supermodernity 104, 109, 113, 114 Surrealists 174 Tandy, Bernard 40, 44, 46 Tandy, Caitlin 42, 44 Tandy, Nicholas 42, 44, 46 Tandy, Pippa 8, 9–10, 40–9, 196 Tandy, Robin 40, 44, 46 Tascón, Sonia M. 7, 13, 182–92, 196 Taylor, Diana 184 Teeuwisse, Jo Hedwig 144, 145 Tegel Airport (Berlin) 106 Telegraph, The (UK) 25 television 12, 151; Mr. Robot 12, 150, 151, 157–61, 162; reality TV 96; 7/7 terrorist attack (London, 2005) 25, 28, 31; Wire, The 166; 9/11 terrorist attack (NY, 2001) 33 Tempelhof Airport (Berlin) 106, 112 temporality 4, 6, 10, 22, 56, 71, 128, 135, 138, 150, 151, 154, 161, 166, 167, 174, 175, 178

Index  207 Temporary Autonomous Zone, The (book) 170 terrorist attacks 3, 7, 21, 96, 161, 170; Charlie Hebdo (Paris, 2015) 1, 2, 3; London, 2005 see 7/7 terrorist attack (London, 2005); 9/11 terrorist attack (NY, 2001) 33 Thatcher (Margaret) 37, 168, 170, 171, 175, 178 thingness 117–18, 121, 124, 127, 128; objecthood, distinguished from 117 Thomas, Lorraine 58 Tiffany, Daniel 119 time-bridges 138, 142, 144 Times, The (newspaper) 172 Timewell, Meg 58 Titchella Creek (WA) 61 Tom Price (WA) 54 Tompsett, Fabian 170, 173 Toronto (Canada) 108, 111, 112, 113 Toronto International Airport 112 ‘Tracking the Mechanisms of the Psychosocial’ (essay) 21 trauma 124, 126, 145, 152, 190; Charlie Hebdo memorial 1, 2, 3; concept of 5; Global Financial Crisis (GFC) 21; post-traumatic stress disorder 5, 23, 62, 117; roadside memorials 91, 93; terrorist attack (London, 2005) see 7/7 terrorist attack (London, 2005); trauma studies 4, 5 traumascapes 11 Trigg, Dylan 133, 138, 146 Trimble, Tammy 60 Tuan, Yi-Fu 137 Tulloch, John 6, 9, 19–38, 196; One Day in July: Experiencing 7/7 25 Turner, Daniel Cross 8, 11–12, 117–28, 196 Tyburn gallows (Hyde Park) 26–7 undead/undeadness see Road, The (novel) unheimlich 11, 122, 125, 128, 152 unhomelike see unheimlich utopia 13, 37, 113, 152, 165, 167, 178; heterotopia, distinguished from 87; see also dystopia Vague, Tom 169 vampires 117

Vancouver (Canada) 111, 112; Skytrain 113 Vaneigem, Raoul 177 Varis, Rosemarie 56 Venbrux, Eric 95 Verlaine, Paul 173 vibrant matter 118, 119, 122 victims 152, 187; Air India Flight 182 111; roadside shrines 91, 92, 94, 95; 7/7 terrorist attack see 7/7 terrorist attack (London, 2005) Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington) 144–5 Villaflor, Azucena 186 violence 2, 28, 30, 36, 96, 144, 146, 152, 175, 184, 189, 191 Walker, Kath 60 Washington Dulles International Airport 107, 108, 109 Washington Post (newspaper) 155 Wates Building Group Ltd 80 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew 151, 152 Wells, Holly 96 Wildfowl and Wetland’s Trust (WWT) 78, 79 Wilson, Pauline 62 Wilson, Robert Anton 170 Window to the Past (website) 141–3 Winnipeg International Airport 112 Wire, The (TV series) 166 Wittenoom (WA) 58, 66 Wojtkowiak, Joanna 95 Woodman, Ellis 25 Woodward, Richard 129 working class 28, 77, 169, 172, 173, 174–5 world disorder 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 36 World War I 75, 150, 155 World War II 42, 78–9, 80, 140, 144, 146; London Blitz 29, 144, 147; Siege of St Petersburg 144, 145 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) 78 WWT see Wildfowl and Wetland’s Trust (WWT) Wylie, John 71 Young, James 144 YouTube 96 zombies see Road, The (novel)