HAUNTING THE SPECTRE AND THE METAPHOR: reports from two symposia
This is the entry page to a series of reflections about spectrality and its relation to metaphor… they result from two symposia that took place during Research Week 2016, and again in 2018, at Konstfack University of the Arts
Symposia by Luis Berríos-Negrón (PR), moderated by Florence Wild (NZ), with contributions by Ectoplasmic Materialism (DK/UK), Vera Knútsdóttir (IS), Annie Lowe (US), and Esther Peeren (NL)
INDEX OF CONTRIBUTIONS
[CLICK on the following linked items to separate Journal pages].
I.) INTRODUCTION to the Spectre and the Metaphor (here below)
II.) Reflections about the symposium’s Opening Remarks;
- I Want to Learn to Live Finally … by Luis Berríos-Negrón
II.) Reflections by each Contributor (in order of appearance);
- Simon. Sounds like Summon, and like Someone. … by Florence Wild
- Simon of my Friend … by Esther Peeren
- Phone Sun Shines Mind … by Vera Knútsdóttir
- The World Thrown Up … by Ectoplasmic Materialism
- Hoaxing in Retrospectre … by Annie Lowe
III.) Concluding Notes and the Dinner-Workshop
- The Time is Out of Joint … by Luis Berríos-Negrón
INTRODUCTION to the Spectre and the Metaphor
by Luis Berríos-Negrón
The index above is a series of reflections about two symposia I conducted. Both were titled identically: The Spectre and the Metaphor
Both events took place as official program events for Konstfack’s Research Week — the first on January 2016, the second on January 2018, a sequence triggered by the book ‘The Spectral Metaphor’ by Esther Peeren (2015).
The core concern of both events was to further explore material from the book by Peeren, mainly by splicing apart the two terms to address spectrality and metaphor individually, and then their relations — particularly about how such relations may generate alternative forms of affective agency.
Now, both events were conducted as a day-long series of talks and presentations, followed by an evening dinner-workshop.
But the focus of this report will be on the second symposium, one that took a self-referential tack, as a ‘doppelgänger’ to ‘re-enact’ and ‘haunt’ the first.
The desire was to simultaneously revisit the prescient issues of spectrality, as subject of cultural studies, while also exploring a quality of spectrality itself, the ‘haunting’, or the persistent re-appearance of a topic or subject, as mode of research in the arts, and as a form of performative public display… in this case as a form of dissemination.
During the 2018 event, returning guests from 2016, Esther Peeren, who is a leading professor of cultural analysis, and the art collective Ectoplasmic Materialism, delivered the following presentations:
Esther Peeren, reflected on the potentials and pitfalls of using ghosts and haunting as metaphors, and discuss the need to separate ghosts from the capacity to haunt. Her reflection hinged upon the most troubling histories and present-day events, such as colonialism and the current so-called European “migration crisis” that produce ghosts without the ability to haunt in a disruptive way, or only do so for a moment before being erased, forgotten or aestheticized.
Ectoplasmic Materialism intersected the events by delivering a presentation and a proposal for a spectral activity, the first as a contribution to the panel discussion, and the second as a ‘séance’ during the evening dinner-workshop.
New guests and researchers, Vera Knútsdóttir and Annie Lowe delivered the following:
Vera Knútsdóttir made a comparative analysis of the archival exhibitions Musée Islandique and Das Experiment Island by the Icelandic artist Ólöf Nordal in regards to her research on spectrality and memory.
Annie Lowe discussed her work about Heidegger’s disconcerting suppression of the political and equivocal invocations of the work of art towards a provocation for aesthetic ‘spoofing’ and ‘hoaxing’ of the Gestell (the all-encompassing ‘enframing’ of technology). She intervenes in order to reflect on how this approach by Heidegger conjures a deep ambiguity and ecstatic state of play between technology and Being.
Co-moderating the event was artist and researcher Florence Wild. She was a Master of Fine Arts student at Konstfack in 2016 and participated in the event that year. For 2018, I asked her to co-moderate the event, offering among other perspectives, reflections about the ghostly virtues of ‘re-enactment’.
I concluded the lecture and panel segments by discussing how my work on greenhouse, as display and anarchive of global warming, is being influenced by the unprecedented twin hurricanes that recently hit Puerto Rico… unleashing a type of ‘superrepressed’ colonial memory, turning the island into a present messianic ghost of the future climate to come.
One more thing. You will find a lot of references to ‘Simon’. Simon was the name we gave to the ghost that appeared during our final dinner-workshop. Conducted by art collective Ectoplasmic Materialism, the workshop was carried-out as a Séance, a meeting where people try to contact the dead through the agency of a medium. The group identified the ghost-figure of the Auto-Text or Text Prediction engine of our text-message system in our smartphones. We each let the text-prediction run, and let Simon take over; results which will be addressed in the participant contributions.
//LBN.
