Simon of my Friend
by ESTHER PEEREN
Reflections on HAUNTING THE SPECTRE AND THE METAPHOR
“Simon of my friend and my sister I have been there since day and we have met and best of all I can hope and I will not die on a Sunday”
This was my Simon — it only emerged after many attempts that went nowhere (well, not really nowhere, but into the endless repetition of the same phrases: Simon of my friend of my friend and of my friend…). I wonder why this was. Was it because, as Florence argues in her response, “the cyclical nature of predicting or predictive (text) is an exploration in mediocrity, tracing the most common combinations of words, the most standardized of phrases”? But what I was generating were not even clichéd phrases but endlessly repetitions of the same three or four words.
Others seemed to be more successful in teasing out meaningful sentences, indicating that predictive text (like Google searches) has a dimension that is not collective but specific to the individual (or the limited number of individuals using a particular phone or the same IP-address). Perhaps because I do not use my phone a lot to text, the predictive text, like a child that has not been spoken to by the adults around it, did not develop the ability to speak in a rich, let alone an imaginative, vocabulary.
By manipulating the predictive text function — not choosing the first option every time, but the second or the one that seemed most interesting or meaningful — I was finally able to generate this Simon, which was far enough from total gibberish and close enough to a coherent sentence to spook my friend Jeroen, to whom I sent it. Because we normally do not communicate by text but by WeChat, he sent me, within a few minutes, through that app a screenshot of the message, the sentence “I just got this from you” and three panicked-looking emojis. His response failed to generate a sound alert (I do not have these switched on for WeChat), so during the experiment I thought my Simon had not been answered, which made me feel alone and isolated, a bit like the ghost character in A Ghost Story, who tries to connect with the world around him, literally reaching out to it, but cannot manage to make contact. Only later did I see that Jeroen had in fact answered almost immediately on WeChat, essentially reaching out to see if I was okay. This made me feel supported in a spectral manner, by someone physically absent but, through technology, able to become present — to be Simoned or Summoned, to borrow Florence’s wordplay — in a very meaningful, mattering and material way.
The prevalence of “and’s” in my Simon makes me think about the idea of repetition as never just the same but always repetition with a difference, the what was already there before plus something else, an infinite accumulation that also connects — “and” is a connector; it makes possible seriality, which, like haunting, involves the linking or relating of events that are never exactly the same and a simultaneous pointing to both the past and the future (expressed, in television series, through the “previously on X” and “next on X” reminders/teasers, where the “previously on X” inevitably also provides clues as to what will happen next, while the “next on X” raises questions about the future more than revealing what it will be).
At this point in my reflection, I want to insert the words with which I began my lecture, which reflected on the nature of the event itself as a form of repetition, something Luis and Florence also touched upon in their introductions — speaking, respectively, of “rewriting … as a form of research dissemination” and of “re-enactments” and “versions” — thereby making my very words on the repetition of the event also a repetition of their words and thoughts.
This is what I said:
It is highly unusual — in a neoliberal academic climate oriented towards constant renewal, in which we are expected to move from one research project to the next with lightning speed — to find myself invited to participate in what is essentially a restaging of an event that already took place in 2016. Such a restaging may seem redundant, useless, even lazy, but is, in my view, anything but. In fact, it allows for a practical demonstration of the potential of haunting as a repeated appearance that, with each of its returns, affirms the need for and power of insistence, of, in Donna Haraway’s wise words, “staying with the trouble” to force an active engagement with it instead of impatiently moving on to the next thing, as dictated by today’s “attention economy” and as exemplified by Donald Trump’s incessant tweets, which, deliberately or not, distract from the long-term disasters his administration is seeding by courting immediate, short-lived bursts of indignation. Staying with the trouble is also necessary because it may take many reappearances before a particular haunting is able to gain traction and effect real change, as was illustrated when the Harvey Weinstein case prompted a reckoning with the long-standing, long-ignored specter of sexual harassment and violation in the workplace and beyond, or when the haunting of the present by the intertwined injustices of colonialism and slavery is brought to general attention by movements like Black Lives Matter and results in the removal or recontextualization of monuments celebrating or obscuring these injustices.
Hauntings, then, are about preventing us from moving on too easily, from declaring the past over and done with, but also about pushing us to anticipate the future (the next appearance of the ghost) and to take responsibility for how our actions in the present will affect this future. Haunting, as a structure of repetition, is a kind of déjà vu, but one that locates in this seeing again the possibility of seeing anew. Haunting is, ultimately, about the difference that emerges from repetition, from sustained attention to the same (like reading Derrida’s Specters of Marx for the umpteenth time and always finding it speaks to me in new ways); what it shows is that what seems to be the same is never actually the same. Therefore, even though some of the same people will gather today to discuss the same questions, the event will be something else, something more, and it will be something more precisely because this second time is another time, a time that, in Derrida’s words is “repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time,” as it is both placed in a series and singular as “the event itself” that will never re-occur in identical form.
The experience of a seeing again that led to a seeing anew was, for me, what this reiterated event yielded, throughout the day: seeing Luis’ greenhouses again but so much more clearly understanding how they can be seen as “spectral figures,” archives and anarchives, bringing colonial pasts and futures of environmental disaster into our present; hearing Florence evoke my reading of Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost” but adding an intriguing connection to Sarah Winchester’s haunted/haunting mansion; meeting Vera again, who used to be my student in Amsterdam, and who started writing about ghosts then, and listening to her ask the vital question of how materials from ethnographic collections that sought to confirm the reality of colonial racial hierarchies are allowed to appear in contemporary art installations and what is erased and/or added in this process of re-exhibition with a difference; having Annie, who, like Vera — who had wanted to come to the first event but who was pregnant at the time, so couldn’t, but who was represented with a story we read together, a story which she could now not remember sending — was there for the first time, add a Heideggerian touch to the proceedings by making us think about “enframing” as a granting or occasioning and making me wonder how close such occasioning would come to a conjuring in Derrida’s terms; and, finally, re-encountering Kevin and Stefan or Ectoplasmic Materialism, who made the medium Eva Carrière emerge from a history in which she had been submerged, like so many vanishing women (the title of a book by Karen Beckman, now on my reading list) and who, in another inspiring séance-like session, got us Simoning/summoning.
Part of my Simon perfectly expresses the feeling that has lingered with me since the repeated event: we have met — in meeting again, we were able to truly meet and to truly think the power and limits of haunting and spectrality as metaphors.
//EP
Esther Peeren is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University Amsterdam, and vice-director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS). Recent publications include The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave, 2014) and the edited volumes The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (Bloomsbury, 2013, with María del Pilar Blanco), Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present: Space, Mobility, Aesthetics (Brill, 2016, with Hanneke Stuit and Astrid Van Weyenberg) and Global Cultures of Contestation: Mobility, Sustainability, Aesthetics & Connectivity (Palgrave, 2018, with Robin Celikates, Jeroen de Kloet and Thomas Poell).
