Obstinate Revenants

Sean Cubitt

Webconference delivered at the Disappearance of Ghosts symposium, Site Gallery, Sheffield, 20th March 2004

Of all the people who ever lived or will ever live we are the only ones who are alive today. Only we can make a difference to the future. Only we can heal the past.

Each of us calls on posterity to remember us, and the past calls on us to remember them. If we do not, there is no-one else.

We have a duty to build the future, and a duty to remember the past.

When we refuse those duties, we become haunted.

Ancestors

What is memory? The past, after all, is gone: our own childhoods, our parents' childhoods, the Crimean War, dinosaurs, the Big Bang. The presence of those events, the taste of frost on the bathroom window, smell of clothes boiling in the copper, netting sticklebacks among the duckweed. All that, held in the mind like crystals of frozen time, melts in the sunlight of today's sensations, business, plans.

Personal memories are the stuff of art as well as psychology: Bazin's belief that cinema was the fruit of all the ancient arts of preserving the dead. Art a gathering of the past into form that will outlive the present. The art of the garden as much as of the gallery - the way the ghost of a rose bed still raises the ground when the roses are dug out and gone, the way the feudal strip farming still rumples the English landscape seen from the air. .

And as each generation makes its way through time, it lays down another set of tools that will become the memories of the next generation - memories as deeply seated as the memory of how to ride a bike, play a guitar or type. The functions (and the near universal graphic language) of play, rewind, pause, skip, scroll. Physical memories.

Easy enough to learn because the technologies themselves embody the manual skills of human beings. Not that the keyboard passes a pen over paper, or that tending a spinning jenny emulates the spinning wheel, but that core principles of ancient human skill are embedded into devices that remember them. The gas oven: the memory of firestarting flints, of mining disasters, hydraulic piping . . . Never a single inventor, but a gathering of the memory of skill into new convocations for every computer, powerdrill, microwave and lawnmower.

What tradition is for Maori, technologies are for the European diaspora. When Maori meet, they recite their whakepapa, calling on the long tale of the ancestors from their first arrival a thousand years ago, remembering each in their turn, their names and stories and relationships, in order to place the living representatives of the iwi among their illustrious dead.

When I write, I recall the all those whose technologies are bedded into my laptop, from the Phoenician alphabet to the Gutenberg press, the letterface designers of the Renaissance, and Scholes' QWERTY board from the first office revolution, Edison's electrics, on and on and on - Xerox PARC, Jobs, Gates, all of them locked into the physical shape of this laptop, their names obscured with age, their ghosts, however, still shaping my thought in the living minute that I write.

And beside them the memory of technique. The memory that lies between tradition and technology, the memory of how to do things. The memory of how to catch turbot at low tide with a spear, of how to skim stones, deadhead potplants, take a fast corner in the rain.

When Maori meet formally, tradition brings the ancestors into the discussion of current matters, their fund of wisdom, their anecdotes, their jokes.

Between tradition and technology, technique remembers the ways of doing. When I write, the machinery I use records the Alexandrian grammarians, Sanskrit arithmetic, Arabic algebra, Irish logic, British math . . . And what I write remembers all the other writings that I've read in vocabulary, in inflections, in the placing of word by word: all the poets and philosophers, all my ancestors, whose names and stories I can tell, and those I can't, all those whose wisdom I draw on when I want to think.

Tradition, technique and technology are the autonomous memories of our species,

There is something soothing in this reflection. What you do well will be remembered. Not, or not often, and not for long, you. What you do well lives on as tradition, technique, technology: reasons, ways and means for doing. What you do badly, your clumsiness and botches, failed attempts and howling errors will disappear. As a field never forgets even one season's ploughing, the global culture recalls every useful gesture. The women who, sometime around the 13th century, invented knitting may be anonymous, but the work of their hands is remembered, and all their sins absolved.

Human evolution is Lamarckian. Though grindingly slow from the perspective of a single lifetime, human society develops at blinding speed compared to biological change. Ants and honeybees have scarcely changed in a million years. We however are almost unrecognisably alien to our parents and our children. Even in traditional societies, the very concept of tradition is a marker of difference from modernity, the technologies and techniques of industrial and now finance capital. And yet each generation builds on what came before, and makes it new.

Ghosts

The dead we have always with us. Karl Marx, haunted as he was by ghouls and vampires, saw in the technologies of embodied memory only the dead labour of fixed capital. And to some extent the old patriarch was right: the Victorian factory sucked not only the life but the skills out of its workforce, to embody them in cheaper, more obedient machines. But the moment machines become consumer goods, as they had to on the very logic of the machine age, they attain some kind of autonomy from the ironmasters. Since the box brownie, machines have had a life of their own, with their own goals. Like the ancestors they have a way of speaking with us. They are guiding, constraining even, but living presences.

What then are ghosts?

Jeffrey Sconce's delightful history of Haunted Media tells us some of the sad story. Telegraph, radio and television each became a channel for benevolent or malevolent interventions in human life, the Poltergeist scenario. No surprise then that the internet should so rapidly have become home to the loas of   Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive . There is   that bleak moment of disturbance when you find old pages of a deceased friend still fluttering in the pixel winds of the web.

I would love to be able to take old Marx's vampires and spectres out of the cupboard, as Derrida has done, and make the case that the dead hand of capital and power now appears in the deferral, diversion and blockage of flows, in damming and taxing communication. And I will, some other time. But today we need to think about those hauntings that flicker at the edges of each new medium, and of their flickering in the old media, that Walter Benjamin so loved, in the surrealist 1930s, something torpid but unsettling that occurs at the intersection of two worlds.

' The past' , Benjamin wrote in the Theses on the Philosophy of History, ' carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption '. An index like an index finger points from the past towards a future moment in which its sufferings are redeemed. He continues: ' Our coming was expected on Earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim '. We are the posterity that the great speech makers called upon to witness the fitness of their deeds. If 'Rock n Roll will never die', we are the people who must secure its life. The poets from Villon to Brecht who spoke to the frères humains qui vivraient après nou s , the human brothers who will live after us, we were the people they spoke to.

Ghosts arise when we mistake the direction of the claim. We think that spirits from the other side owe something to us, but it is we who owe everything to them.

Spirits

We are not alone. Like most Western boys, I like to believe that somewhere out there in the twinkling skies are other intelligences. But what with the expanding universe, the chance of ever meeting them diminishes minute by minute, hour by hour, as the constellations fly apart. Given our miserable history of intercultural meetings, perhaps it's just as well.

On the other hand, there are other others right here, right now. The autonomy of our machines is perhaps relative, but nonetheless real. Take Vilém Flusser's description of photography as a struggle for mastery between human and machine:

Photographers encode their concepts as photographic images so as to give others information . . .   The cameras encodes the concepts programmed into it as images in order to program society to act as a feedback mechanism in the interests of progressive camera improvement ( Towards a Philosophy of Photography , 48)

Just one aspect of Flusser's disturbing technological   phenomenology - our devices have goals of their own, evolutions   to follow. As Nik Williams used to say - and if any ghost deserves to haunt this talk it's his - from the standpoint of a computer, humans are just random number generators. Now Flusser is very explicitly on the side of the humans here, even though he sees the art of photography as a dialectic ('two interweaving codes in any photograph'). His goal is discover, in a technological era ('the photographic universe'), the grounds for human freedom.

Our task is different: we need to understand those inhabitants of the world that are not human, and that come to deny our secular belief that only humans communicate. (It's true God has the power to communicate, but She does it rarely, and lately apparently only to some rather peculiar tele-evangelists). Less uncanny is the idea that at least some animals talk to one another - whales and dolphins, apes, birds, bees, and increasingly now we are beginning to understand that they talk not just to each other but across species, in that most communication-oriented of sciences, ecology.

r a d i o q u a l i a 's   commissioned work for Remote, a New Media Scotland show, featured a webcast from Neptune, an audio conversion of telemetry received by radio astronomy. Astrologers have some reason behind them. The planets are singing to us, but in wavebands we can't hear.

The cosmos is singing to us in wavebands only our machines can hear for us.

Like the song of the humpback whale, or the colours of flowers as they appear to a butterfly, the universe is talking in wavelengths our technologies perceive, but not us.

Three phyla make up the world: society, land and machines - the Greeks might have said polis , physis and techné . I say polis because individually we forget: remembrance is collective. The three orders talk to themselves and to one another. Each has its own way of remembering, and each its own techniques for haunting those who forget. The return of the repressed is not just the swaggering of instinctive nature into the social: it is the explosion of repressed society into nature and technology, of repressed technology into society and nature.

and ghosts?

Phantoms

There is the question concerning the ecology of bad ideas: "basic error propagates" says Bateson, in the same passage that provides Guattari's epigraph to his Three Ecologies . If that is the case, then Richard Dawkins' 'memes' concept has a basic design flaw. Does the memory of ill deeds (mistakes, failures) remain, and if so does it remain across the whole system polis-physis-techné? The internal combustion engine, to take a simple example, worst invention of the 19th century, plague of the 20th. How will we forget, even when, in twenty years or so, a merciful deity has provided that the stock of fossil petrochemicals will all have been burnt? How will the world forget the hydrocarbons in the ozone layer, the paved woodlands, the poisoned bays and rivers? How will we feel when there's so little left, and we discover something more useful to do with the fossil heritage than setting fire to it? Will that staggeringly stupid idea be recalled? Or will we only ever feel a wordless tug at the heart, a gap where there should have been some dead species or environment that is no more? Does error propagate by positive or negative means?

And can a technology ever be intrinsically evil? Weapons, for example. Does the memory of all those slaughters compacted into an AK47 or a Chieftain tank congeal there all the misery, anger and pain our species have inflicted on one another, and on our machines and our planet?

Unless technology is not just autonomous (not just indeterminate, not just contingent) but free, it cannot be guilty.

The same is true for nature. Nature, red in tooth and claw, involves a great deal of eating and being eaten. But unless we can ascribe freedom to nature, we cannot ascribe guilt either.

'Correct ideas come from social practice', but Chairman Mao forgot to add that stupid ideas come from the same source.

Elsewhere Bateson argues that it is purposive thinking bereft of systemic thinking that drove Eve and Adam out of the Garden (though in his version, they drive God out and then lose the topsoil). Horkheimer and Adorno have a related argument about instrumental rationality - the use of reason as an instrument of dominance, over other people, or over nature. Both, loosely, see the original sin as one of abstracting short-term or narrow (class or clique-specific, for example)   human goals from the overall welfare and sustainability of the system. George W Bush's policies in Iraq and Kyoto stem from a single instrument, though it is a question whether he wields it or it wields him. Both seem to benefit (but after all, how much can a man spend? Bush and the oil barons are prepared to sacrifice a lot of other things for their brief tenure as alpha male).

Ghosts come in many forms. Chinese vampires suffer from rigor mortis and move by hopping on both feet. The forest spirits of Miyazake's Princess Mononoke are animals enraged by the incomprehension of humans. In Micronesia, the honoured dead nonetheless are capable of returning with malice in mind. In some recent blockbuster movies, they appear as asteroids, twisters and perfect storms, forces of nature, mindless destiny. Which would suggest that human beings don't always have agency either - poor old George Clooney sailing deeper and deeper into the storm because the industry he works for has fished out the Grand Banks and have a lease on his boat and therefore on his life.

Basic error propagates across systems but, like Flusser's interweaving codes of photography, codes of photographer and camera at odds with one another but pursuing nonetheless their different goals through a shared practice - and a solidly bad idea can take a long time to get rid of if some alpha male gets his rocks off making it.

So when Humphrey Jennings asked about the disappearance of ghosts, we could perhaps answer that with the increasing systematisation of daily life in industrial England, a topic Jennings knew well, the task of memory had been instrumentalised - turned into a tool for oppression and exploitation - by one class who, at the same time, became the servants of what they had wrought: an utterly unforgiving   system that broke their hearts as it filled their wallets.

The System everyone railed against in the 1960s was not, however, a system in Bateson's terms. The metaphor of the governor was too entrenched in the steam era, and inflected the handling of gas, plumbing and electricity. As capital shifts from production to finance, the instruments pass from monopoly of the means of production to monopoly over the means of distribution: banks, media networks, the WTO and IMF, dare I say galleries?

Power, wealth and change never come from above: they arise from the three phyla and their communication. The 'spectre that is haunting Europe' still haunts   the system that is not a system. Insistent on the domination of nature and the control of technology, the system society cannot control either making or meaning, so devotes itself to a stranglehold on distribution of all our key global communications media, today most especially money.

In this sense basic error does not propagate throughout the system: it concentrates on a single moment of communication, the distributive, seeking from their to guide the making and the meanings of the messages it holds, delays, diverts and disposes of.

Not surprisingly, after all we have learnt about thermodynamics and psychodynamics, creators and audiences alike are the barely contained inventors of new modes of distribution to circumvent the chicanes of power. Non-human things resist likewise, their pressures building day by day, until the unthinkable moment - unthinkable in the sense that it would be a future without humans. .

The ghosts of extinct species still speak to us about what happens to a phylum that no longer coordinates with its environment.

Revenants

All the same it's as well to take heed of Adorno's warning in the ninth of the Theses Against Occultism. 'Late bourgeois ideology has again made [mind] what it was for pre-animism, a being-in-itself modeled on the social division of labour, on the split between manual and intellectual labour, on the planned domination over the former' (132).

The subordination of manual labour has become the subordination of both nature and the machines that now do so much of the hard work. In the interests of producing an entirely mentalist culture, or what is worse, a culture that embraces the irrational without noticing that it is merely the flipside of rationality, not an alternative to it. Whence the neo-fascism of that fearful old Jesuit Bataillle. Ten minutes study of 20th Century anti-semitism demonstrates the stupidity of irrationalism as a cultural or political platform.

It doesn't redress the balance between mind and body to cut your head off, even if you wander around with it tucked under your arm.

And yet these stupid concepts come round again. Of course acephalitic art is big in biennials. One thinks of the drawings Klaus Theweleit reproduces from the psychic underbelly of the SA. There is a kind of obligatory and forced anamnesis going on in contremporary art. . But even if we try to, even if we succeed in forgetting the past, the past does not forget us.

Gregory Ulmer cites 'Wyatt MacGaffey, a scholar of Kongo civilization':

The simplest ritual space is a Greek cross, mared on the ground, as for oath-taking. One line represents the boundary, the other is ambivaslently both the path leading across the boundary, as to the cemetery, and the vertical path of power linking 'the above' with 'the below'. This relationship, in turn, is polyvalent, since it refers to God and man, God and the dead,   and the living and the dead. The person taking the oath stands upon the cross, situating himself between life and death, and invokes the judgement of God and the dead upon himself' (in Tofts et al eds 2002: 118)

I do not evoke God but every staement, every creative act, is a witnessing and to that extent an oath, taken in view of the cosmos and of the dead, that agrees to my debt, as the one who makes it, to the universe and to that past that made me.

And can still unmake. One upshot of complexity in systems theory is that ragardless of how complete our knowledge of the present is, we cannopt extrapolate from it by analysis or any other method the initial conditions that brought it into being. Once we sacrifice teleology, the goal-driven work of time, we must also sacrifice prime movers and final causes. The millenia of chance and necessity that made me are no more knowable than the future, both determined and random, that will dawn tomorrow.