Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination by Avery F. Gordon

Author:Avery F. Gordon [Gordon, Avery F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2008-02-29T08:00:00+00:00

The Real Haunting Business

The organized terror unleashed by the state and the military was designed to destroy not just the organized and overt opposition, but the disposition to opposition, the propensity to resist injury and injustice, and the desire to speak out, or simply to sympathize. The strong, the weak, and even the indifferent were equally targets. “’First we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then … their sympathizers, then … those who remain indifferent; and finally we will kill the timid.’—General Ibérico Saint Jean, Governor of Buenos Aires, May 1976” (Simpson and Bennett 1985: 66). The authoritarian regime could not kill everyone, but the apocalyptic determination to destroy the living, to end the world (how else could we understand the governor’s plan to kill everyone except the killers?), created a permanent menace and a collapsing fear that was designed to make “all the Argentineans disappear as persons and as citizens” (the Mothers in Bouvard 1994: 43). Philipe Sollers puts it well: “Who is called on to disappear? A little bit of everyone, and, by extension, those who will dare to ask what became of you. The social fabric is thus held in suspension. … Fear, agony, guilt, anxiety, trouble, pervasive malaise: the living become virtually disappeared, potential specters. … It is a question of slow poisoning, a delayed psychic bomb. Identity is changed, it becomes hypnotized” (1994: 11). The exercise of state power through disappearance involves controlling the imagination, controlling the meaning of death, involves creating new identities, involves haunting the population into submission to its will. On the ground of the very shape and skin of everyday life itself. To live under the mantle of the omnipresent dread disappearance produces, a fear that “exterminate[s] all social life in the public realm,” a fear that eats away at you bite by bite, is to live not “in the light of cold reason, of realistic calculation, of party traditions” (Perelli in Weschler 1990: 89, 213) but in the vestiges of your own shadow, in the gray shades of an everyday life charged with a phantom reality.

Indeed, the military itself saw ghosts everywhere. The Doctrine of National Security (not unique to Argentina by any means) was a program of purification to cleanse the nation of the internal sickness devouring its vital organs and corrupting its mind. The military called this sickness simply subversion, a highly adaptable version of the ever looming International Communist Conspiracy. The definition of subversion was fairly vague, yet flexible. In 1981 the Uruguayan army defined it this way: “actions, violent or not, with ultimate purposes of a political nature, in all fields of human activity within the internal sphere of a state and whose aims are perceived as not convenient for the overall political system” (Weschler 1990: 121). Bad writing certainly, but the most striking and significant aspect of the threat of subversion—the precision in the midst of the vagaries—was just how magical and ghostly it appeared to the military. Listen to

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