The Social Life of Nothing by Susie Scott

Author:Susie Scott [Scott, Susie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781138297975
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

As Rosa continued, she described the experience after Henry’s death, when his no-body lingered on. She sensed his ghostliness no longer as the positive image of his being, but as a negative formation, following his removal. She saw the absence of him, a space from which ‘something vital’ had been taken. From this depresented opening, the ghostly figure emerged. It could not be seen directly, but only sensed intuitively, as an awareness of no-body:

Henry, you were the glue that held us all together – protecting you, worrying about you occupied my attention.… In your recent final absence, I have been accompanied by a sense of nothingness, of something vital being removed.

The social residue of Henry continued to exist and haunt Rosa. Despite feeling the pain of his loss, she emphasised that this nothingness itself afforded a presence. It was a companion that lived with her, in and through the body, altering her subjective experience of selfhood:

Grief is a companion; an absence lived somatically like a presence. Removed is the feeling of there being that one person in the world who has loved me all along, watching me since I was born, proud … this absence of you is a hole I keep peering down; its sides are not clear.

Haunting also occurs on a sociocultural level. Telling ghost stories is a way of keeping myths, sacred stories and legends alive across generations, protecting group heritage and perpetuating shared values through social, collective memory (Halbwachs 1925). Gordon (2008) describes the significance of communal ghosts: lingering effects of previous institutional forms, ideological political regimes and historical configurations of social relations, such as capitalism, patriarchy, slavery and the colonial past. While modern narratives may seek to erase these discomforting truths (Bhambra 2014), they are deeply embedded in a cultural landscape, or structure of feeling (Williams 1958). Transmitted through generations, they continue to haunt personal lives over successive presents.

For example, Seal (2014) examines the historical case of Edith Thompson, who in 1923 was hanged in an allegedly botched execution. The gruesome display of the scene – Thompson’s body spilled out, including the remains of a pregnancy – was gratuitously documented in newspaper reports, which played on discourses of gothic horror, abjection and monstrous femininity. Seal argues that the ripple effects of this could still be felt 30 years later, during British parliamentary and public debates about the abolition of capital punishment. Thompson’s ghostly figure was invoked and displayed as a notorious example of what could go wrong with the death penalty, challenging its official representation as efficient and sanitary (Seal ibid.). That a long dead, physically unreal object could regain such cultural visibility shows once again that ‘nothing’ has a social life with a traceable trajectory.

Some ghosts take the form of social representations. These are systems of encoded values and ideas, exchanged between members of a community, which serve to anchor unfamiliar objects in ‘already-known’ worldviews (Moscovici 1961). Invocations of frightening, threatening or unwelcome spectres function inversely to define the boundaries of normative behaviour, strengthening social solidarity (Durkheim 1898).

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