Title:
Haunts: A Eulogy to Phantasmagoria
Haunts: A Eulogy to Phantasmagoria
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Author(s)
Gilloch, Graeme
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Abstract
My aim in this paper is to rethink and
reconfigure the notion of phantasmagoria
not as forms of deception and domination
(myth, fetishism, illusion, dreaming) but
rather as sites of and encounters with
‘gatherings of ghosts’. To this end, I
compare and contrast two key visions of
contemporary urban space: the notion of
‘non places’ (non-lieux) identified by the
French social anthropologist Marc Augé and
‘place of memory’ (lieux de memoire) as
articulated by his compatriot, the historian
Pierre Nora. I suggest that these may be
understood as two sides of the same coin: non-lieux as spaces of alienation and
individualization bereft of meaning and
significance as characteristic of supermodernity (malls, airports, car
parks, gas stations, fast food chains);
lieux de memoire as spaces (and objects,
texts, and other artefacts) of mythological
history seeking to indoctrinate a national
collective consciousness in the absence of
any genuine connectedness to the past
(monuments, school textbooks, historical
personae and stories). One produces the
atomized individual; the other
incorporates this individual into the mass
and mythology of the nation. Both kinds
of ‘spaces’ are, in fact, about amnesia: the the
absence of remembrance and / or its
orchestration. So I will propose
something else which might serve as sites
of critique and counterpoint: those places
that are haunted by the repressed, the
down-trodden, the unsuccessful, the
dead, the poor, the ‘others’ of
conventional history. These are
eradicated / erased by both these kinds of
lieux: almost! They remain as traces and
residues, they survive as ghosts. The
places of the city are those that are alive
with ghosts. Far from rejecting these as
sites of fetish and ideology, we must
redeem the crowds of ghosts that haunt
the city. ‘Phantasmagoria’ is therefore to be
understood here not so much as deceptive
'phantasms in the marketplace' (the fetish
commodity chief among them) but more
simply as a ‘gathering of ghosts’ in a
certain place. And so what I am going to
advocate, and this is very much in keeping
with the Surrealists of course, iare what we
might term lieux d'hanter or simply les
hantes. Haunts because this is both an
action and a place, a place which one frequents. Not ‘non-places’, not ‘places of
memory’, but haunts. And this returns us
to the writings of Marc Augé whose essays
on Paris are very much a series of eulogies /
elegies to his haunts: the metro, the little
independent Left Bank cinema, the corner
bistro.
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Date Issued
2017-03-31
Extent
40:02 minutes
Resource Type
Moving Image
Resource Subtype
Lecture