We are Ghosts. This is Hades.
I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dust anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all prisoners here and we are dead.
—Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer.1First page. My emphasis.
The first paragraph of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer has stayed with me. Like the line that opens Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s a passage that, for me at least, sticks to memory like a burr. Nor is Orwell’s opener unrelated to Miller’s. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” As any tarot user knows, thirteen is the number of the dead.
While reading about Nostradamus when I was a kid, I had a troubling intuition. It suddenly seemed incontrovertible that the world had already ended and that we were already dead. The idea comes back to me from time to time. Why again now, I’m not sure. Blame the autumn (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun…”) or the most recent twists of the geopolitical nightmare (“What rough beast, its hour come round at last…”). For whatever reason, my mind turns again to spectrality, yours and mine, and to the question of what that childhood intuition could mean.
The world has ended. We are dead. Surely, it wasn’t meant literally; but I don’t think it was meant metaphorically either. Perhaps it comes down to how we choose to define the terms. Suppose, then, that by “world” I mean an image of the world without which the world would not cohere for us as world, and “dead” refers to an image of life without which life would not cohere to us as life. Am I just saying that a certain idea of life and the world (a certain “lifeworld”) has run its course, unbeknownst to us, such that we are now living in a different world from the one we still think we live in? For a while, I thought that was all it boiled down to—and I still do, in a sense. But to leave it at that doesn’t do justice to the intuition, any more than a literal or metaphorical interpretation would.
It isn’t that a certain idea of life and world has become obsolete. It’s that life and the world have found a new image that we are only barely aware of. This new image, which imposes itself on all of us, has death and extinction burned in. It’s not just that the world we think we inhabit and the life we think we live are no longer the case; it’s that we cannot but image forth a world that has already ended and a life that has already passed. We are ghosts, and this is Hades. Again, no metaphors: what I mean is that we experience ourselves in such a way that “phantom” is a more apt descriptor for what we think we are than, say, “person” is. We experience ourselves as beings that have, in a sense, already died, beings for whom life and the world are defined by their finitude.
We’ve wrestled with this idea in a few Weird Studies episodes. The one on Stranger Things, for instance, touched on the work of the French anthropologist Marc Augé. In a fascinating work, Augé argues that contemporary architecture and civil engineering inhere in the construction of smooth, diaphanous “non-places.”2See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992). Think of airports, malls, hotel rooms, and so on. Their function is to facilitate the controlled circulation of beings divested of identity or rootedness in a place. Such spaces suit us because they endorse an idea that we already have of ourselves as discarnate intelligences for which the body is little more than an instrument, something we have rather than something we are. It isn’t that we subconsciously believe we are dead; rather, we believe that being alive is something inherently deathly and phantomatic.
In that old Stranger Things episode and the more recent one on Brian Eno, I remarked that non-places such as the modern airport bear a subtle yet suggestive resemblance to ancient depictions of Hades, the land of the dead. Both are vast, tunnel-like spaces wherein creatures reduced to the rudiments of selfhood circulate in a kind of stupor. What you are in an airport is entirely determined by the environment: your interiority is of no import. Maybe that’s the real reason we are advised not to joke around with security personnel and customs agents. Any show of individuality, any expression of character, singles us out as a potential threat. The airport environment demands that we be nobody.
In late 2023, we can go farther than Augé did when he wrote his book, because the non-places that serve as our haunts are no longer limited to the physical milieus he described; they now include the multitudinous digital spaces that concretize what their physical precursors could only abstractly prefigure: a fully spectral lifeworld. Considering the role that technology plays in shaping this spectrocosm, should we say that our phantomatic existence is technologically contrived? That it comes down to the tools we use, such that getting rid of the tools would also get rid of the problem? Gilles Deleuze warned us not to foist the blame on our hapless creations. Technologies, he said, do not determine anything; they merely “express those social forms capable of generating them and using them.” 3See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990) Likewise for Martin Heidegger, modern technology is merely the outgrowth of a particular metaphysical assumption which we only vaguely know we hold.4See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954). He would insist that the problem goes back to Ancient Greece. I’m not sure about that, but there is no question that the assumption goes fully online when Kant publishes the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. By the turn of the twentieth century, it has been so thoroughly metabolized that it forms the background of our thought, the vector space in which the technological architecture that now contains us will emerge.
The assumption I’m talking about can be summarized as follows. The world does not consist of things that exist in themselves but of “phenomena,” that is, images shaped by the very cognitive and conceptual machinery by which we apprehend them.5“Phenomenon” comes from the Greek phainos, “to appear,” “to show itself.” It shares this root with terms like “fantasy” and “phantasm.” In Kant’s system, this machinery takes the form of the “transcendental apparatus,” which consists of reason, sensibility, and the categories of understanding.
For someone who privileges science over philosophy, the machinery takes the form of the brain (this angle tends to omit the fact that the brain itself is just another image “in the brain”). Insofar as everything that we see, hear, and touch is a representation that exists only “for us,” it is no longer correct to say that humans are in the world. The phrase is, at best, a figure of speech. In truth, it is the other way around: the world is inside us. Or so we think. Finding out the real world, the world in itself, involves breaking through the phenomena we naively take to be objective reality in order to apprehend the substrate that gives rise to them. But as hinted above with the brain, this puts us in a catch 22, as Kant knew well. Given that the cognitive apparatus we use to pierce through the illusion is the very same apparatus that generates the illusion to begin with, whatever we find “behind” phenomena will be equally phenomenal. It’s images all the way down, representations of representations in an infinite hall of mirrors. Spectrality in a nutshell.
This metaphysical assumption is too absurd for anyone to endorse it categorically, if only because of its implicit logic, which makes any philosophical position other than solipsism arbitrary. If Kant is right to say that space and time only exist in the human mind, and that such basic categories as causality and possibility have no validity outside our mentation, on what basis can he truly claim that anything other than him exists? The post-Kantian Fichte saw the writing on the wall and had the balls to cry it out on the market square. In the place of the old principle of identity, foundation of all logic (A = A), he substituted the more accurate, eminently modern formula: “Me = Me.”
But again, these are games philosophers play. In the real world, the ethos of suspicion that Kant inaugurated took more pragmatic forms. For one, it convinced educated Westerners that reality was not given, and that to think otherwise was “naïve.” Knowing reality requires us to decode it. We must translate its biologically determined (and thus ultimately false) representations into more accurate—and necessarily less human—images, images whose very abstraction is what gives them primacy over the concrete.
In the popular consciousness, this means atoms replacing things, brains replacing souls, genes replacing will, and the block universe replacing space and time as lived dimensions of the given world. These entities—atoms, brains, genes, the spacetime continuum—are not things but images. Whereas the chair I’m sitting in may or may not be just an image, the idea of the block universe definitely is and forever will be an image, the predictive power it lends certain experimentations notwithstanding. By image, I do not mean unreal. I simply mean that, for us, the reality of the block universe is an imaginal reality. It manifests through the imagination.
The point is that our metaphysics has leveraged the undeniable power of images at the cost of overlooking what distinguishes them from sensible things. It’s not so much that we don’t know that the sensible world is there: we know it, we experience it, but we don’t believe in it. In our minds, the sensible world pales in comparison to the images we privilege, be they conceptual, scientific, psychological, aesthetic, political, economic. These images are more real than the experiential world; they form a vast overlay between us and the things that compose this world, including our bodies.
Never has the image—and through it, the imaginal—exerted such power over humanity as it does today. This is the true weirdness of our situation, and the reason I keep saying that our problem isn’t that we are too modern but that we are not modern enough. Far from being disenchanted, we have never known such razzle-dazzle as the sorcerous pageantry of the late-capitalist spectacle. The wizardry once restricted to secret cabals and heretical sects is now the stuff of routine operations. Everywhere, images override things; everywhere, the imaginal overtakes the material.
Images belong to a realm beyond matter and time. Think of how the laws of nature vanish in your nightly excursions into the imaginal world of dreams. Unlike the thing, the image isn’t imbricated in a causal cosmos of interdependent beings. The image is an autonomous, unfettered, discrete entity. It isn’t wrong to describe it as “digital.” The ambient imaginality—or digitality—of our era pulls us away from the ebbs and flows of the analog cosmos. Take the category of life, for instance. The old vitalist doctrine positing a primal difference between living beings and inanimate things is often cited as an example of how easily the scientists of the past succumbed to the deceptive lure of mere “appearances.”
Between living and non-living matter, we are told, no essential difference obtains. “Following the science” means troubling our capacity to tell life from non-life. It means placing people and corpses on lines that ultimately converge. In The Secret Commonwealth, the folklorist Robert Kirk observed that the world of dreams, magic, and fairies is, to the common folk he interviewed, indistinguishable from the land of the dead. An imaginal world, a digital world, is a dead world. Hence, I think, the sense that “we are already dead.”
As for the other part of my intuition, about the end of the world, we may find grounds for it in the idea of the block universe, so long as we see it as just one example among many we could cite. The block universe de-realizes experiential time—that which Henri Bergson called “durée”—by replacing it with a more abstract, yet more “real,” relativity of time and space. In an effort to remind us that this imaginal model of space and time could never abolish durée, Bergson debated Einstein on this topic in 1922. He was practically laughed out of the room, and it wasn’t until very recently that people finally started grokking the point that he was trying to make. In a block universe, what will happen has, in a sense, already taken place.
The implication is that experience is illusory. In reality, everything has happened, or nothing does, or anything does; you can put it any way you like because our experience of time is inadequate to what time is. The British thinker Ray Brassier claims that since we know “with certainty” that the sun must go out in five billion years, we can confidently say that, logically speaking, the world has already ended.6See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007). Every rationale is always-already a kind of madness; every life, a form of death. But since death is no more substantial than anything else, it isn’t quite right to speak in such sepulchral terms. One ought to speak instead of extinction, as in the extinguishing of a flame or flickering image. Again, all goes spectral: we are not the dead so much as the undead, the unalive.
Alejandro Amenábar’s supernatural film The Others (2001) rests on a conceit that, as far as I know, had never been tried before: the idea that if the living can be haunted by the dead, the dead may also be haunted by the living. In the film, a woman and her two children inhabit a mansion on the tiny isle of Jersey. Setting the story in the Channel Islands evokes the idea of a fragmented world suspended between more substantial places, which the fog that pervades the film cuts off. We learn that the woman, played by Nicole Kidman, lost her husband in the war. She and her children have locked themselves up in the house and have no intention of leaving. The story begins with the arrival of three servants, who have come to replace the recently vanished house staff. As the plot unfolds and it becomes apparent that the house is haunted by a family of ghosts, the story adopts the familiar patterns of a classic ghost story. Not until the very end do we learn the truth, namely that it is the woman, her children, and the servants who are the ghosts. The phenomena they have witnessed throughout the movie were caused by the activities of the flesh-and-blood family that has moved into the vacant mansion.
It is worth nothing that The Others is set in late 1945, months after the bombs dropped on Japan. Does it mark the point of inversion, the pivot point where the living and the dead switched places? On the podcast and in our writings, Phil and I have both pointed to Hiroshima as the moment when everything changed. As Phil put it in a talk he gave in Chicago a few years back, the fall of the bomb confronted us with “the dark gnosis of absolute contingency,” the revelation that “nothing is necessary, not the world, not the universe, not even God. It’s contingency all the way down.”7Phil Ford, “Garmonbozia: A Daimonic Commentary on Nuclear Fear” (2019). Unpublished. In Reclaiming Art, I wrote that the bomb was so shatteringly disruptive of certain tenets of human experience that it gave the lie even to the most pessimistic of our ancient prophets. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever,” wrote the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes. As it turns out, however, nothing abideth forever, not even the earth.
The nuclear age plunged us all, headlong, into the far-flung temporalities of astronomy, geology, and physics. It put us in a time of the nonhuman—of atoms, seisms, and supernovas. One cannot underestimate the role of an image—namely the atom, always imagined and never directly observed—in the magical operation that sparked this great turning. Is it any wonder that the atomic age occasioned an unprecedented influx of imaginal entities into our world, first by way of television and then by way of the countless LED displays that now mediate our access to reality? Spectres in a world of spectres, we children of the Bomb have been set adrift in the groundless space of absolute contingency. Levinas was right to posit the free-floating astronaut as the key figure of our age.8Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us” in Difficult Freedom (1990), p. 233. You could make the case that, as the figure of the crucified Christ symbolizes Christianity, so the figure of the dead astronaut symbolizes modernity. See the opening shots of the video of David Bowie’s farewell anthem, “Blackstar.”
Are we not haunted today by a life that seems always “elsewhere,” as Milan Kundera put it? What will it take for us to believe again—not in some otherworld, but in this one, the one that it is given to us to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste? What is the status of this world in the light of the imaginal realm that beckons us from our dreams and screens?
Bringing this essay to a satisfactory conclusion would double its length, so I will give the last word to my ghostly teacher Deleuze, who made the reclamation of faith in this world the signature of his late style. Here’s how he put it in a lecture he gave back in 1984 (O fateful year):
We are in a very strange situation with the world today. What we demand, what we require, are reasons to believe in this world. Just think about it: we have stopped believing either in another world or in the possibility of transforming this one. What we are asking for is something simpler, as if we were all affected by a universal schizophrenia, or a universal hypochondria. You know, in the hypochondriac delirium, there is no more world, no more body, no more organs. Or schizophrenia, which manifests more as … an escape from the world, a loss of world. That’s where we are. (…) We need reasons—this has never been an issue for philosophy before—we need reasons to believe in this world.9Gilles Deleuze, “L’image-pensée,” course at Vincennes University, 6 November 1984. My translation.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared on the Weird Studies Patreon.
Notes
↑1 | First page. My emphasis. |
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↑2 | See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992). |
↑3 | See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990) |
↑4 | See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954). |
↑5 | “Phenomenon” comes from the Greek phainos, “to appear,” “to show itself.” It shares this root with terms like “fantasy” and “phantasm.” |
↑6 | See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007). |
↑7 | Phil Ford, “Garmonbozia: A Daimonic Commentary on Nuclear Fear” (2019). Unpublished. |
↑8 | Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us” in Difficult Freedom (1990), p. 233. You could make the case that, as the figure of the crucified Christ symbolizes Christianity, so the figure of the dead astronaut symbolizes modernity. See the opening shots of the video of David Bowie’s farewell anthem, “Blackstar.” |
↑9 | Gilles Deleuze, “L’image-pensée,” course at Vincennes University, 6 November 1984. My translation. |