Dominic Pettman recently made remarks that attacking anthropocentrism is the trendy thing to do right now in academia. That being said, are there still new ways of doing this without falling into buzzwordy traps or defaulting onto the same animal-human ontologies that have already been explored (to death)? What theoretical ground hasn’t been covered by anti-humanists?

It might be strange to look towards the horror genre for the answer to these questions. It is not shocking or new to say that the monstrous in any horror text is directly related (symbolically or metaphorically) to the Other, nor would it be shocking to say that horror reflects the material conditions of the time period the texts were made in: monsters of horror movies and literature have always recapitulated our anxieties over sexuality, animality, and technology. The cannon of monsters has included the deformed, the queer, the insane, women, the dark-skinned, children etc… (Nor is it surprising that haunted spaces are often related to these categories of otherness: abandoned insane asylums, nunneries, orphanages, prisons, hospitals, etc…) But most importantly it has included the dead: zombies, vampires, frankensteins, ghosts. Can the dead (or un-dead) be put into the same category of Otherness as queers, animals, and non-whites? Is the anthropocentric worldview a life-centric one that excludes considerations of the dead and the damned? Is it because the dead are in-human (or in Hodgson’s lexicon: ab-human) that they are treated so differently?

If we look at the description of the outer worlds as described in Carnacki, it seems that the world of the dead exists right on top of the world of the living:

‘Well, we have an earth-sphere of solid matter on which to stamp as solidly as we like; and round about that sphere there lies a ring of gases the constituents of which enter largely into all life, as we understand life - that is, air.

‘But this is not the only circle of gas which is floating round us. There are, as I have been forced to conclude, larger and more attenuated “gas” belts lying, zone on zone, far up and around us. These compose what I have called the inner circles. They are surrounded in turn by a circle or belt of what I have called, for want of a better word, “emanations”.

‘This circle which I have named the Outer Circle can not lie less than a hundred thousand miles off the earth, and has a thickness which I have presumed to be anything between five and ten million miles. I believe, but I cannot prove, that it does not spin with the earth but in the opposite direction, for which a plausible cause might be found in the study of the theory upon which a certain electrical machine is constructed.

‘I have reason to believe that the spinning of this, the Outer Circle, is disturbed from time to time through causes which are quite unknown to me, but which I believe are based in physical phenomena. Now, the Outer Circle is the psychic circle, yet it is also physical. To illustrate what I mean I must again instance electricity, and say that just as electricity discovered itself to us as something quite different from any of our previous conceptions of matter, so is the Psychic or Outer Circle different from any of our previous conceptions of matter. Yet it is none the less physical in its origin, and in the sense that electricity is physical, the Outer or Psychic Circle is physical in its constituents. Speaking pictorially it is, physically, to the Inner Circle what the Inner Circle is to the upper strata of the air, and what the air - as we know that intimate gas - is to the waters and the waters to the solid world. (“The Hog”, Hodgson)

Although describing an ostensibly fictional world, Hodgson’s musings on the dead reflect attitudes about the afterlife not so distinctly different from the Jewish notion of Sheol (in which the dead float freely in a realm circumscribed on top of the earth) or the fictional realms of the dead posited in contemporary film (Insidious, Beetlejuice, Poltergeist). The underworld: even the word we often use to describe the land of dead suggest that they are, topologically and semiotically, below us (even if this world might be interlaced or piled on top of us). If the dead and the living occupy territories that overlap and/or intersect our world, why is it that attitudes about hauntings always suggest that the ghosts are the invaders? Weren’t the dead always already here before us? Our attitudes about ghosts and phantoms constantly have a bizarrely imperializing or even orientalist flavor to them: we see ghosts as exotic foreigners invading our world, and never the other way around. Then, suddenly, we are perturbed when they demand we leave their domain. Any attempts to talk with the dead are characterized by simplistic or condescending call and response communications, as if the ghosts were children or mentally impaired: “Can you hear me? Are you out there? Respond with yes or no.” As if the ghosts were too stupid to speak in full sentences. Contemporary reality shows like Ghost Adventures allow the muscly host to assert his hyper-masculinity against the “cowardly” dead. When the living invade the land of the dead, the haunted spaces allow the living to assert their hetero-normativity and hegemonic positions. Traditionally, people who can communicate with the dead are already “othered” figures: histrionic women, animals, the mentally ill, aboriginals, and children; only “othered” groups can communicate in the same “language”. In this instance, it is not only the othered individuals, but the bodies of the othered individuals, that become the technologies or media through which communication can occur: like the medium who expels ectoplasm from all of her orifices, or the shaman who dances his communication with the spirit world.

If this is the case: it is no surprise that mediation plays a role in communication with the dead. The act of translating living language (human language) into the language of the dead (ab-human language) would have to require technologies of various kinds because the idea of relating to the dead through some kind of typical person-to-person communication would be inconceivable: humans can’t talk to animals directly (the question will always remain: to what extent do animals understand language?), and we the living can’t talk to the dead directly. The dead must be mediated, communication with the dead must be mediated, because they exist on a different symbolic, semiotic, or psycho-linguistic register and only technology (high, low, or old) can bridge the gap between the registers.

Derrida was not incorrect when he stated in Specters of Marx that we need a new science of the dead, a hauntology. But even this tongue-in-cheek suggestion reeks of anthropocentrism, as if the dead need to be studied like animals. Do hegemonic, hetero-normative, or anthropocentric attitudes immediately cast the dead in the same position as the animal? It would almost be too easy to say that the dead, in fiction, are used as metaphors for otherness, but perhaps we should stop seeing the dead as metaphors for things and start considering the dead seriously, as their own category. This is not to say that a new science of ghost hunting will prove with any kind of assurance that there is life after death (a term that, in this context, might itself be considered misconstrued or repressive, as if “life” is the necessary qualification for being considered worthy of attention) but that we might need to take into more serious consideration the ways in which the dead effect the living, or (more importantly) vice versa. In what ways do the living effect the dead?

So much attention is given to the ways in which haunted houses effect the living but very little phenomenological attention is paid to what it would be like for the ghost. The aforementioned film Beetlejuice is one of the few exceptions: a movie about a house being haunted by the living. Do ghosts stuck in homes feel like birds trapped in airports: confused and lost in a vast artificial territory they cannot comprehend? Or is the experience something totally different: something that escapes the confines of human language and metaphor? Is it only through technology or mediation that we can understand the experience of the dead?

-eric