pre-inhabitation, part 2: House

Nothing I write needs to be true.

But let me be clear: there is no such thing as a haunting house. Despite my first post describing my students’ real fear that Danielewski’s house would escape its leaves and swallow them up in their beds, let me repeat that haunted, possessed, evil, animated and homicidal houses don’t exist. The book does. And it is a daemon of affect. But Danielewski’s house on Ash Tree Lane is also particular because the house itself–and not ghosts or undead human inhabitants–commits all manner of creepy and hostile actions upon the living humans that breach its threshold.

Another unique twist: the house sucks humans into its expanding insides and these insides contain only the barest architectural content…there is no people stuff inside the expansive house. The living move their stuff in when they arrive but when the house infolds, its spaces are minimalist. When the living go into these infolds, they haul in stuff, particularly recording media.

The house and its inhabitants compete over enframing. The actual story of the novel presents a series of embedded protagonists that struggle to document (read capture in a given medium) the power of intensive expansion exercised by the house and by humans with mediation. They fight to determine if ‘what’ captures ‘who’ or if ‘who’ captures ‘what’?

[The academic in me demands some airtime.]

Derrida wrote nicely of this organic and non-organic battle over the capture or “conjuring” of powers:

…the medium of the media themselves … is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes. It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death. It requires … to save time and space rather than just to make up a word, hauntology.

(Specters of Marx, Routledge, 63)

In this sense, nearly every moment of life in media thick culture is spectralizing and we labor constantly to elaborate collective and distributed hauntologies. The failure of my video, “House,” was a hauntological failure, but let us come back to the “House” later.

Popularly, a haunted house refers to a house in which vindictive or trapped dead folk refuse to or cannot leave after shuffling off their mortal coils. These ghosts or undead inhabitants provoke horror because they breach established human understandings of the material world, in many cases summoning religion, magic, sacralization, or, in the case of fraudulent (read NOT otherworldly) horror, technology as a narrative bridge, demonstrating the very confusion of “religion from demonic sacralization” (Derrida on Patocka, The Gift of Death, Chicago, 1-2) in the first instance and spectralization by medial capture in the fraudulent second. The affect of horror constricts around the intension and closure of life flowing out to the extension and aperture of death and worse, the reverse.

Regardless the horror provoked by the witnesses and victims of their actions, horrible things have happened to the undead and to ghosts. As haints, they continue to suffer from their mortal life-abuse in an Oedipal narrative tracing that of the adult abuser as a victim of child abuse. The cycle continues. If only the pain and suffering of the early life spent dwelling in violence, fear and abjection could be recognized, confronted, and either resolved or purged….

Instead of simply crossing the threshold of the temporality of generations, the victimized/er ghost or undead crosses the thresholds time/space and matter/energy. How do you fight that with a camcorder? Haunted houses only become de-haunted by sealing up the thresholds, which always threaten a future breach (“This history will never come to a close,” (Derrida, Death 7)), or by overflowing the thresholds, creating a haunted world (“incorporation” or “repression” of the “mysterium tremendum” (ibid)). And in both cases, the discovery of the great mystery must be counter-balanced by a reinstatement of its secrecy.

Haunting and haunted houses belong not only to the resonance of living death but to our collective hauntological practices mixed up with secret childhood wounds and woes surviving generational spans. These houses are homes, for better or worse. And unlike Danielewski’s haunting house of leaves, haunted houses usually offer an excess of architectural content and are crammed full of people stuff.

The material body of the haunted house opens up like a wunderkammer of loved and despised belongings, thick with the oils, slough, care and use of human handling. Particularly wonder-filled are the hauntologies made by previous inhabitants: family photos, needle-work, and distributions of furniture, clothing, and food left in the places where they were touched for the last time. These are material clues, traces of the secrecy that closes over life after death, memento mori but also memento viveri that while reaching for that which is beyond the actualizing world, surf a fulcrum. And these mementi, these are the real ghosts just as the body of architecture and auratic wear and tear upon its walls and floors are the real #ghostedhouse.

A #ghostedhouse is an empty house, perhaps an abandoned house. But it bears secret histories of life, not otherworldly, but of other times of life, of affections persisting in the stone, wood, and glass and in the minutiae of furniture, clothing, toys… the proper and personal belongings and lived and touched objects that continue to inhabit a #ghostedhouse. When a house remains full of the dusty stuff and moldy belongings of people after the people have gone, the house and these things resonate with abandonment. They plaintively call for #inhabitation.