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Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, by Avery F. Gordon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 252 pp. $49.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8166-20830. $19.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8166-2089-X.
I am not at all at home with this book and had difficulty writing a review. Since I no longer honor the style of reviewing that transforms the intimacies of text-reader conversations into objective evaluations, I've written this to discover and explicate the sources of my discomfort.
Gordon is deeply dissatisfied with established ways of writing sociology. "[L]ife is more complicated than those of us who study it have usually taken for granted" (p. 7). She holds that investigating society's "ghostly aspects" (p. 7) changes fundamentally how we produce knowledge. Haunting-or ghostly matters-is paradigmatic of the surplus of complication that escapes standard sociologies.
Gordon's method of investigating ghostly matters goes something like this: Sociologists are readers. We are continually engaged in various ways with the textual output of the society. Something we read engages us. Investigating follows, exegetical to the text that is the point of entry. For example, someone is missing from a photograph of psychoanalysts assembled in Weimar in 1991. Sabina Spielrein, who might have been there, is not among them. Investigation is a historical work. Spielrein was active in the early development...