Buy an essay Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, a book by Avery F. Gordon

1. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, a book by Avery F. Gordon, is devoted to the problem of life complexity. Though this issue may seem to be too broad and not scientific, with no theoretical significance, she tends to explain that this question has been too generalized and simplified and paid too little attention among sociologists and social analysts. To be more specific, she pays attention to the calamities of everyday life we all sink in while we have to “move analytically between that sad and sunken couch that sags in just that place where an unrememberable past and unimaginable future force us to sit day after day” (Gordon 2008, 4). What is more, Gordon concentrates her attention on the painful divide between the social and the individual, the imagination and analysis, emotion and logic, the abstract and the concrete – a divide constituted historically. Hereof she moves to the problem of a person living under conditions of racialized capitalism, property and market values through which private is opposed to social and common. This is a problem of a part divided from the whole, leading to social disappearance and enslavement as a result. It is also articulated in the political context, while the diseases of the contemporary society, the very evils of political systems are revealed and demonstrates that the differences in cultures do not matter for the issue. In every corner of the world “ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day” (Gordon 2008, 204).
Gordon is driven by the idea to understand the way people act, behave and live, the reasons, styles and consequences of actions they take as well as to investigate what can be done in some other way and thus how things can be changed in everyday life. Besides, she intended to show how these perspectives can be reviewed in historical context, taking to account the events of the past that influence all the generations throughout the world.

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These influences are compared with ghosts that haunt every one of us in present. “The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life,” she insists (Gordon 2008, 8). Besides, Gordon uses the example of social studies to open the entry into a new way of “knowing”, getting knowledge of the things behind the things. The ultimate goal of changes to be brought forward through this new way of thinking is to build a more just society and thus to make the world less cruel. To provide this new type of knowing, by Gordon, the researcher should pay maximum attention to various hints and murmurs of the history, the whispers of minorities, suggestions and intimations hidden inter lines, portents, reflections and echoes requiring sensitive interpretation. It is not so much a scientific investigation as a kind of speculation and meditation, “haunting”, “a process that links an institution and an individual, a social structure and a subject, and history and a biography” (Gordon 2008, 19). In other words, the work she has written calls for going beyond the limits of present comprehension and reaching new forms of sociality as well as subjectivity in thinking.
2. “To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. That is its utopian grace: to encourage a steely sorrow laced with delight for what we lost that we never had; to long for the insight of that moment in which we recognize that is could been and can be otherwise,” Gordon (2008, 57) writes. I found this passage quite inspiring, though I can’t say I completely understand Gordon’s reasoning, but I feel that if once to become brave enough to open your mind to haunting, you won’t be able to do without it. It goes without saying that haunting is not an easy and pleasant experience. It can be frightening, it can be traumatic and oppressive, and you never can be sure in the logic of events you investigate. “What’s distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely,” Gordon (2008, xvi) warns. But despite all the risks and discomforts, it is a chance to see things in an absolutely new turn. The world will never the same again after you welcome those ghosts in your mind, but that is truly the way to have something changed, to have something done.
3. The interesting point to discuss is the way Gordon applies the study of psychoanalysis and the discourse of the unconscious speaking through the consciousness. What is more, it would be interesting to transfer the approach proposed by the author to linguistics and literature study as well as other philological fields.

Work Cited
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.