Seeing the Specter: A Gothic
Metaphor of Subjectivity, Popular
Culture, and Consumerism
Clifford D. Deaton
Abstract – Due to their very nature, some societal forces are invisible to common
perception. Using the work of Foucault and Baudrillard, this essay develops a theory of
“the Specter” — an invisible consumer phenomenon that perpetuates a negative
symbolic exchange between the subjective viewer and the commodity form. The Specter
promulgates itself as a totalizing consumer force, yet Baudrillard suggests that there is
always a point at which Impossible Exchange operates. With the revivification of critical
insight, the specter returns to its rightful place as an aspect of symbolic exchange,
creating a holdfast for the subjective viewer. Through various media such as the pop
music of the Postal Service, a contemporary novel by Sarah Ash, and the Mummy of
Lenin, this paper explores the relationship between subjectivity, ideology, and consumer
culture.
The
Gothic metaphor, as set forth in this paper, is an attempt to describe the
characteristics of an invisible cultural phenomenon. Gothic literature tells tales of
dark supernatural foes, macabre events and sudden appearances. In many ways the
Gothic novel was a response and an accomplice to realism and the modernist project with which it
coincided historically (Armstrong 2-3). This paper discusses the modernist project from the
perspective of a Gothic metaphor, using the characteristics of the Gothic to outline a theory on how
subjectivity interrelates with the symbolic. A most compelling characteristic of the Gothic genre is the
suspension of disbelief that it demands of its readers. Beyond the base suspension that is required by
any work of fiction, the Gothic genre requires the suspension of disbelief in the supernatural through
the supernatural that we can see the workings of a phenomenon quite peculiar. It is paradoxically a
visible and an invisible phenomenon, and it is quite undead. The return of the living dead, as in Bram
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Stokers Dracula or Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, is a popular theme of the Gothic genre. The
Gothic metaphor asks that we suspend our disbelief in the possibility of the undead, the possibility of
the supernatural, so that we can see for ourselves a modern relationship characterized by much that is
Gothic.
Living dead: it seems a contradiction, the living and the dead combined into one being. What
has life cannot have death as well, or so some rationale would dictate. As Jean Baudrillard’s work
points out, there is a level at which symbols and forms operate—a symbolic exchange between beings
—that bypasses individuality. In contemporary cultural theory, when we approach the body as a
symbol, it is not a symbol of life, but rather of the reversibility of life; the body as symbol becomes “a
substance which can move through other—animal, mineral, or vegetable—forms” (Baudrillard 2003:
17). This protean symbolic form is neither living nor dead, and is in fact both at once simultaneously.
This virtually inexplicable transmutation of forms is not a visual phenomenon, and so it becomes a
secret. In a world that relies heavily on visibility, valuing the totalizing influence of visual information,
things that cannot be explained are secreted away; they become “occult, clandestine, maleficent…but
these things cannot be destroyed” (Baudrillard 2003: 33). The world of symbolic exchange exists as
invisible and secret, and it is this secret invisibility that the Gothic metaphor allows us to penetrate.
This paper approaches the question of how symbolic exchange operates, from the perspective of
pop culture, literature, and music. This inquiry develops the Gothic Metaphor as a theory of the
Specter, making use of the vision-ary1 theories of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard,. In doing so,
this paper aims to shed light onto a societal phenomenon: the hidden the world of symbolic exchange.
We will see the specter operating through popular music, contemporary Gothic literature and,
ultimately, the ideology of communism. Although it may seem that the Specter is pervasive and
overwhelming, I conclude that there remains a holdfast of impossible exchange where the subject can
be involved in the system of objects and participate in the symbolic exchange so prevalent in our
society, yet be revivified when facing the totalizing specter of economic and symbolic exchange.
A few key questions guide our journey in to the realms of the undead: What characteristics of
the Gothic undead are relevant to a discussion of symbolic exchange? What does the act of viewing
have to do with the relationship between specter and subject? How is the theory of the specter different
from Baudrillard’s simulacra, and why is the difference important? How are specters created, and
where can we find evidence of the existence of the specter? These questions, and the suspension of
disbelief in the existence of the undead, help set the tone for an inquiry into the Gothic metaphor.
Gothic Undead and the Mirror
When discussing the undead we cannot ignore the cultural references so prevalent in popular
culture: Romano’s Night of the Living Dead, the Evil Dead movies, and many others. These cultural
references are indicative of a society that has repressed some aspect of the symbolically supernatural
and indicative of a society on the edge of transformation (Zizek 1991). It is the transformation between
life and death, a society involved in symbolic exchange. Popular culture frequently depicts the undead
as a viral threat, as a displacement of the subject, and as a manipulator of individuality (Armstrong
2005, Zizek 1991). “The dead walk among us. Zombies2, ghouls—no matter what their label—these
1
For the purposes of this paper, I use “vision-ary,” to mean “relating to the study of vision, the gaze, and visuality,” rather
than the customary use and meaning of the word “visionary.”
2
This account is from the Zombie Survival Guide, a pop culture guidebook on staying alive in a world overrun by the
undead. The book gives “real world” tactical advice on how to defeat zombies using firearms and household devices. One
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somnambulists are the greatest threat to humanity, other than humanity itself” (Brooks 2003). What is
so compelling here is the concept of the undead as a threat. The relationship between the depiction of
the undead and the individual is always one of violence, usurpation and consumption. It is this
symbolic exchange between the undead and individual—the confrontation between life and death—that
the Gothic metaphor explores.
We must differentiate between the popular images of the undead and the goal of the Gothic
metaphor. Popular culture depicts two general types of undead: corporeal (the zombie, mummy, etc.)
and incorporeal (the poltergeist, phantom, etc.). When dealing in the symbolic exchange of forms, we
are generally referring to the incorporeal, the evanescent and intangible. Even so, we cannot ignore the
corporeal. Symbolic exchange involves both the body and the symbol; it is simultaneously form and
function in exchange. This is why the vampire is the most convincing depiction of undead for our
discussion. “Clearly marked as imaginary, vampire practices represent precisely that notion of kinship
as one that reproduces itself at the expense of humanity. Natural reproduction is hardly the issue,
however” (Armstrong 146). The vampire is a reproductive phenomenon, but the reproduction is not
living, it is undead. The vampire can transform between physical body and ethereal spirit, entering and
reproducing bodies as well as symbols. It is the bridge between undead form and undead function.
The undead is a secret involved in a symbolic exchange, it reproduces itself as undead through
the bodies that it consumes. This is the Gothic metaphor: an attempt to see into the workings of the
symbolic exchange and into the reversibility of life. But how do we see? If this is a secret event, an
invisible phenomenon and an incorporeal subject, how then can we perceive this Gothic metaphor?
Uncovering the specter that we seek requires a visual approach, and a stable and critical viewpoint
from which to analyze the conditions involved in a symbolic exchange of the undead. The act of
viewing is where this inquiry begins, for it is in that our Gothic metaphor is first spawned. “The
flickering between the dynamics of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’ operate in such a way that the I and the
eye are intricately and inseparably related” (Stern 26). When we consider the process of viewing we
must begin by viewing ourselves viewing ourselves, in a reflexive process. Viewing should be a selfexploration, a reflection of pure consciousness and cognition.
If viewing is the reflection of consciousness, then the mirror is the symbol of critical selfanalysis. “In theory, the mirror should have provided…access to an ‘abstract platonic realm’ of pure
imagination” (Axelrod 286). While the mirror may or may not grant access to the platonic, it does
expand the imagination and provide the type of inquiry that we need for the Gothic metaphor. The
introduction of the mirror as a reflexive lens that gives us critical access into our own subjectivity is
also the introduction of a gateway for symbolic exchange. The mirror is simultaneously a lens for
imaginative and self-reflexive thought, and a gateway to access the realm of symbolic exchange. If the
nature of humanity is one of subjection, where the body bows to the exchange of signs, then there must
be a way for us, as mirrored viewers, to access and assess our own subjection. “In a more general
sense we may say that the mirror is a symbolic object which not only reflects the characteristics of the
individual, but also echoes in its expansion the historical expansion of individual consciousness”
(Baudrillard 1996: 20). The mirror emits light: historical vision may be reflected back upon the
individual, a second sight that gives additional critical insight. For the purposes of this paper, the
mirror is a heuristic that signifies critical and self-reflexive analysis, and thus functions as a gateway
for the reclamation of individual agency.
can only guess as to the efficacy of this advice, but for what it is worth the text seems well researched.
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We have here the beginning of the Gothic metaphor—an analysis of contemporary Western
culture built out of a conception of the undead and the symbolic exchange of the body, and seen
through the visual gateway of the mirror. This paper argues that the act of viewing initiates the
relationship between the subject and the symbol. An inquiry into theories about the gaze and visual
culture, which I call vision-ary theory, illuminates our understanding of what this process entails. The
mirror will be our guide throughout this journey into the phenomenology of our cultural undeath.
Vision-ary Theory
No one better describes the societal conditions of viewing than Michel Foucault, and his theory
of the panopticon.3 The panopticon is a society-wide system of viewing based in the subjected nature
of the soul. Panoptic theory asserts that individuals are in a constant state of viewing themselves as
being-viewed. Foucault uses Bentham’s prison as a metaphor for society at large: “Watching itself,
such a subject partakes in what Michel Foucault terms…‘self policing’ (Stern 30). In viewing their
own thoughts and actions, subjects adjust themselves according to internalized societal norms without
formal subjugation to repressive power.
A dual notion of the act of viewing rules the societal panopticon, a duality between the subject
and the unexercised power of an external viewer. Surveillance is omnipresent in the panopticon, but it
is a self-surveillance. The subject perceives itself as always visible, forced into a cell of isolation and
exposed before the normalizing power of society. At the same time the individual is unable to perceive
who and what it is being viewed by, because there is in reality no external viewing “other.” This
subjectifying power relationship renders the individual malleable and self-correcting: the subject
becomes one who is a viewing being, being viewed.
Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one
invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there constitutes the
meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the
supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines
the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is
amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is
carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies (Foucault
217).
Foucault recognizes that signs, the cultural markers of normalizing power, reinforce the power of
norms over subjectivity. Society is no longer the historical spectacle, where power was demonstrated
visibly through execution and circus. Instead, power is held in the system of surveillance, and
“fabricates” the life of the individual as subjected.
The societal panopticon transforms viewing, the most pure form of self-reflection, into an agent
of normalizing power. It is this perversion that is Gothic; it is this diverted use that turns a symbol of
consciousness into a sign of control. We should not understand this panoptic view to be merely a false
sense of consciousness because it affects the whole body, not just consciousness. Foucault states that
3
Based on Jeremy Bentham’s plan for the perfect prison, the panopticon is an analogy for contemporary society. Grounded
in the power of societal discipline, the panopticon is an enclosure comprised of multitude of single cells surrounding a
central watch tower. Each of the cells is isolated and the prisoner is under constant surveillance by the power of the
viewing tower.
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the panoptic process is not one of repression or alteration; rather, it is one that fabricates a subjected
sense of being. Like in Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Cask of Amontillado, the viewer is slowly walled
in by a subjectifying sense of external viewing. What is at issue here is the essence of the modern
subject. The building blocks of subjectifying and normalizing signs create the very lives we live, the
thoughts we think and actions we take. In essence, they create a soul:
The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect
of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him
to existence, which is in itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body.
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the
body (Foucault 30).
The normalized and constructed nature of disciplined life that the Foucaultian subject’s soul conveys is
the singular essence of modern subjectivity. Foucault gently admonishes the idealistic modern thinkers
who seek to free the soul from illusion, and asserts that the autonomous soul itself is an illusion,
subjected at a deeper level by the very tools of science and rationality that modern proponents of the
rational ideal would employ to free it.
This is a difficult idea to accept: the reduction of the human soul to a form of control. But if at
essence we are fabricated by the images, discipline and norms of society, is not our soul one of
subjection? Jean Baudrillard understands subjectivity through signs and the influences imparted by the
objects of consumption. In The System of Objects, Baudrillard develops a theory of human subjection
that is derived from the subject-object relationship and the “illusion of personal distinctiveness”
(Baudrillard 1996: 165). In the system of objects a model is the ideal image: the singular prototype. A
series of secondary mass-produced or “serial” products are developed from this model. For
Baudrillard, the value of an object comes not from its usefulness, but rather from its value as a cultural
icon.4 The stronger the ideal image’s influence is on an object, the more valued an object will be. The
consumer attempts to personalize each new product purchased by seeking authentic objects—models5
—instead of mass-manufactured products.
Consider the personal computer, a product based on a model computer that is efficient and
available to all. The model personal computer is modular and adaptable to individual needs/desires. In
purchasing this object, an individual believes that he or she is getting a model, but the software,
hardware and brand names are all mass produced, all serial. Even the name of this product is
“personal,” and like all other personal objects it is in fact a serial consumable masquerading as a model.
In purchasing a personalized object, a consumer is attempting to invest his/her nature and subjectivity
into the object, but the model is just an idealized image, one that does not really exist.
It is clear that in the act of personalized consumption the subject in his very insistence
on being a subject, succeeds in manifesting himself only as an object of economic
4
This is similar to the Marxist division between use value and exchange value, except that the cultural value is not
determined by purely economic means, but rather by the hierarchical and class connotations that come along with a product.
Cultural value is a “psycho-sociological dynamic” (Baudrillard 1996: 151).
5
The model would be defined as the “ideal object”, but also as something theoretically tangible. Designer clothing, and the
ever changing fashion object, is a good example. You can purchase designer clothing but as soon as you do the fashion
changes and you no longer have the model, but just another serial product. The model is a chimera.
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demand. His project, filtered and fragmented in advance, is dashed by the very process
it is supposed to realize it (Baudrillard 1996: 165).
In failing to attain the idealized image, the consumer becomes subservient to the economic object. The
consumer has failed in his/her project to attain the model, and instead is left with the personalized but
no less serial object. By investing nature into a personalized object, the consumer becomes the subject
of the object he/she wishes to personalize. The subject comes to be defined by the object.
Baudrillard’s theory describes another factor of human subjectivity, one that complements the
panoptic theory we have already discussed. In both theories, subjectivity is developed by modes of
viewing: In Foucault’s account, viewing exerts a normalizing force on subjectivity, while Baudrillard
describes the objectifying effect of viewing serial objects as personal. In seeing the personalized object
as a model, the viewer is tricked into objectifying him/herself through his/her serial object. The
illusion of personalization drives a deep reification of consciousness, the delusion of the model only
perpetuating a cycle of consumption. The illusion that emerges from viewing objects and their signs
brings us directly to the resurrection of the living dead.
Returning to our metaphor, the undead symbolic exchange is created through a process of
reified viewing, through the misinterpretations of signs. We have created a framework of viewing that
involves the societal panopticon, the system of norms and judgment, and the symbolic system of
objects. In essence we have seen the effect of viewing, but we have not yet analyzed what is spawned
at that effected moment. Does viewing have an affect other than the effect of subjection?
Subject-viewing creates the simulation of a real event or object, a mimicked reality that is in
itself hollow and without meaning.
Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the
merest fact—the models come first, their circulation, orbital like the bomb, constitutes
the genuine magnetic field of the event. The facts no longer have a specific trajectory,
they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the
models at once (Baudrillard 1994: 16).
The simulation is not logical or reasonable. It is a field of misinformation born of the normalized
viewing of objects as models, instead of ersatz serial products. The singular fact of subjectivity is
broadcast from all the false models at once, creating a visual field that is only a simulation of the real.
The simulation is built out of signs, and therefore is easily identified in those bastions of culture,
literature and music.
Popular Music as a Mirror of Spectral Simulation
Contemporary pop music never fails to reveal this simulation of real socio-cultural signs, and it is
to this media that we turn. In their 2004 album Give Up, the band The Postal Service has a few songs
that show the interaction between contemporary culture and simulation, including the song “Clark
Gable:”
I have been waiting since birth to find a love that would look and sound like a movie…
‘I need you to pretend that we are in love again.’ And you agreed to. I want so badly to
believe that ‘there is truth, that love is real’ and I want life in every word to the extent
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that it’s absurd…and I kissed you in a style Clark Gable would have admired (I thought
it classic) (Tamborello & Gibbard).
The fixing of an emotional sign, like love, to a cultural icon, like the movie Gone With the Wind,
depicts the realm of simulation. In this filmic simulation, love is characterized by the acts and
attitudes actors display on the screen, not by the relationships between real people. Actors
simulating love becomes the postmodern definition of love desired by pop culture. The singer
asks his former love if she would “pretend we are in love again” in an attempt to find the
romance that he desires. The characters are simulating the simulated love6 of the movie screen,
in an attempt to experience something that is “real.”
Baudrillard believes that the system of objects and norms liquidates all symbols, all sign-objects
and all referentials, and resurrects them as a reified image, his “simulacra.” The simulacra is the
undead image of the symbolic, the sign of consumerism and norm, it is the mode of power and,
simultaneously, the new spectacle for the masses. While objects and norms structure the individual and
build him/her as a subjective being, the subject participates by viewing and legitimating those signs.
The signs themselves become a new form of spectacle, a field of precessing images that distract and
entrance the subject, making him/her docile both socio-politically and economically.
The song “This Place is a Prison,” again from The Postal Service, is a poetic replica of the
simulacra/spectacle: “I know there’s a big world out there like the one I saw on the screen. In my
living room late last night, it was almost too bright to see…what does it take, how long must I wait?”
(Tamborello & Gibbard). As the character in the song sits on his couch watching television, we hear
that his definition of the world is created through the visual spectacle. The screen takes the place of
real experience, and transforms the world into a simulation which is viewable, but never attainable.
The desperate cry at the end is directly related to our mirror: a critical gasp that beholds the spectacle,
perhaps even sees through the façade of the screen, and yet is still waiting. The Postal Service shows
that even if the viewer has critical access to their subjection this does not assure action to mitigate the
relationship.
Seeing the Specter
The specter is born out of the postmodern spectacle. The specter is the undead image and the
resurrected simulation of a sign. Spawned from the reified viewer-subject, the specter encompasses the
model and the subject in a vampiric exchange of life. The model is set to be viewed, but as we see
now, that sign is hollow. By “buying into” the truth of the specter, and by validating it through norms
and purchases, the subject imparts to it a semblance of reality, a false life and a false importance. The
specter feeds and grows, perpetuating itself through the respect and validity granted to it by the subjectviewer.
If the concept of a societal specter seems too outlandish we can use our critical mirror to access
the supernatural nature of another societal ghost, Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand.’ Like our specter, the
invisible hand is incorporeal and mediates between objects and people, moderating and adjusting
6
On one level this is a mockery of love, a vicious cycle of simulated viewing which perpetuates misinterpretation.
Some consolation comes through the physical kiss, which is a real expression of love, even though it is likened to the
simulated classic Clark Gable. The simulation of simulated love does bring some real life romance to our characters,
but we don’t know from the song whether the experience rekindles love, or is in itself just another simulation.
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economic relationships. “The original intentions of actions are superseded by the intervention of an
‘invisible hand,’ but Smith represents the economic reconciliation of individual and social interest as
the natural, ordinary course of events” (Andriopoulos 740). The invisible hand appears to be a natural
phenomenon, but is in truth an artificial agent. The market, like our viewer-subject, is subject to the
power of the invisible hand.
The specter is not Baudrillard’s simulacra. Baudrillard’s theory is hyperbolic: his world of
“hyperreality” is an implosion that has destroyed perspective and panopticon, even the critical mirror.
How, then, can he sit and write about his hyperreal system, if it has destroyed all perspective including
his own? We must see that the specter is a specter of sign, not one of all-encompassing reality. The
specter of society is the myth of each individual norm and each use of juridical power. The specter of
economy is the myth of model and seriality. Each reified sign is its own unique specter, and each has a
complementary and vampiric affect upon the viewer-subject. The specters join together to create a
field, a spectacle of the specter that is pervasive, but not universal.
The specter is characterized by a few general traits: invisibility, vampirism, and objectperspective. Like the guards of the panopticon, the specter is impossible to see without the reflexive
power of the mirror. It has corrupted so many cultural and economic signs that it appears and
indistinguishable from reality. “Having no individuality, Dracula7 can mimic virtually anyone. In
mimicking them, he enters them and knows what they know. In containing him, they in turn know
him; indeed they share the knowledge of those so incorporated” (Armstrong 149). The specter is
amorphous and intangible; it is through transmutability that the specter steals the keys to our own
subjectivity. The vampiric specter rests inside of the subject, seeing what the subject sees and
normalizing the subject across bodies and across culture.
The specter is an interaction, a vampiric symbolic exchange which expands subjecting power.
With each purchase of personalized objects, with each acceptance of a norm, the power of the specter is
reinforced. The specter gains its legitimacy through continued acceptance, by and through the
incorporation of the incorporeal. Coercive, vampiric perpetuation is inherent to the system of norms
and disciplining power, and to the rampant consumerism involved in the contemporary system of
objects. The specter has subjugated and enveloped the realm of symbolic exchange, promulgating
itself as a totality. It incorporates the material exchange of objects through the symbolic exchange of
signs. The specter therefore becomes the object, the false true-form of a sign, and the viewer is subject
to that truth. With object-perspective, the specter becomes dominant and the subject takes all cultural,
economic and political references from this simulated undead thing.
The Specter: A Story of Creation
In her book How Novels Think, Nancy Armstrong develops a detailed history of the
interconnected nature of the individual (our subject) and the novel. In essence, she argues that, “the
history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same”
(Armstrong 3). As the novel develops, so does the individual. A most compelling full depiction of the
specter comes from a contemporary novel, The Lord of Snow and Shadows, by Sarah Ash. If we
7
Here Dracula refers to the vampire of Bram Stokers novel. When Armstrong invokes the vampire it is as a modern symbol
of “other,” and in doing so she describes the quality of a vampiric entity. The specter is not really an “other,” but it does
have the quality of a vampiric monster, and thus the description of Dracula. Almost like the specter, Armstrong argues that
the process of modern incorporation and the internalization of outside have brought Dracula inside, where it relates to the
postmodern as it never could have in the 19th century.
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believe that the novel reflects and represents the modern subject, then through this text we are given a
mirror view into the relationship between the specter and the subject.
There is one passage in particular that interests us, because in this passage we see the creation
of a specter. Here we find the young servant Kiukirilya preparing the chambers of the old king, a man
very recently murdered. As she stands before the mirror, she becomes possessed by a specter:
She sensed that there was someone else behind her, and yet there had been no sound of
footsteps or a door opening. ‘Who’s there?’ The question came out sharp-spiked and
tense…Turn around, Kiukirilya… ‘No’ she said in a small voice, resisting. Help me,
Kiukirilya. Slowly, unwillingly she turned around. The mirror had become a yawning
portal of rushing darkness from which wisps of fog escaped, colder than winters’s chill.
And framed in the center of the portal stood a tall figure of a man, a warrior, his hands
reaching out to her through the swirling mists. The terrible burns of the alchymical
poison still disfigured his face, and stains of dried blood marked the gaping wounds
through which his life had leaked away (Ash 49).
Here we have the resurrection of a spirit, depicted in the frame of a mirror. Sensing the invisible spirit,
Kiukirilya hears the call of the specter and is unable to resist. In turning to see the image in the mirror,
she is engulfed by the gaze of a dead man. Through the act of viewing she becomes a subject of the
specter. The mirror morphs into a portal, no longer the critical lens of self-analysis. In submitting to
the view of the specter, Kiukirilya has lost her own sense of self. The open portal of the mirror has
shifted into a virtual prison.
Bring me through, Kiukirilya. ‘M-me?’ Her heart seemed to have stopped beating.
‘Why me?’ Because you have the gift. Blue the spirits’ eyes were, intensely blue as
starfire on a winter’s night. You have the gift to bring me through (Ash 49-50).
The specter needs the acceptance and sustenance provided by a living being. As she stares into the
eyes of the specter, Kiukirilya gives succor to the vampiric nature of the undead. Only she has the gift
to bring the specter to life. As she gives life to the specter, her own heart stops beating—she no longer
has freedom, and is subjectively consumed by the specter.
The specter shows her a world, a dark hellish world, controlled and filled with ghosts.
“Through her dust-stung eyes she began to make out a slow stir of movement in the plain. As she
stared, she saw they were human forms, some crawling laboriously, mindlessly onward across the
barren plain” (Ash 50). In viewing his hell, Kiukirilya is viewing the spectacle of simulation. The
field of undead images crawls in front of her eyes, a collection of forms with human shape, but without
the gift of life.
In the novel, Kiukirilya is strong. Even as the spirit cajoles her and pulls her deeper into the
hell where it resides, our heroine uses that strength to escape the torment of the specter. “Her whole
being fought the pull of the darkness. She wanted to let go, to shake herself free of the revenant, but
still it clung on. The mirror frame glimmered ahead, a portal limned in stardust. She strove toward the
daylight, the shadow clinging fast to her hand” (Ash 51). Critical viewing returns in response to the
hellish field of specters. Breaking out of the world of simulation takes an act of strength and
determination, but even that is not enough. The specter was created at the moment of subjected
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viewing, and even a return of the mirror cannot prevent the survival of the specter. Even as she escapes
the field of spectacle, Kiukirilya brings the specter into the world full-blown. The revenant she brings
back haunts Kiukirilya and the entire world for the duration of the novel.
Kiukirilya’s personal experience with the specter represents the postmodern subject’s
interaction with the specter. Born out of viewing, both Kiukirilya’s and our own specter gain life from
their victim, and both draw their respective subjects into a world of simulation. In both cases, not even
the critical mirror is enough to dispel the specter. The mirror gives us insight into our own relationship
with the specter, but it does not ameliorate the conditions imposed between the specter and its subject.
Just having a critical understanding of a phenomenon like Foucault’s panopticon does not make that
phenomenon impotent. Rather, there must be an alternative, or at least amelioration in the relationship
between the specter and the modern subject.
The Masque of the Red Sparowes
In order to find this amelioration, we digress for a moment to another Gothic sign: the Mummy.
Upon his death in 1924 Vladimir Lenin was embalmed and eventually placed on display in one of the
“holiest” sites in Russia. “Lenin’s mummy is here to stay in this world, and establishes a foundation
for the entire ideological and political universe” (Kujundzc 52-53). Lenin’s body and the Feodorovian8
obsession with death and resurrection set the tone for a generation of artists, politicians, and
ideologues. Resurrection was possible, but this is not the resurrection of true life, rather it is the
symbolic use of an ideological specter for the perpetuation of a political system: communism.
There was a special quality to Lenin’s mummy, a quality that reflects on communist ideology.
“The mummy is both a mask on the corpse and a masque in the sense of an elaborate entertainment,
even bordering on a masquerade, a pretense” (Kujundzc 53). The specter of Lenin was a simulation of
Marxist ideology, a simulation of honest leadership and truthful politics, and an abridgment of history.
What concerns us is not the content of this simulation, but the fact of its simulation. In essence,
Lenin’s mummy was, and continues to be the communist specter. “The pronouncement of Marx and
Engels that ‘a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism’ has found in Lenin’s
mausoleum a literal embodiment” (Kujundzc 53). As Kujundzc points out, Marx and Engels were very
right: the specter is undead, and perpetuated through the policy, program, and memory of the Soviet
Union.
As a system of simulation, the specter of Lenin produced a whole range of secondary effects,
like specter spin-offs who haunt in their own right. It became a self-perpetuating ideology-machine:
The ceaseless translation of the every day and the mundane into the historical, the
present and real into the mythical is probably the most interesting phenomenon…a kind
of machine that allegorizes its own representation, produces metaphysical and rhetorical
from the real with unprecedented efficiency. It is not real that is being depicted but
theatricality and dissimulation (Kujundzc 54).
Ideology rests as a master specter, a grand simulation that normalizes and incorporates the banal of
daily life into the ethos of a generation. Efficiency is the goal, and in search of it symbols are
transmuted, morphed and adjusted to fit the party line. Symbols are dissimulated, and resurrected as
8
Nikolai Feodorov was a Russian philosopher who believed that humanity, if perfectly controlled and regulated, could
master nature and resurrect dead; the ancestors of Russia (Kujundzc Endnote 7).
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specters; making subject the viewers of society. When understanding ideology as a specter, especially
a materially defunct ideology such as communism, we must consider the residual haunting. The
specter is a dead symbol, a dead image passed off as a living sign, and it holds that even when a
material system dies the spectral ideology does not pass with it. Since it existed as dead before “the
end,” it continues to perpetuate itself through its system of specters, through the rhetorical and
allegorical.
In 2006, The Red Sparowes released Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red Sun, an
allegorical musical audiology of communism. A beautiful eight track non-vocal record, the Red
Sparowes’ work captures the specter of communism. This band and this album combine all aspects of
our Gothic collection and reflect them back to the listener as a critical mirror in itself. A prose9 piece
included in the album gives a short textualization of their music so that we can experience their music
and the Gothic metaphor in words. In reading the text it is apparent that the Red Sparowes are coming
to grips with the Chinese communist revolution, a revolution inspired by the rhetoric of the communist
specter. The importance of the Red Sparowes becomes clear when we understand that they pair a
depiction of the specter with a critical analysis of the specter.
The album as mirror shows us the true quality of the subject-specter relationship. The subject is
blinded, and peered down upon by a great unseeing eye. The blinding of the subject is analogous to the
normalization and panoptic control imposed by the system of societal specters, but the Red Sparowes
point out that the act of viewing in this instance is a hollow viewing. Just as there need be no viewer in
the central tower of the panopticon, there is no need for the eye to see as long as the subject is riveted
to its gaze. The eye becomes the “eye-deology” of the leader, the commanding voice issuing from the
mummy of Lenin, or any other machine of dissimulation. The words, the simulated signs, become holy
to the ear, and the subject defers to the power imbued in the specter.
The specter is vampiric, using its power as a sign to wrap a “tangling” chain about the heart, to
yoke the subjectivity of the viewer. This is not a violent form of control, because subjectivity is given
to the specter with “innocent awe”. In giving up life, the subject imparts a un-life and legitimacy to the
system. In its role as the ever-expanding machine, the specter promotes the killing of other signs, “the
sparrows,” and uses the rhetoric of fear and greed to promote their death. The mirror shows that it is
the goal of consumption and avarice that drives the death of symbols, and it is “by our own hand” that
the symbol came to pass. By placing the responsibility in the hands of consumers, whether it is a
consumer of ideology or otherwise, the Red Sparowes identify the perpetuators of symbolic death.
The specter, whom the Red Sparowes metaphorically rename the locust, “swallows our greed
whole.” The specter grows fat off of the reified symbols delivered by the people. The locust-specter
consumes the crop-like field of symbols, leaving no sustenance for the subject who begins to wither
away, growing thinner as the specter grows fatter. The mirror reveals the shrinking of meaning
9
“The great leap forward poured down upon us one day like a might storm, suddenly and furiously blinding our senses. We
stood transfixed in blank devotion as our leader spoke to us, looking down on our mute faces with a great, raging, and
unseeing eye. Like the howling glory of the darkest winds, this voice was thunderous and the words holy, tangling their
way around our hearts and clutching our innocent awe. A message of avarice rained down and carried us away into false
dreams of endless riches. “Annihilate the sparrow, that stealer of seed, and our harvests will abound; we will watch our
wealth flood in.” And by our own hand did every last bird lie silent in their puddles, the air barren of song as the clouds
drifted away. For killing their greatest enemy, the locusts noisily thanked us and turned their jaws towards our crops,
swallowing our greed whole. Millions starved and we became skinnier, while our leaders became fatter and fatter. Finally,
as that blazing sun shone down upon us, did we know that true enemy was the voice of blind idolatry; and only then did we
begin to think for ourselves” (The Red Sparowes 2006).
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involved in the specter’s domination. The Red Sparowes show that as the specter consumes the field of
authentic symbols, the body and consciousness of the subject suffer as well. The shriveling of meaning
affects not only the symbols, but also the people who view symbols. For the Sparowes, there comes a
time when the field of the specter is too desiccating, too debilitating for even the subject to maintain
obedience. There comes a time when a subject is so normalized, so structured, so consumed that life is
restructured; returning the critical mirror of “blazing light” as a tool for the subject. What is important
here is not that the Sparowes are rejecting consumerism, or even the idolatry of ideology. The
importance of the Red Sparowes comes through the revivification of life itself. In seeing the specter
for what it is, the Red Sparowes infuse the exchange with new meaning and deny the specter a host
body from which to perpetuate the symbolic duality of life and death.
In Conclusion: Revivification
The Gothic tale in literature always has an end. For each story there is a conclusion which
involves the destruction and dismantling of the undead. Dracula is defeated and the cursed house of
Usher collapses into rubble. In a sense this is the revivification of the Gothic. As Usher falls, the
narrator sees a world re-infused with life, the colors are brighter and there is a bite to the air—visceral
experience returns as life force returns. In our metaphor, the specter is designated as simply another
aspect of the daily exchange involved in life events. With insight and critical thought, the Red
Sparowes as subjects, begin to think for themselves, and furthermore, they bring this critical insight to
others through music and artistic expression. In this solidified moment of realization we have the
“transpiring, the ‘showing through’ [transpiration] of evil” (Baudrillard 2003: 36). The true nature of
the specter is illumined in the light of our mirror, and we see the relationship of the specter to be just
another aspect of the symbolic exchange.
Through creative effort, the Red Sparowes attain a perspective that eliminates the delusion of
totality involved in the vicious cycle of the undead symbolic exchange. Through the development of
an artistic thought that realizes both their own history and their own destiny, the Sparowes have
balanced the duality of the material/symbolic exchange. The Sparowes know the symbolic exchange to
be the reverse aspect of an economic exchange, and are involved actively in both sides, one being the
cultural sale of a musical product, and the other the promulgation of a musical theory that rejects the
totality of that economic exchange. In harmonizing the duality of symbolic and economic exchange
the Red Sparowes have, in a sense, revivified impossible exchange. The subject can become the seeing
viewer, a conscious participant in the field of specters. The culture, the structure of norms and
observations described by Foucault and Baudrillard are still in place; nothing in our discussion has
changed this fact. What has changed is our awareness of our own involvement in the system.
Revivification is the transpiration of specter, the realization of how the cycle of symbolic
exchange works. There are three essential levels to exchange: economic exchange, which rules the
world of material interactions (this is the exchange of the economic market); symbolic exchange, which
is the exchange of the cultural sign (this is the realm of the undead); and the impossible exchange. If
symbolic and economic exchange are dualistic opposites involved in a mutual relationship, then
impossible exchange is the dualistic opposite of exchange itself. “It is something which, at a particular
moment, is of such singularity that it is not exchangeable against any rationality whatever” (Baudrillard
2003: 73). The specter is therefore the delusion that everything can be exchanged; that life and death
can be traded back and forth in a symbolic exercise. Impossible change is the limit to that delusion, a
limit that the Sparowes have achieved and comprehended.
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Baudrillard states that there is a limit to exchange, a “critical mass”, beyond which the values
involved in exchange have no meaning because the laws of exchange are no longer operating.
Impossible exchange is a limit to the expansion of exchange, the opposite of exchange, and the barrier
to its presumed totality. Protected by the barrier of impossibility, the revivified seer is protected by the
experiential knowledge of the duality of exchange. The strategy of the specter is to convince the world
that there is nothing but the totality of exchange. It recycles its own shadow, polymorphing between
form and function, life and death, creating that processing image which rotates and revolves around the
subject. Seeing the specter for what it is—the master and medium of symbolic exchange—relegates
the specter to its proper position as an aspect rather than a totality. The revivification of impossible
exchange protects the remainder of the individual, creating a holdfast for conscious thought. This
remainder is the essence of consciousness, perhaps the true soul of the being, and the experiential
knowledge of the duality of exchange.
The specter is a metaphor; a metaphor for our daily encounters with commercial symbols,
political images, and other “real” representations of reality. By thinking about the world and its ideal
images in a metaphoric way (any metaphoric way, not just the Gothic metaphor presented here) we are
able to achieve a critical distance; a mirror in our own thinking to better understand the world in which
we live. When we think metaphorically, we benefit our own consciousness, we are better able to
visualize of the world around us, and we foster a creativity of thought that is sometimes stifled by the
demands of the mundane. This is the power of the Gothic metaphor and its lessons on impossible
exchange: We learn, through metaphor, the point at which the symbolic exchange of signs and the
commercial exchange of products, wages, and labor power, loose their totalizing influences, and we
become once again revivified in the face of modern consumer society. The art of the Red Sparowes
shows us that it is possible. Michel Foucault’s panopticon and the simulation theory posited by
Baudrillard are gloomy theories that leave little space for authentic responses to consumer society. The
Gothic metaphor shows that while the specters of consumerism and popular culture hold a powerful
sway over the domain of the subject, there is always room for hope and strength, life and artistic
creation, a space preserved by the borders of the impossible.
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