On Spectrality as a Method of Care

The university does not deserve our knowledge production.
Find other ways to use this knowledge.
Make the archive living by gravitating to other genres.¹

The archive is a site of past extraction, of data, of information, stored for future ages. The archive contains captured lives, extracted for value but not necessarily worthy of a real entry in the records. Or in Saidiya Hartman’s description of the black enslaved women in the colonial archives, “The archive is […] a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history” (2).

How does one recuperate these lives tossed aside by history, stripped of their humanity, and purely seen for their extracted value? Hartman calls this an impossible task. Heeding her, I ask the following question: If the archive is inherently tied up with violence, what kinds of research methods would enable care for its materials? How might we, as researchers entering the archive, avoid replicating the embedded extractivist violence?

This piece is inspired by the WITNESSING panel at Inward Outward: a collaborative project For Alberta and Victor: A Collection of Conjurings and Opacities (2019) by Daniela Agostinho and La Vaughn Belle; the dead and inorganic bodies of migrant crossings in Amade M’charek’s research project; the photographic project tracing the massacre of Kazal in Haiti by Edine Célestin; and the video/data archive for human rights defenders maintained by WITNESS as narrated by Yvonne Ng.² These archives bear witness to colored bodies living, thriving, and dying in the midst and aftermath of colonial violence. With care, the panelists reflected on how their respective research practices attend to structures of power that cut through these archives.

Methods are not just scientific modes of thinking and logic. To define methods as such is to stay within a colonial episteme that rejects other ways of knowing. Methods are ways of being in the world. They are ways of navigating relationality between researcher and research subject. The scientific method only dictates one possibility—an extractivist, colonial way of knowing that depends on the position of the all-knowing scientist. The scientist defines the research subject, captures all that is observable, and turns mere experience into principles, hypotheses, analyses, neatly labeled and categorized, ready for consumption.

But what if the scientist is only able to encounter the ghost or the ghostly remains of one’s research subject? How does one navigate such a research process? Hartman suggests critical fabulation to seek the conditional temporality of “what could have been” (Lowe in Hartman 11), to practice narrative restraint so as to refuse closure (Hartman 12). To be witnesses across time by attending to the unspoken and the unspeakable. I want to emphasize the necessity of becoming the haunted scientist, to allow ghosts to be ghosts, to turn to the discourse of spectrality.

Jacques Derrida asks, “What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or the presence of a specter, that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual, insubstantial as a simulacrum?” (10, original emphasis). The ghost, neither here nor there, not fully material and yet not merely metaphorical, hovers in the in-between. To conjure ghosts of history, to study through the lens of the spectral—as Blanco and Peeren aptly put it, “This quest cannot be called a science, or even a method, as the ghost or specter is seen to signify precisely that which escapes full cognition or comprehension” (9).

But it is a method. It is a method known to those of us who communicate with ancestors through spiritual practices, whose colonized cultures have been named “superstitious” and have been cast out by Western science. It is a method that calls on a multitude of voices, who speak to us from beyond to share their wisdom. Maybe the spectral is a method of interest here precisely because it is not premised on Western scientific logic of knowledge extraction and production, rationality, and mastery.

And ghosts are not unusual to any of us working in the archives anyway, where death is no stranger.

In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon muses over the lack of a settled methodology in studying ghosts, and over the trouble she got when attempting to present her work in sociological circles. Like Hartman, Gordon lands in literary imagination, in the power of the fictive, a tool to conjure ghosts untold by historical facts. “As a mode of apprehension and reformation, conjuring merges the analytical, the procedural, the imaginative, and the effervescent” (Gordon 22). In other words, the analytical cannot be disentangled from the imaginative.

So maybe there is possibility in the margins of the scientific method—“For isn’t it the method, the path to knowledge, that has always also led us away, led us astray, by fraud and artifice” (Irigaray in Gordon 39)? Colonial science is, after all, the darker side of modernity (Mignolo). Epistemic violence is by definition narrated and embodied by the archive.

And so we turn toward what has been cast out. Toward the ghosts. Toward the potentialities of what could have been, in an attempt to decolonize our methods of knowing and being with our research subjects.

Gordon writes:
“And so we will need to invent other forms of curiosity to engage those haunting moments that take us down the path of the helplessly repetitive, of the fictional pretense, of the contradictory, of the ghostly, in order to capture back all that must be circumscribed in order to produce the ‘adequate’ version.” (41)

Hartman writes:
“I wanted to write a romance that exceeded the fictions of history—the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive and determine what can be said about the past.” (9)

Within the scene of analysis is the reality of facts and the potentialities of fiction. Fact: We enter the archives to conduct historical research, to attempt to resurrect a truthful sketch of what has happened. Fact: We revisit the archive to come to terms with historical wrongdoings, to become accountable, to repay colonial debt. Fact: We extracted labor from colonized, enslaved bodies and enacted unspeakable violence. Potentiality: We can choose whether we wish to extract labor again from painful histories today. We can choose whether we wish to re-enact and restage the trauma and the colonial violence for the public to consume. Fact: We dredge up the most awful tales from the archive to “educate” the public, to “educate” ourselves. Potentiality: Sometimes it is more respectable to let the stories be. Potentiality: It is possible to extend care, even if this could only happen postmortem.

Option A: Let the ghosts speak and amplify their voices and their demands for justice. We turn to their multiple voices to unsettle insular logics of writing in a so-called scientific, all-knowing voice. Let their voices challenge the scientific narratives of certainty and validity, of casting the world in binaries of us versus them, colonizer versus colonized, life versus death. Crossing the boundary of death to listen to the ghosts’ unfulfilled desires, dreams, and hopes requires us to attend to “a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (Derrida xix). Derrida argues that these politics are enfolded with a sense of responsibility, of acting in the name of justice for those who were formerly victims of systemic oppression and violence, as much as those who are not yet born. Spectral method, in this sense, works as a time-warp that enfolds the present with its many pasts and many futures, and asks us to extend care beyond those inhabiting the living. It invites us to be critical and inventive, to consider interdisciplinary tools to “explain, explore, and story the world” (McKittrick 4). It invites us to move past the disciplinary thinking that limits research to the gathering and processing of data used as a normalizing force that designates who does and does not belong and used to reduce captured subjects to points on a graph and punctuations in the grand historical narratives. It invites us to feel the data, to feel the violence embedded in archives, and to be spurred on by the calls to justice by its ghosts.

Option B: Let the ghosts rest in peace. Some stories are meant to be laid to rest and some stories are not for us to tell. We practice the method of refusal in alignment with the work of scholars like bell hooks, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, and The Practicing Refusal Collective (Campt). In 1990, hooks had already pointed to the symbolic violence of the academy, where scientific research provides recognition for the Other only through narratives of pain and suffering (Tuck and Yang). Colored bodies often enter the academy not as full and embodied but as scarred, wounded, and not fully human. This, to Tuck and Yang, is a form of settler colonial ideology that is reified through narratives in and out of the archive. Pain narratives are attractive to Western science because they fit within the coloniality of knowledge orders,

in which the pained body (or community or people) is set back or delayed on some kind of path of humanization, and now must catch up (but never can) to the settler/unpained/abled body (or community or people or society or philosophy or knowledge system). (Tuck and Yang 231)

By letting the ghosts rest in peace in the archives, we refuse to accede to the settler colonial ideology of the academy, and we stop extracting and commodifying stories of pain and suffering in the name of science.

We work between the necessity to speak and the refusal to speak. These two options do not preclude each other. We move from the desire to extract from the archive (and to extract from the extractions) to the desire to care for what is in and out of the archive. We reject extractivist science and affirm critical and imaginative conjurings. We practice transtemporal solidarity with those whom we cannot name. We forge alliances in the interstices of past, present, and future,

wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices and pursue ways of living the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized. (McKittrick 5)

We become haunted scientists, committed to narratives of desire toward what could have been and what can and will be. Turn away from the ideologies of Western colonial science that have imprisoned its subjects in a knowledge order that ignores their voices. Refuse the epistemic violence prescribed by the archive. Stand with the ghosts and their calls for justice—for an act of refusal is an act of care.