What Is Haunting?

Original draft written by Kristofor Giordano, 2021. Edited by Kristofor Giordano, 2024.

As I write, the wind shakes my trailer, reminding me that my home lacks a solid foundation. The curtains dance too. Sometimes, it’s impossible to trace a direct line from a movement to its source. My wall-mounted heater generates air currents, as do my fingers as I type, transforming things around me in some way.

McKenzie Wark described writing as physical labor, a perspective that resonates with me. I like to view words as heavy, material things. Yet what drives me to write seems more complex. Perhaps it's a desire to externalize something within me. But once these words are out, they start to shape me, what I write next, and so on. In this instance, I’m compelled to define what haunting is, and for me, haunting is a form of possession.

Possession is a weighty term, suggesting ownership akin to chunk of real estate. Legal documents are used to declare that [this thing] belongs to [this person]. Possession also implies active use. Owners, through their sovereignty, can be said to haunt their possessions. Socially, there’s a level of instability and fear about our possessions being used or owned by others when they should rightfully belong to us. This reflects the bourgeois anxiety about unauthorized guests or unfaithful partners.

Haunting begins when something possessed is suddenly dispossessed without a proper exchange ritual. It occurs when something—free from contractual, coercive, or corporeal constraints—realizes it belongs nowhere and to nothing; a space of assignification.

I grapple with reconciling haunting with my materialist view, which denies any “behind-the-scenes” intelligent design and focuses on measurable forces and particles. I used to ponder the cost of this quantitative approach and whether its methods reveal real truths—like the nature of matter. But is it worth the violence?

I remain skeptical of any explanatory framework that pursues the irreducible. I’m aware that my skepticism is part of the world, but doesn’t define it. Invisible things like radioactive waves penetrate me without my knowledge or consent, measurable in ways haunting and possession are not. Yet both radiation and possession produce effects I don’t have to know about to experience.

I’d rather believe every emotion is a chemical transformation than embrace a superficial materialism. Accepting my body as a limit is easier than believing it’s a vessel for an ineffable realm. However, my strong reaction might stem more from a disdain for sloppy metaphysics than from a genuine faith in science. Committing entirely to one side of the argument feels, at best, naive and, at worst, potentially dangerous.

The idea of “being possessed” is familiar to religion, philosophy, and even science, though a biologist would not describe instincts as a form of “possession.” The urge to fuck can feel like a possession. While it may be an evolutionary inheritance, the drive to advance the species seems tangential to the personal images and sensations I associate with fucking. It’s odd how these appetites occupy so much mental space and how societal constructs around regulating them show it’s a deep concern.

I am possessed by both my inherent traits and social realities not encoded in my DNA. I didn’t create a white, straight, male identity, but I accept these labels more or less. How I perform this identity is another complex issue. As a child, I asked for a sewing machine for Christmas, and it was pointed out to me that this was unusual for a boy. Technology, alongside its utilitarian function, can help us resist and rewrite what feels inscribed on us. In this sense, it expands the limits of the body.

When someone’s action seems inexplicable to another, the latter might ask condescendingly, “What possessed you to do that?” This language reveals more than just a demand for an explanation. It implies weakness, as if the person accused is merely a vessel for some disembodied force. It’s closely related to “What were you thinking?” suggesting that an “inferior” thought or possession led to the action. The act in question is almost always antisocial or against property.

Haunting emerges from the boundaries of what can be socialized. It lacks stable utility, being unreliable and untrustworthy. It arrives uninvited and overstays its welcome. Its brilliance lies in its elusiveness. It’s an outside that is also a deep interior. Popular culture often reduces haunting to a ghost—a form that passes through walls. Haunting is resistant to form, and yet, embodied in material. It disrupts our reliable and secure forms, exposing hidden violences and abuses. Though haunting operates out of sight, it often reveals truths, tearing at the social fabric and tugging at threads.

Or, is haunting “a remainder of signification,” as some suggest?

Or, is haunting a kind of hypersignification—a radical overabundance of meaning that leaves us with a mess to sort out, like the aftermath of a horrific crime? This mess demands all our knowledge-gathering facilities, which will always fall short.

Or, does the high status of order and the effort used to grasp elusive things itself reflect haunting? Is this why science and philosophy pursue ghosts—something that haunts both human and nonhuman entities? Though empiricism and empire differ in etymology, empire haunts empiricism through resemblance and practice. The desire to grasp doesn’t eliminate ghosts, but rather, generates more hauntings.