Much as a reckoning with ghosts, Avery Gordon’s analysis of social science as a field and its knowledge production is at once painful, unsettling, and difficult; however, as she insists throughout, we need not be frightened of the ghosts we (social scientists) so painstakingly strive to discipline and in its worst forms, stifle. Her project is one that seeks out justice in a world that is not yet “post” modern, whether in psychoanalysis, Marxism, sociology, the U.S., or Argentina, areas where the focus on the “exceptional” and individualized trauma tend to cast social hauntings and complex personhood to the shadows. She pushes for haunting as a methodology—imputed with a kind of objectivity and sociality—that makes the fictional, theoretical, and factual speak to one another. She strives to fill in the gaps of knowledge production through an interdisciplinary approach that examines literature as sociological texts, incorporates historical and photographic evidence of ghosts, and utilizes Raymond Williams’ notion of the structure of feeling. Similarly to Cedric Robinson in his book An Anthropology of Marxism, Gordon critiques Marxism and psychoanalysis: while both provided important directions for analyzing unseen forces, they failed to account for the things and people who were primarily unseen and banished to the periphery of social graciousness, whether due to hypervisibility or silencing through exclusion. She introduces Luisa Valenzuela and Toni Morrison as exemplary writers who utilize haunting to recognize the need to deal with the State, Power, Slavery, Racism, Capitalism Science, and Patriarchy, as well as the necessity of reckoning with the structure of feeling of haunting, whether one feels it or not, whether one was on the receiving end of violence, the one dealing the blows, or a bystander.
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