| Chapter 1: | The Aesthetics of Spectrality |
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knowledge but instead are within the deepest self-organizations of the epistemic machine. Phantomenology gestures toward the sense that the logos of logic is haunted from its inceptions, which are always plural, and indicates that this logic of displacement is beginning to manifest itself throughout the university. The haunted house is always in ruins and in need of justice. There is crying from the basement and from the attic, from the blood-stained bed. But are not these images, this familiar architectural imaginary, quite far away from the ordered architectonics of the university?
Phantomenology opposes, in general, neither the machinic quality of the academetron—because all knowledge depends in some way on the techn
of the machine—nor the humanist impulses of recuperative and clarifying scholarship. It does, however, reconfigure all of the disciplinary networks that used to enable one to differentiate and identify such categories as the subject of knowledge, in both senses, and the objects of inquiry. The time of the phantom is also the time of the cross-, multi-, trans-, and inter- of the disciplines. In the domain of literary studies, for example, David Punter has observed that there is “a sense that any involvement with or in literature is inseparable from the phantom, the ghost” (260). As Avery Gordon, a sociologist, has remarked:
Everything seems to be doubling, folding back on itself, becoming-simulacra. What, or who, is doubling one in the hum of the media center that was once a place of the book, the pages riffled slowly by hand? As one of your future 401(k) benefits, in what form would you like to be cloned?
What has overturned, in the space of the university, the reflective ground for such a shimmering of the double, the multiple others that rationality cannot obliterate? The dead that speak are everywhere in the