See →.
The physicist Huge Everett, a student of John Wheeler, published in 1957 a paper that proposed the “Many-Worlds” hypothesis as a solution to the indeterminacy described by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. What this means is that Leibnizian compossibles (or Staurt Kauffmann’s adjacent possibles) are not concentrated in (or left with) one (best of all) world but are constantly splitting into other worlds. A possibility that does not make it into this world does not vanish but enters another one. This way of thinking also explains Delueze’s claim that the virtual is as real as the actual.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (Columbia University Press, 1996), 2, 5.
FX’s 2022 television adaptation of Kindred turned out to be barely mediocre, which is surprising when one considers the narrative power of Butler’s novel, which begins with a cinematically vivid image and situation. From that point on, the pages just fly. Though the writer and showrunner of the series, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, preserved the main features of the novel’s time traveling, he made significant changes to large sections of the original story, which made fans of the novel deeply unhappy.
Agnieszka Polska and Geo Wyeth’s installation The Happiest Thought inspired the course of thinking in the first half of this essay.
This moment in physics was called the November Revolution. Fred Gilman writes: “As the name ‘revolution’ implies, the discoveries of November 1974 were not just additions to our knowledge of Nature. Instead they signaled a change in our understanding of the structure of matter: that the particles in the nucleus of the atom are themselves composite and are made of quarks. This new layer of structure, the quark level, was moreover one for which we have simple equations to describe the forces which act on the quarks. Thus there emerged what is called the Standard Model of the structure of matter and its forces.” After this revolution, physics fell into silence until the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, first proposed in 1964, was confirmed by the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. Fred Gilman, “The November Revolution,” SLAC Beam Line 16, no. 1 (1985): 3.
James Wheeler, “The ‘Past’ and the ‘Delayed-Choice’ Double-Slit Experiment,” in Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory, ed. A. R. Marlow (Academic Press, 1978).
The core ideas in the remaining sections of this work were first presented in a lecture I delivered at the Swiss Institute in 2020 →.
See Lafcadio Hearn’s In Ghostly Japan (1899) and Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). In 1964, Masaki Kobayashi made Kwaidan into one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Japanese cinema. The past, again, haunts the present in Kaneto Shindo’s 1968 Kuroneko (Black Cat), which is the greatest film about ghosts in the history of cinema. A mother and daughter are raped and killed by a troop of samurai. The horror of this crime is so extreme that it enables the mother and daughter to break the order of time—the fixed past, the dynamic present, the open future. Their ghosts can now visit the present for the purpose of exacting revenge against any samurai who enters the bamboo grove. The mother and daughter lure them to their home, then turn into demonic cats that eat the doomed samurai. In this common reading of ghosts, an event of extreme evil (or injustice) has the emotional force to propel the present into the past.
In the Japanese ghost stories collected by Lafcadio Hearn, ghosts often have no vendetta. They just want to be loved and spend time with those in the present.
I must point out that ghosts in Southern Africa are very difficult to figure out. They certainly come from the past, but their motives are not always clear. And you get into trouble with them precisely because you have failed to read their often-complicated motives. Southern African ghosts also hate those who do not believe in them. This arrogance is, of course, a great injustice. For more on this, read Charles Mungoshi’s collection of short stories Coming of the Dry Season (1972).
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 82–83.
Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 83.
Some ghosts in the Japanese tradition are not all vengeful. They simply miss the company of the living, and go to great lengths to fool the living into thinking they are not dead. One can see this kind of ghost in Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterpiece Ugetsu.
The ghost as a figure certainly needs the emergence of hyper-culturality from ultra-sociality. Ants are also ultra-social, but not hyper-cultural. There are no ghost ants.
A whole scientific field is devoted to mirror neurons of the mind. They enable us to imagine what’s in another person’s head. And though neuroscience was almost nonexistent in Adam Smith’s time, he got the psychology of the theory of mind correct. The dead person is not there. But the living feel for them. This connection, I think, is the ground of much revolutionary politics. We imagine the wrong done to, for example, Black African slaves in America, and we imagine how they would demand from the present that justice be done. This is how their ghosts haunt the present. It is by means of surplus human sociality—our profound fellow feeling.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999), 471.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 471.
The Black slaves that saw nothing but a life of misery and pain on plantations (gone), the Indians starved to death by Winston Churchill (gone), the European Jews in the gas chambers (gone).
One of the ghost stories in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan, “The Story of Aoyagi,” is about a young man who encounters “a comely maiden” who turns out to be not only a ghost but the ghost of a tree. Southern African stories also do not limit ghosts to humans. Indeed, I recall that even a mushroom can haunt humans. However, I have yet to read or hear a ghost story that does not involve any humans whatsoever, e.g., a mushroom haunting future mushrooms or a tree haunting future trees.
In the end, Dana Franklin kills Rufus.
See →.