The digital uncanny and ghost effects

Abstract

Technology is at the heart of the debate over what constitutes the 'uncanny'. Freud opens his classical text on the subject by questioning Ernst Jentsch's claim that the uncanny is produced by a 'doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate'. 1 What Jentsch is referring to is the character of Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story 'Der Sandmann' -a lifelike automaton that confounds the protagonist (Nathaniel), who falls in love with it. In an attempt to overturn Jentsch's view that humans automatically take automata to be human when they see them behave like humans, Freud develops a different reading of Hoffmann's short story, focusing not on Olympia but on the 'theme of the Sand-Man who tears out children's eyes '. 2 This manoeuvre allows Freud to reconnect the uncanny to the processes of repression, and thus to castration anxiety. 3 To Freud the uncanny is not a direct reaction to mechanical devices but a neurological (internalized) form of automaticity that is realized as an aesthetic or affective experience -deja vu, the appearance of a doppelganger, delusions of grandeur, paranoid behaviours, and so on. The uncanny is driven by the compulsion to repeat, and that compulsion is automatic. Rather than a simple reaction to technology, the uncanny is an intentional, embodied (even if symptomatic) response to 'something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light '. 4 This debate has been revisited and reenacted numerous times throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -from Masahiro Mori's study of our responses to dolls and robots that are too lifelike, 5 to the discourse of remediation that traces the effects of bringing back to life or capturing the image of death in a film or photograph, on a phonograph