Ghosts Without Unfinished Business

Abstract

Historians have long written about the relationship between the living and the dead and the role ghosts play in maintaining this relationship. However, only recently have scholars turned to the ways death in the digital age has disurpted our traditional mourning rituals."Ghosts Without Unfinished Business: Recorded Media and the Liminal in Para-Social Mourning" explores the ways recording technology have shaped Western society's relationship with the dead from the development of the camera to the recent animation capabilities of CGI and "deep fake" technology. In particular, recordings construct a liminal space between life and death by altering our perceptions of the body, ghosts, and time, particularly when the relationship between the living and dead was para-social. This new mourning, theorized as para-social mourning, disrupts traditional understandings of ghosts as recordings are unchanging and frozen in time, thus disallowing the relationship between the living and dead to change. This paper concludes with a parallel drawn between the anxities between the development of the camera and the current anxities regarding CGI.