A Conversation About Spectral Data

Conjuring a Conversation

Spectral data are a Deleuzoguattarian territorial assemblage, or multidimensional space, composed of a variety of kinds of data (e.g., St. Pierre’s [1997] emotional and dream data, embodied moments, and writing) that are generated by a relationship between a living researcher and a deceased person. I experienced spectral data throughout my post-qualitative study about family history genealogists and the objects (e.g., photographs, documents, and artifacts) they use to construct their ancestors. The ancestors occupied the objects associated with their lives and the participants’ words used to describe those objects. As I came to know the ancestors through those objects and words, we joined together and created a variety of spectral data territories. Through my own genealogical work, my deceased ancestors also became part of the study as they haunted the objects that once belonged to them. However, the spectral data generated between my deceased grandmother Naomie and me remains closest to my heart and most important to my work.

My namesake, Naomie Vivian Swanson Nordstrom, died in 1966 from brain cancer 11 years before I was born in 1977. I was named after her because of her absence in my family and the presence of my red hair, her red hair, a physical trait originating in the Swanson family. At the time of my birth, my parents did not know that I would also grow into her face, a resemblance that numerous family members still comment on to this day. Some family members even note that I have her mannerisms and voice. The genetic fragments grandmother Naomie and I share are the constant physical reminders of the relationship we have formed that transgresses the living/deceased binary.

This article is both an arrested moment of spectral data between my grandmother and me and a description of spectral data. To do this work, I use a version of a photo-text, a continuous narrative of alternating pages of texts and photographs without captions developed by Morris (1946, 1948, 1968), a Nebraskan author. The continuous narrative is a conversation between my grandmother and me as we work together to define spectral data. Like most of my writing, I wrote this article as I read it aloud to a framed collage of my grandmother’s objects that I assembled 19 years ago. She responded, as she always does, with advice, questions, and different ways to think about the task at hand. As my grandmother and I write and are written, we are constituted with traces. These traces are “the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence, and [are] constituted by the threat or anguish of [their] irremediable disappearance, of the disappearance of [their] disappearance” (Derrida, 1978a, p. 230). My grandmother and I are no longer separate entities as our selfhoods become characterized as both present and absent, living and nonliving, and so on. As subjects of our own writing in this conversation, we are “a system of relations” (p. 227) in a middle space between life and death, appearance and disappearance. In those relations, my grandmother’s responses are sometimes brief and succinct. Sometimes she is silent so that I can pick up speed in my thinking and writing. Her succinctness and silence should not be perceived as a reminder of the so-called ultimate silence of death, but as pulsating reappearances and disappearances, “trace[s] of life” (Birnbaum, 2007 p. 17) that constitute both of our selfhoods as we write and are written together.

The format of the conversation seeks to textually manifest a reversal of the living/deceased binary and the middle space of our selfhoods, our writing. When I write by hand with my grandmother, I always begin writing on the right side of the page, not on the left as I was taught to do. Likewise, in this conversation I occupy the right side of the page and my grandmother the left. In such a format, my grandmother passes from the right side of the living/deceased binary to the left side. The reversal and passing of terms offers a middle space constituted by “relation[s] between life and death, between present and representation, between two apparatuses” (Derrida, 1978a, p. 228). Such a middle space gestures toward the idea that the spectral data my grandmother and I generate are always in the middle of life and death.

The photographs in this photo-text are those of my grandmother and her objects and are from my personal collection. Derrida (1989) suggested that the photograph is “all about the return of the departed . . . . The spectral is the essence of photography” (p. 34). My grandmother, then, once again transgresses the living/deceased binary by returning again and again to the photographs in this piece. The spectral essence of the photograph is not singular. The essence, or the center, of the photograph is “contradictorily coherent” (Derrida, 1978b, p. 279) in that there is always already a play of presence and absence, knowing and not-knowing, real and unreal as meanings are constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed each time a person views a photograph. In a similar vein, Morris (1978/1989) described the photographs of his photo-texts as “a given fragment of the visible world to which the writer, as he changes, will have differing responses” (p. 30). To enable multiple responses, constructions, reconstructions, and deconstructions, the photographs are not captioned in this photo-text.

Morris (1978/1989) explained his photo-texts as “a glimpse through a narrow crack in time, these arrested moments, in the lives of objects, are open to numerous and contrary interpretations” (p. 30). Likewise, the fragmentary conversation and spectral photographs that constitute this photo-text are open to a variety of interpretations and responses. This photo-text, then, becomes a passageway to think about how the living and dead work together to generate data in qualitative research. Perhaps you, the reader, will pass into something new and different because of it.

OPEN IN VIEWER

A Conversation . . .

I worry as I gaze at your photograph. I don’t know what to write. How do I put all the ideas about spectral data that I want to write about in this very short piece?

Don’t worry.

My stomach bubbles with anxiety and my eyes well up with tears as I gaze at your photograph. I nervously turn your, our, wedding ring around my left middle finger. Am I again mourning your death that happened 11 years before I was born? Are you “making [me] speak . . . from the place where [I] want to say nothing, where I know clearly what [I] do not want to say but do not know what [I] would like to say” (Derrida, 1994, p. 217)? Is this just another instance of spectral data happening right now?

Write with me.

OPEN IN VIEWER

I am not sure if I am willing to define spectral data. Like St. Pierre (2011), I am “weary of all the lines drawn around social science inquiry these days” (p. 623). I am not sure I want to draw a line around spectral data so that it can be categorized and normalized.

But, isn’t writing about me, us, for publication drawing a line around us? Are you trying to draw a line that cannot be drawn?

Yes, I think I am trying to draw an impossible line around us. Spectral data exceed encircling and normalizing lines.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Why do you cause me so much work? I am reminded of Derrida’s (1994) words, “The one who has disappeared appears still to be there, and his apparition is not nothing. It does not do nothing. Assuming that the remains can be identified, we know better than ever today that the dead must be able to work. And to cause work, perhaps more than ever” (p. 120). What is this work that you are causing, prompting, pushing, and inviting me to do?

You are remembering your future.

So, as I wonder “what may have burned of [your] secret passions, of [your] correspondence, or of [your] life” (Derrida, 1995, p. 101), I am also wondering what may be burning of my secret passions, of my correspondence, or of my life. Am I also conjuring our secret passions, our correspondence, our lives?

Yes. Conjure our correspondence, our lives.

OPEN IN VIEWER

To help me conjure our correspondence, our lives, I return to the literature on ghosts in qualitative inquiry. McMahon (1996) wrote about the loss of her mother and how she wrote reflexive letters to understand the absent others “who may be attached to the researcher or to those studied” (p. 321) in her interview study about Canadian mothers. She calls these absent others characters from her past. You are not a character from my past. You are (I am) my past, present, and future.

No, I am not a character. I am (you are) my past, present, and future

Mulcahy, Parry and Glover (2009) included an italicized and nameless ghost who haunts the daughter in their performance text, a one act play, about interviews with cancer survivors. They claimed their ghost surrounded them and “the only way to escape the specter was to face it” (p. 39). I face you every day in the mirror when I see myself grow into your face. I face you when I write our names, Naomie and Naomi. I face you as I write, live, and think. I cannot nor do I want to escape you.

We are Naomi(e), a middle space of shared genetics and lives that undermine linear time and stable subjects.

Doucet (2008) described the reflexive relationships with autobiographical ghosts in her ethnography of Canadian primary care giving fathers, a study “deeply rooted in [her] past experiences” (p. 77). She knew these ghosts as living, breathing people from her past conversations and observations of them.

I never knew you as a living person. I never heard you sing in the church choir, which I understand you enjoyed. I never saw you walk up to the house where you lived, a house I never visited. I never smelled your perfume on your breathing body. In fact, I never knew any of the ghosts that haunted me in my research.

Our knowing is different.

Derrida (1994) wrote “One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present-present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge” (p. 5). Our knowledge is a cracked mirror. I look to you and shards of knowledge mark my image, my body. Each shard creates lines across my body that throw into radical doubt sure knowledge as you mark me with traces of you.

Doucet (2008) also suggests a separation—a gossamer wall—between herself and the ghosts. No wall separates us. I am “withdrawn from the majority [life], and [you] rise up from the minority [death]” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 291) as we become each other in middle of life and death. Our correspondence is constituted by lines of becoming that “only ha[ve] a middle” (p. 293). In this middle space, the shards of knowledge are data that help me think, help me live.

McMahon (1996) described data—letters to a close friend, email fragments, and research memos—that she used to help her understand those absent others in her research about mothers. She explained that “letters [she] reconstruct[ed] are more conversations with [her]self than dialogues. She [her friend] does not talk back” (p. 321). Derrida (1996), however, noted that “a spectral response is always possible” (p. 62).

As you talk back to me, you take my hand and invite me to the middle spaces between knowing and not knowing, real and unreal, presence and absence, living and dead. Our conversations “are written only as we write, by the agency within us which always already keeps watch over perception, be it external or internal” (Derrida, 1978a, p. 226). We become subjects of these conversations, correspondences, becomings, which generate data, spectral data. These data generate us as we generate them and produce shards of knowledge that elude categorization.

Write us. Write our data, our becomings.

OPEN IN VIEWER

As I write, I read aloud my writing to you. You are my “answering machine whose voice outlives its moment of recording: [I] call, the other person is dead . . . and the voice responds to [me]” (Derrida, 1996, p. 62).

Go on.

You “respond to [me], in a very precise fashion” (Derrida, 1996, p. 62).

Indeed.

This simple exchange we are having now is not necessarily representative of our conversations. Sometimes I am not ready to hear what you say. Your responses spin labyrinthine threads that orient and disorient. You suspend the event of writing—of writing my way into unforeseen spaces—by commanding me to write what I do not want to write, what I cannot write, what I must write.

While this correspondence, this data we create together, might loosely fall under St. Pierre’s (1997) response data—data gleaned from sources other than the participants in a study (e.g., writing groups, committees, and conference attendees)—it is quite different because you are dead.

The most material of all binary divisions . . .

But, our correspondence, our data, is more than the conversations I have with you while I write.

Yes, it is.

OPEN IN VIEWER

As I write this piece, I dream Kodachrome dreams during which I enter into one of your photographs. We sit next to each other on two wooden chairs, and you place your right hand on my left forearm. The same light blue with cream and tan fern wallpaper is the backdrop to our conversation. As I share my concerns with you, you never respond to me. You are “only being silent to let me speak, long enough to transfer, to interpret, to work” (Derrida, 1996, p. 62).

When I wake up from these dreams, my left forearm is still warm from your touch. I clutch my forearm to hold the warmth, to keep you near. As the warmth spreads across my body, I know what work must be done, even if it is difficult.

I dream of you, “desperate for meanings that elude me” (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 183). I dream of you to help me with the problems I encounter. I dream of you to “keep interpretation in play” (p. 183). I dream of you to help me work through the uncomfortable. Perhaps I dream of you to enter into the uncomfortable.

Are you here?

I’ve never left you.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Throughout my life and work, every emotion I feel is with you and for you. Whereas St. Pierre (1997) described emotional data as “emotions that sometimes threatened to shut down [her] study” (p. 180), our emotional data pushes me through my work, our work.

I first saw this photograph of you at my parents’ home in February 2010 when I was collecting data. To keep himself busy during that very cold and snowy winter, Dad scanned some of Grandpa’s slides. I occasionally looked at his computer folder to study the images. When I saw this photograph of you taken in Arizona 6 weeks before your death, I cried an open-mouthed, soundless, tear-filled, and runny-nosed cry. I do not know why I cried as I did. I have known for a very long time that you died in 1966. I suppose I just did not expect to see your dress partially uplifted by the wind, your mussed hair, or your face showing the signs of cancer. I had never seen a photograph of you like that before. As I wept, I could not stop looking at you, as if you might save me from my tears. In this moment of inexhaustible emotional complexity, I became enlivened to work harder and better for you. Every time I see you in this photograph, I respond in the same way.

In my work of words, I try to make the wind calm down and the cancer stop. I know I cannot make the wind die down nor can I erase your cancer as easily as I hit the delete key on the keyboard. “I live my [your] death in my writing” (Derrida, 2007, p. 33). Every piece of writing I write is a trace of me, of you, of us.

I am in every word we write.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Perhaps I get so emotional when I look at that photograph, because I am remembering my future, which will undoubtedly include my death. Perhaps I am reminded of our shared genetic code, which may include the cancer cells that killed you. Perhaps the tears are a culmination of all the embodied moments of your haunting. Perhaps the tears are ones of survival.

I grab another photograph of you sitting in a field of wildflowers in Colorado that was taken before the cancer invaded your body. I hold it close to me in the hope that I can somehow be transported to that peaceful field. I imagine us talking, admiring the view, breathing in the clean mountain air. I am soon swept away to Colorado. I can smell the mountain air made fragrant by wildflowers, see the mountains, hear your (my) voice that I never heard before, and feel my head resting on your shoulder, a shoulder I have never touched. This embodied moment helps me survive the emotional complexity of looking at the photograph of you in Arizona.

Derrida (2007) wrote, “To survive in the usual sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death” (p. 26). You survive by wrapping yourself around me like a double helix. You survive through our shared genetic code. You survive when I feel your hand on my arm, as I do in my dreams. You survive in my emotions as I cry our tears. You survive in my writing, our writing. These are just not embodied moments—they are moments of survival, of life.

OPEN IN VIEWER

“You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 262).

Yes.

You invite me into this haecceity that “has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 263).

Do you accept this invitation?

How can I not accept it? I accepted it when I was born, when I was named after you, when I grow into your face, and when I sound like you. I accept it when I write with you, live with you, become you. We are one, the middle, the fog, the speeds, the moments, the gusts of wind that rustle our red hair.

Our correspondence—this writing data, dream data, emotional data, the embodied moments, and probably many other data that I cannot and may not ever to know—are moments between us that fashion the fog and determine the speeds.

Go on.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Our correspondence is filled with refrains, blocks of “periodic repetition” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 313). These refrains are like bird songs that we sing together that express varied melodies and rhythms. These songs—or kinds of data (e.g., writing, dream, emotional, and embodied)—vary in style and tempo. Sometimes we sing grave adagio, seriously and slowly. Other times we sing and pick up speed with a presto tempo. As I sing to you and you sing back to me, we repeat and differentiate melodies and rhythms. Spectral data are a conglomeration of these harmonious and varied tempo songs, these refrains, we sing with each other.

The conglomeration of songs forms a territorial assemblage or “a place of passage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 323) that enables us to enter other unforeseen and unanticipated assemblages. For you, the territory allows you to occupy the middle of living and deceased so that you can insert yourself in my life and work, themselves assemblages. When I call to you as I write, dream, feel, and live, you invite passage into new and different assemblages, other spaces of thought and being. We are in the middle, always in passage, always moving.

As we modulate together in this territorial assemblage “between life and death” (Derrida, 1994, p. xvii), I “learn [how] to live with ghosts” (pp. xvii-xviii). I learn how to inherit my life’s and work’s secrets which say “read me, will you ever be able to do so?” (p. 18). I learn how to occupy an unsure knowledge that borders on ignorance and marvel in it. I learn how to remember my future. I learn how to write what I do not want to write, which is what I must write. I learn how to live in the middle—the fog of haecceity.

Spectral data are a territorial assemblage formed by a relationship between a living person and a deceased person(s). The living and deceased sing together and create melodies and rhythms, or kinds of data, which vary from relationship to relationship. From that relationship and those melodies and rhythms, the living and deceased person create a unique territorial assemblage, a multidimensional, growing, and porous space. In that assemblage, passages emerge to other assemblages. Those passages allow the living to learn how to live and work in the middle of life and death, knowing and not knowing, and haecceity. No line can be drawn around spectral data—the territorial assemblage always exceeds any line which seeks to contain it.

OPEN IN VIEWER

I get it now. Spectral data are not possible without you, without our correspondence. We had to have this conversation so that I could pass into a space where I could define spectral data without drawing a line around it.

The collage of photographs attempts to crystallize the assemblage, the conversation, we create(d) together in “just a moment, at any moment now [incessamment], presently or at present, so that, later, a few moments from now, sometimes a lot later or even a very long time from now, another present to come will be taken by surprise by the click and will be forever fixed, reproducible, archivable, saved or lost for this present time” (Derrida, 2010, p. 19). The collage is my meager attempt at the impossible task of stilling the constantly moving assemblage we create(d) for presents to come as well as shifting, unknown, and unanticipated perspectives. I suspect that I will be swept up by the blurred edges of the photographs and the spaces in between them as I enter again and again into the assemblage where we locate passageways and becomings. No doubt, we will continue to define spectral data as it defines us. In this way, no single story, no single conversation, no single photograph or collage of photographs can capture spectral data.

I am breathless from this conversation, this writing of following passageways and lines, as if I had just run the 1284 km to your grave. But, this embodied moment is not surprising. You always make me breathless when I write with you. How do you take my breath away?

We are a haecceity. We just sped up together. The sensation of breathlessness is the sensation of an uptake in speed. You were moving so slowly before. Together, only together, can we speed up, create lines, and generate passageways to other assemblages.

What’s next?

Another passageway. . .