Senior Research Seminar with Dr Deborah Jones (Max Planck - Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy & Social Change)
Spectral Labour: Ghostwriting as Animation
This presentation is about ghostwriters, people who write as and relinquish credit to someone else. Ghostwriting initially seems an archetypal case of ‘performance’ in which a gap between self and role must be managed — or the self simply erased. Performance tropes capture the self-estrangement many workers experience, but they can make it difficult to comprehend why anyone would find fulfilment in labour that contractually requires invisibility. My ethnography of U.S. American ghostwriters working in business, academic, and religious genres finds spirits surprisingly satisfied and overwhelmingly insistent that their work is ethical. How can this be? I argue that much ghostwriting is better analysed not as ‘performance,’ but as ‘animation,’ a collaborative, reflexive practice of imbuing figures with the appearance of life (Silvio 2011; 2019). Though particularly suited to the internet era, animation may be helpful for understanding a variety of forms of labour, particularly those of a spectral sort.