The Well and the Web: Phantoms of Community and the Mediatic Public Sphere

I.

What monstrous new being appears in the gaze of a person watching another at a computer that is connected to unknown, unseen, untold others?
 

–Mark Poster

 
San Marino, California, 1949. A little girl falls down a well. Rescue crews are soon on the scene, and for a grueling 52 hours, working night and day, they try to save the girl. News media cover the story as it unfolds, unaware, however, that they are covering not a rescue but an exhumation: the girl had in fact died before the cameras, crews and spectators arrived.
 
The death of Kathy Fiscus is considered a watershed in media history, as this story was the first to be broadcast live, with uninterrupted coverage, for a full 27 hours, by television news. Transfixed viewers stayed up all night to follow the story, and the news sensation is credited with single-handedly boosting sales of TV sets, still a novelty to households in 1949. Hopes dimmed as the night wore on, and viewers began to fear the worst. The race against time, covered live and shared by viewers around the world, masked a bitter irony. The first live TV coverage was not live but belated; viewers were held in suspense not by the present, or even by a future revelation, but by the uncanny and retrospective temporality of what will have been. Live TV news is born in this Orphic turn that captures not the present instant but only a belated moment and a spectral presence. One can speak in this case of a paradoxically belated horror; the future anterior haunts the spectacle, and the moment of the girl’s death returns to haunt those who unknowingly participated in her wake. If we have inherited this haunted legacy of TV, we have not yet settled accounts with the ghost that was broadcast from San Marino.
 
Today we see in the Kathy Fiscus story the first rehearsal of now-familiar staples of television: prurient coverage of “human interest” topics, exploitative violence, permanent distraction from politics, and passive consumption. It is indeed tempting to see this media-event as the origin of our sensationalistic mediascape. Looking back this way, however, we may only repeat the Orphic turn that haunted viewers in 1949. When did media come to saturate the public sphere? How to heal the breach that makes the live moment always doubled by its alienating spectacle? How to rescue the singular life broadcast from San Marino across the world? The race against time, the struggle of life against death turned out to be unfortunately “too late” for Kathy Fiscus. But a more unsettling belatedness haunts this story. This belated horror resembles that described by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida as he pores over the photograph of a man condemned to death. Barthes is gripped by the convergence in the image of two disparate times: the man will die, and yet he has already died (96).¹ Jacques Derrida refines this insight to claim that the poignancy of the photographic image lies in its status as impossible referent and evanescent presence. Speaking of Barthes’s punctum and its haunting temporality, Derrida asks, “is not Time the ultimate resource for the substitution of one absolute instant by another, for the replacement of the irreplaceable, the replacement of this unique referent by another that is yet another instant, completely other and yet still the same? Is not time the punctual form and force of all metonymy – its instant recourse?” (Mourning 60).² Every moment, even “live,” Derrida suggests, is made spectral by this “resource” and “instant recourse”: whatever appears appears “as” itself, yet masking the instant duplication that haunts the image. There is no source, in this light, that is not a re-source. The well in San Marino is such a haunted source; what the viewers saw as the “tragedy” of Kathy’s death–thus fully narratable, if only by an abuse of genre–covers over the poignant and punctual re-source that always and already replaced her, as live television spectacle. As such, the Kathy Fiscus “story” is an allegory of television. Viewers were drawn into a spectacle that evoked primal fears and elementary struggles, but also the consolations of community reduced to the bare essentials of myth. Here at the well we seem to see the very source of community. The re-source of the well, however, escapes from view, making the viewer the haunted carrier of a visual secret, the poignant belatedness of the live image.
 
The aim of this essay is to bring out ghosts that haunt community in such mediatic spectacles. In so doing, I articulate a notion of community that is expanded to a global scale. I explore the figure of the viral in tandem with that of the ghost to advance a theory of the ethics of spectatorship. The ghost, I argue, emerges as the figure of community’s impossibility, indexing a confrontation with what it both banishes and aims to manage, contain, and lay to rest. The death of Kathy Fiscus is an instructive example here; it brought together a community of viewers in a spectacle of death, a redemptive, if painful, experience of common loss. As we will see, this scenario, including its haunted well, is compulsively repeated in narratives of mediatic communities. This would seem to echo René Girard’s claim that social collectivities ground themselves in the sacrifice of one of their number. And yet behind the single victim of the spectacle there looms a vast number; it is worth noting that Kathy Fiscus was born August 21, 1945, a mere twelve days after the Nagasaki strike. The race to save the little girl’s life is shadowed in this way by a global necropolitical force that relegates other people’s lives to the category of collateral damage. It may seem ungenerous to ascribe such an anti-morality of survival to the well-meaning spectators of Kathy Fiscus’s story. And yet a necropolitical logic binds together the spectators of the events in San Marino. To defend life at home is not merely to hold death at bay, but to enforce the distinction between valuable and disposable lives. Moreover, as Dina Al-Kassim argues, the figure of the innocent girl victim provides a frequent and reliable “link between social consensus and repressive force” (52), by means of which the “cultural production of innocence” both infantilizes the public sphere and legitimates the state’s discriminatory policing of minorities (53). An illusion of community, a phantom public, is conjured in this blind act of necropolitical enforcement. This illusion of community is alternately a phantom public of mass mediatic spectacle, and the phantom of a global context, the untold millions who never amount to a story, but only haunt the edges of the scene as its blindly excluded.
 
The TV reporter on the scene in San Marino, Stan Chambers, seems haunted by the events he covers. A young man at the time, this cheerful and popular reporter has never stopped paying his respects and giving credit to the little girl who made his name, indeed his “celebrity” (KTLA 31). His unfinished mourning indicates the burden of an unpaid debt. There is indeed an awkward, though fitting, irony in the fact that television would profitably extend its “news hole” into the night by continuing to cover the fatal story of a dark well. Sixty years later Chambers revisits the story in his autobiography. “The evolution of extended television news coverage happened overnight in that open field in San Marino,” the veteran reporter says (23); one newspaper credited his coverage as “one of the greatest reporting jobs in the history of television” (28). Chambers quotes from a letter he received following his reporting of the story:
 

Until that night, the television was no more a threat to serenity than any other bit of furniture in the living room. Now you have utterly destroyed this safety forever …you and the epic which you have been part of this weekend have made us know what television is for. You have made many of us know that we belong to the world. Through your own dignity and your recognition of the dignity of others, you have given us a flash of people at their best, as we remember them in the battle, or as I’ve seen them at Negev outposts in Israel.
 

(27–8)

This letter, the only one Chambers cites from his files, is oddly ambiguous, thanking the reporter precisely for destroying the viewer’s safety and invading his home. Television, it would seem, is the gift of the Unheimlich. And while the letter proffers the lofty moral that “we belong to the world,” it concludes, awkwardly, with an heroic evocation of Zionist war. A fleeting insight into shared precariousness–accidents happen, we are all mortal, like Kathy Fiscus–inflates into an “epic,” and ultimately inverts into a valorization of armed conquest and colonization. The spectacle of community, of people gathered together around the well and around the TV set, morphs into that of a band of fighters facing a common enemy. While it was a common feature of the news of the time that the costs of the 1948 war went virtually unreported, what is less clear is how a book published in 2008 could skirt so casually over what many now understand to have been the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.³ We can only speculate that the author sees the Israeli context as somehow still “relevant” today–though surely not in the way he intends.

 
A postwar necropolitics of American television news is sketched out here. Between the story of the girl in the well and the larger global scene there is a striking disparity in the valuing of human lives. In this, the news media support and broadcast the state’s management of what Talal Asad calls “the distribution of pain” (508). One might add that it is local media–here, the provincial Los Angeles media–that best performs this unequal distribution in its focus on stories of local “human interest.” But this local focus only exacerbates the contradiction opened up by the extended reach of television, its widening news hole, and the global scene. This other scene haunts the spectacle of the girl in the well, for while a common accord binds together the spectators in hoping to save the girl, the very definitions of the “local” and of “community” are implicitly thrown into crisis. What rises to the level of a television “story”? Who deserves saving? And can community cohere where the audience expands beyond the local? It would seem that only the figure of an innocent white girl can suspend these contradictions, if only for a moment.⁴ But in so doing, the televisual public sphere reveals itself, in Alexander Kluge’s words, as a “universal provincialism,” claiming to encompass all voices yet blind to its constitutive exclusions (Liebman 44).
 
These exclusions are subtly perpetuated even in what seem the most humane expressions of cosmopolitan fraternity. As one editorial of the time has it, “A little girl falls down a well in California and the news sweeps across oceans, waking untold millions to eager, anxious sympathy” (Chambers 29). We may recognize here the postwar American discourse of “The Great Family of Man” ironized by Barthes’s critique of media and consumer culture, Mythologies (100). Barthes shows how hypocritical sentimentality and gross abstractions of shared humanity serve to elide more concrete issues of history and politics. Barthes’s diagnoses still resonate with a broad range of arguments, most notably those of Jürgen Habermas, that media, merchandising and ideology have corrupted the public sphere. As critics of Habermas have pointed out, however, the notion of the death of the public, or a “phantom public sphere,” often grounds its critique in the nostalgic premise of an ideal state of communication that is questionable if not unfounded (Robbins viii). On the other hand, as these authors have argued, the idea of a “phantom public,” to be taken seriously, may help account for the elusive promise and phantasmatic potential of public discourse as a field of subversion, emancipation and desire. Beyond the discourse of communicative norms and nostalgia for community, such a notion of a phantom public lays bare the contradictions and exclusions that sustain the public as a vital illusion. These two versions of the phantom public reflect the main schism in leftist cultural studies: the Adornian indictment of mass culture as thoroughly complicit in the economics of exploitation, and the search for dissident and emancipatory forces within the society of the spectacle. This argument is potentially endless, given that the two sides tend not toward a dialectical synthesis but to the stalemate of a liberal politics exemplified by the collection edited by Bruce Robbins, The Phantom Public Sphere.
 
Other ghosts, however, haunt the phantom public, and the catastrophic legacy of the Kathy Fiscus story is carried on even by media’s sharpest critics. Mary Ann Doane, for instance, argues that live TV coverage is intimately linked to the spectacle of catastrophe. “The lure of the real” sustains TV’s claim to “urgency” and “liveness,” but in so doing exposes its own failings as a medium devoted to “forgetting” and “decontextualization.” As Doane says, “the ultimate drama of the instantaneous–catastrophe–constitutes the very limit of its discourse” (“Information,” 222). Doane invokes Tom Brokaw’s coverage of the Challenger disaster, a live report complete with unscripted moments that fall in the lineage of Stan Chambers’s original broadcast.⁵ “It is not that we have a ghoulish curiosity,” Brokaw lamely apologizes, as he reruns the disaster footage (232). Live TV, Doane argues, is drawn to events that defy representation, which in turn reinforces the medium’s occlusion of deeper causes and political contexts that remain unrepresented. In this sense, then, the spectacle of catastrophe is a turning away from politics and the systemic causes of disaster. Doane thus contributes to an understanding of how capitalism exploits crisis as opportunity, indeed thrives on sheer catastrophe: a condition that has more recently been dubbed the “shock doctrine” (Klein). Interestingly, however, Doane’s essay betrays a similar turning away, as if TV’s fascinating “catastrophe machine” draws the critic into its own specular economy (234). “The Challenger coverage,” Doane says, “demonstrates just how nationalistic the apprehension of catastrophe is–our own catastrophes are always more important, more eligible for extended reporting than those of other nations. But perhaps even more crucial here was the fact that television itself was on the scene–witness to the catastrophe” (231). For Doane, the crucial issue lies in TV’s participation as mediatic witness of the disaster; live TV thus reveals its problematic entanglement in a general state of political-economic crisis it fails to account for. However, Doane’s claim that the presence of cameras on the scene is “even more crucial” than the show’s nationalistic bent is almost tautological, since it inadvertently reinforces the “always more important” choices critiqued in the foregoing sentence. Doane clearly does not condone those editorial choices, but she makes her own dubious decision as to what is most “important” in the scene, and in so doing, skirts the vital function of the spectacle in supporting the “distribution of pain.” As a result, Doane enacts the very “slippage” she indexes in her definition of the catastrophic media event: “There is often a certain slippage between the notion that television covers important events in order to validate itself as a medium and the idea that because an event is covered by television–because it is, in effect, deemed televisual–it is important” (222). The slippage on the critic’s part seems to follow the fateful lure of TV’s supposedly self-reflexive nature, and demonstrates how media criticism can reinforce the closed loop of TV’s self-interested perspective: “television,” Doane says, “incessantly takes as its subject the documentation and revalidation of its own discursive problematic” (226).
 
In contrast to Doane, we might assert that the catastrophic spectacle is not a postmodern exemplum of the media-event, but rather the symptom of a technological monopoly that turns eyes inward and away from the global scene. Further, that global scene is not an additional scene that cannot fit into the broadcast slot or the critic’s commentary, but its haunting double, always present if only as lapses and asides. Doane’s own lapse may seem minor, but it is symptomatic; it may be seen as well in her reference to economic crisis: “Catastrophe makes concrete and immediate, and therefore deflects attention from, the more abstract horror of potential economic crisis” (237). Her reference to a deflected “potential economic crisis” itself deflects from catastrophe on the other scene, where crisis is not “abstract,” “intermittent,” or “potential,” but the actual realm of predatory capital; not the scene of the occasional NASA mishap, but the economic proving ground of the military-industrial complex. Doane goes so far as to say that “economic crisis does not appear to meet any of the criteria of the true catastrophe. It is not punctual but of some duration, it does not kill (at least not immediately)” (236). This last qualification is especially telling, as it betrays the limitations of the critic’s temporal emphasis which, much as it critiques the sham liveness of TV coverage, envisions economic crisis either as one of long duration (and thus unspectacular) or as temporally deferred. We can, however, restate her formula instead in spatial terms: economic crisis, in other words, does not kill (at least not here). Indeed, we might say that space haunts the critic’s analysis as its disavowed category; in this way, the argument subtly reinforces the presentness of the here even as it contests the liveness of the now. The space of the not-here, spectral and non-present, haunts both the critic and televisual catastrophe. This disparity in the coverage of disaster reflects Achille Mbembe’s trenchant formula for necropolitics as the division between “those who must live and those who must die” (17).
 
Mbembe’s “necropolitics” draws on Foucault’s theory of biopower as “that domain of life over which power has taken control” (12). Mbembe argues, however, that modern disciplinary power over subjects is always accompanied by its necropolitical other. This entails a challenge to the normative liberal theory of a public sphere grounded in freedom, reason, and autonomy, and expressing itself in the common exercise of sovereignty (13). Mbembe argues instead that this sovereign power is always also a force negating the life of others. The double injunction that some must live while others must die reflects the twin but disparate exercises of sovereign power over populations at home and populations abroad. Race provides the persistent rationale for this distribution of the power of life and death, whose history extends from early modernity into the present.⁶ Plantations, colonies, occupied territories and targets of neo-imperial wars are the sites of “death worlds” that relegate other populations to the status of “the living dead” (40). “If power still depends on tight control over bodies,” Mbembe says, “the new technologies of destruction are less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time comes, within the maximal economy now represented by the ‘massacre'” (34). A sinister anti-morality results even for those who survive death, Mbembe says; survival becomes another means for the perpetuation of necropolitics. As Mbembe says, “in the logic of survival one’s horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it is someone else who is dead” (36).
 
For Mbembe, the necropolitics of survival are realized in their most complete form in occupied Palestine, where the first world and an advance guard of settlers abut a population in enforced destitution. The invasion of Gaza in 2008–9 seems to confirm Mbembe’s diagnoses by both ratcheting up the violence and underscoring the failed response of the media and the international community. Occupied Palestine, strangely invoked in the Kathy Fiscus story, reflects the logic of haunted community I pursue in what follows. In each case, community casts itself in the lurid terms of a battle of life against death. At the center of this struggle is the figure of the settler and the frontier, narrowing down to the figure of the frontier well. As we will see, the figure of the well supports a dubious mythology of autonomy and self-sufficiency. The autonomy of the frontier homestead allows the community to identify itself as similarly bounded, sovereign and independent. Gathered at the well as if in the forum of a town square, the community tries to save a threatened life, and thereby reaffirms its communal bonds. However, such scenes are haunted by a necropolitics they disavow; as a result, community takes shape as a phantasm haunted by ghosts of which it is only dimly aware.
 
We have said that the Kathy Fiscus story ushered in a new era of television news. Forty years later, in October 1987, another mediatic era began with cable television’s coverage of a similar story. The Jessica McClure story seemed to replay the events of San Marino, though on a much larger, indeed hyperbolic scale. In a milestone in sensationalistic TV coverage, CNN chose to run the story around the clock, with the result that the upstart cable channel claimed its highest ratings ever, joining overnight the ranks of established television news channels. CNN’s famous scoop of Operation Desert Storm is often seen as signaling the shift toward cable news and the 24-hour news cycle, but the decisive turn in fact happened earlier, in the backyard of the McClure house in Midland, Texas. Iraq and Midland are linked, however, in more uncanny ways; Midland, Texas, after all, is George W. Bush’s “home town,” and at the time of the Jessica McClure story he had only recently left town to help in his father’s election campaign and to embark on his own political career. A boomtown of millionaires, Midland’s politics and fortunes are linked not only to its local wells and derricks but to the global geopolitics of oil and empire. As in the Kathy Fiscus story, a larger global scene haunts the phantom public’s spectacle of life and death in Midland. What emerges from the well in Midland is not only a girl miraculously saved from death, but a new force in media news, a channel whose sensationalistic bent will prove its worth in the coming years with the rise of neo-liberal empire and the security state. And while the young girl in Midland was finally rescued from the well, her story seems to have left a curse, as Lisa Belkin suggests: her rescuer committed suicide some years later, and one of the police officers on duty was convicted of sexual exploitation of a child. The curse of the Jessica McClure story does not, of course, derive from anything occult, but rather from the toxic saturation of exploitative infotainment. Moreover, the victims of this story are far more numerous. The phantom public conjured by CNN in Midland is bound together in a shared drama of intimate danger and survival, yet blind to its necropolitical participation in a broader mediatic state of emergency.
 
As covered by CNN, Midland was not the geopolitical center of neo-liberal empire, but a middle America where political issues give way to a story of mere human interest: an ordinary white working class family confronting a private tragedy. In this way media coverage of the Jessica McClure story conveys a drama with which everyone can presumably identify, converting a “personal accident” into a “national catastrophe,” as Patricia Mellencamp puts it (252). Here lies also the characteristic ruse of the televisual spectacle of catastrophe: “TV administers and cushions shocks,” Mellencamp says, in a duplicitous “mastery and discharge” of trauma (254, 246). Not only did Jessica become “everybody’s baby,” as the film devoted to her story had it, but Midland was cast as a typical American small town, a microcosm of the country as a whole. This very restriction of focus lends a mythic political dimension to the drama, evoking fantasms and fears of the frontier, the homestead, and the embattled settler family.⁷ The well itself, focal point of the drama, suggests a frontier well, symbol of autonomy and belonging, gathering place of family and friends. Gathered in turn around the televisual well, viewers share in the intimate circle of this frontier myth. The well becomes a televisual agora, a collective forum embodying the nostalgic promise of the traditional public sphere. As a point of televisual gathering, this frontier well is deeply ironic, however. Its potent symbolism of self-sufficiency is, of course, a mere anachronism in a time of public water agencies and complex networks of water distribution; in suburbs across the United States, ersatz wells are planted in front yards to produce a similarly vain illusion. The spectacle of the well holds firm to this anachronism, however, in its appeal to a community of shared grief and hope. But that larger mediatic community is in contradiction with the intimate scale of the spectacle it wants to observe. Television viewers are thus viewers of the very obsolescence of community; their pious concern and fear are the ambivalent affects of a desire for community and the unknowing recognition of their impossible participation. This is not to discount, moreover, a pervasive ambivalence of the spectatorship of death and disaster: the spectacle appeals to the viewer’s sympathies, but as spectacle, it is enjoyed at a distance. Mediation thus allows both for sympathy and dissociation, though purveyors of disaster stories rigorously disavow the latter. It seems that the mediatic power of such stories lies in their ability to channel the trauma of the viewer’s ambivalence in the spectacle of another’s trauma. As Michael Warner argues, the mediatic spectator is necessarily abstracted from any corporeal, face-to-face community exchange, and in a compensatory reflex, it gloms onto the body of another in pain. Mediatic scenes of horror thus do not so much forge common bonds of sympathy as express “the mass subject’s impossible relation to a body.” As Warner argues, “the mass subject cannot have a body except the body it witnesses. But in order to become a mass subject it has left that body behind…. It returns in the spectacle of big-time injury” (Warner 250).
 
The latent political significance of the Midland well as symbol of American imperial politics has been harnessed by the right-wing website, “Jessica’s Well,” which, headquartered in Midland itself, sports the patriotic logo-image of a frontier homestead. A toxic swill of hate-mongering ethnocentrism, militarism and religious fundamentalism, “Jessica’s Well” exemplifies the politics of George W. Bush’s political base. As discussion forum and gateway to like-minded extremist sites, the website exploits the connectivity of the internet while defending the mythic autonomy of the frontier home. The website epitomizes a radical failure of the American public sphere: knowledge is strictly partisan, and community (white, Christian and Zionist) is bound together in a war of defamation against all other ideologies, countries, religions, and races. “Jessica’s Well” is perhaps only a fringe element in a larger American public sphere, and yet it underscores the tacit politics of CNN’s nominally centrist position and that of the other dominant media outlets that manage the mediatic public sphere.
 
There are, of course, venues that hold to a different model of civil discourse on the web. The most influential of these is none other than the WELL, “The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link,” founded in 1985 in Sausalito, California, and the first internet community on the web. After 25 years, the WELL still stands as a model of literate, cosmopolitan, informed discussion and debate; its image of the well supports a left-leaning ethos of community, creativity, and mutual sustenance. But even on the left, one finds echoes of the frontier mythology of Midland’s well. These are suggested by the WELL’s name and logo, but are explicitly advertised in Howard Rheingold’s history of the WELL, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. If Rheingold seems unconcerned about the unfortunate implications of his frontier metaphor, he might be excused for employing a well-worn figure. And yet no-one today brandishes the figure of the “plantation” with such political insouciance. The difference, of course, is that while contemporary American free enterprise seeks its profits in outsourcing, in sweatshops and call centers abroad, it takes as its favored metaphor not the plantation but the more heroic figure of the frontier. For the metaphor to “work” in leftist discourse, it must harness the adventurous spirit of the settler while at the same time denying its genocidal implications. And indeed, in Rheingold’s history of the WELL, the spirit of the entrepreneur vies constantly with a political world it implies and yet disavows. This conflict makes his “virtual community” another version of the “phantom public” we have explored so far.⁸ And as in those media turning points, this community centers on the figure of a young girl in mortal danger: a girl fighting for her life in the WELL.
 
The Virtual Community offers a history of the rise of our new mediatic world of internet connectivity, and its opening pages rehearse a familiar claim to community haunted by a world it would exclude. The first chapter, titled “The Heart of the WELL,” tells how the author sought medical advice for his ailing two-year old daughter from the online “Parenting conference,” which quickly provided him vital information before his own doctor could call him back. This forum, “a small but warmly human corner of cyberspace,” has a particularly intimate and social character, Rheingold says; there is “a magic protective circle” around this part of the WELL. “We’re talking about our sons and daughters in this forum, not about our computers or our opinions about philosophy, and many of us feel that this tacit understanding sanctifies the virtual space” (1). The “magic protective circle” of the forum is defined, then, by numerous exclusions: politics, philosophy, computing–in fact the core of the WELL’s larger conversations–are all staved off. Community, imagined here as all-embracing and far-flung, narrows down to shared concerns about the nuclear family. Rheingold invokes a virtual consensus in which the liberal and leftist ethos of the WELL merges with the mentality of the security mom.
 
Rheingold cites at length from the post of a member of the Parenting conference watching over his ailing 14-month old daughter. The father, Jay, appeals to the online community from the darkness of this quiet room in Woods Hole. “Woods Hole. Midnight. I am sitting in the dark of my daughter’s room. Her monitor lights blink at me. The lights used to blink too brightly so I covered them with bits of bandage adhesive and now they flash faintly underneath, a persistent red and green, Lillie’s heart and lungs” (3). Interestingly, even as he connects to the outside world, the scene he describes contains technical prostheses of connectedness, here more ambiguous and unsettling: “Above the monitor is her portable suction unit. In the glow of the flashlight I’m writing by, it looks like the plastic guts of a science-class human model, the tubes coiled around the power supply, the reservoir, the pump.” Jay continues, “Tina is upstairs trying to get some sleep. A baby monitor links our bedroom to Lillie’s. It links our sleep to Lillie’s too, and because our souls are linked too, we do not sleep well.”
 
The line “we do not sleep well” echoes strangely with Jay’s observation that, unlike other friends and communities, “The WELL was always awake” (4). To connect to the forum is to bring others into the circle of a vigil where no-one sleeps well. Here, at the heart of the virtual community, its metaphoric well is incarnated in the “power supply, the reservoir, the pump” connected to a young body in crisis. Like his daughter connected to the tubes, pumps and monitors, Jay’s online connectedness is vital, and that connectedness is felt most keenly in a state of emergency and a time of need. In this way, the Parenting conference proves its worth as more than a mere venue for conversation. Its stakes are higher: the Parenting conference is a lifeline, connecting a community in a struggle to preserve life. But if the vigil of connectedness is a fight for life and survival, Lillie’s connectedness is more ambiguous. Even as her connections sustain her life, they subtly replace it as well. In the sentence that describes the lights that monitor her vital signs, two clauses are apposed, linked only by a comma that suspends the vital connection: “a persistent red and green, Lillie’s heart and lungs.” Likewise, the “science-class human model” is a prosthetic double that suggests Lillie’s replacement by her life support. As emblematic example of the virtual community, the story of Lillie and her family conveys more than a moral of friendship and support, suggesting as well a disquieting dislocation of subjects in technological life-support. Moreover, the natural family reduced to its mere essentials is at the same time a fully mediated technological interface. These tensions provide of course the pathos of Jay’s posting and Rheingold’s use of it as moral allegory of the virtual community. Cyberspace may alter the space, time and media of communication, Rheingold tells us, but contact on an intimate and emotional level is still very much possible. And yet, if connection and communication are the keys to Jay’s post, those terms are strikingly ambiguous. Community is forged precisely in the frail bonds that are alternately connecting and disconnecting, and in the substitution of electronic monitors with the “souls” of the family. Connectedness, for Lillie, carries the ambivalent meanings of both remedy and curse. Suspended between life and death, Lillie is a prosthetic survivor, a haunting figure of the virtual community’s contradictions.
 
As such, the girl in the WELL expresses a pervasive tension, indeed an “ethical contradiction,” as Rob Latham puts it, that congeals in monstrous pop-cultural icons of youthful cyborgs and vampires (14). The figures of the vampire and of the cyborg reflect twin facets of the economic conscription of youth, Latham argues, conveyed in the double meaning of his book’s title, Consuming Youth. On the one hand, youthful bodies are vital to the economics of production, “consumed” by the imperatives of labor and production, as Marx portrays it. “The worker,” Latham says, “essentially becomes a cybernetic organism–a cyborg–prosthetically linked to a despotic, ravening apparatus” (3). On the other hand, in the post-Fordist era of increasing consumption, the “mass-market fetishization of youth” (16) encourages the insatiable appetites of youthful consumers. These two facets of “consuming youth” reflect not only an historical distinction, but a continuing conflict between labor and leisure, consumption and production. Moreover, while deriving from an earlier time of factory production, the vision of a “prosthetic and predatory” world of automation clearly remains with us today, as fantasy, sci-fi and horror films amply indicate.⁹ Rheingold’s parable can only address these concerns symptomatically, but in Lillie’s state of suspended animation we can discern the latent figure of the “vampire-cyborg as a twinned metaphor for youth consumption” (20). The prosthetic Lillie seems, then, to signal a problem endemic to the contemporary mediasphere: the media market strives increasingly to target children, prying little consumers from the control of their parents. Lillie’s frail body stands implicitly as symbol of online children threatened by predators, identity thieves, marketers and manipulators of public opinion.
 
It is striking that fears of this kind can accompany a technophilic text such as Rheingold’s, but as Mark Poster shows, this is a pervasive feature of commentary on the internet. The advent of the web was accompanied by a panicked discourse in the media that focused on the figure of the online child, alternately monster and victim of the web. Poster shows that such technological fears follow a script typical of previous media innovations (106). Fearful commentary on the internet revolution thus repeats fears of mediation as such; as a result, the discourse of crime and perversion is marred by its unexamined presumptions of innocent and unmediated communication outside of the technological sphere. Rheingold’s text copes with such threats and fears by composing a moral tale of the online community as extension of family and forum of connectedness. Lillie survives her illness, we learn, but in what seems a substitutive narrative sacrifice on Rheingold’s part, another member, less innocent than Lillie, dies by the end of the chapter. “You aren’t a real community,” Rheingold pointedly concludes, “until you have a funeral” (24). What the author narrates in this way, however, passes over–and passes on–a more haunting death-work that defies his narrative choices and moral fables. Lillie’s suspended life and Jay’s lonely postings speak to a disturbing mediation that links death and deferral to the messenger’s vital signs. Life in crisis is the very mode of survival, but this ambiguous survival is only intimated in the inarticulate gaps and disjunctions of the message. To respond to such a haunted message is to pass it on, since the reader cannot realize the author’s intent without betraying it or making choices. The posting from Wood’s Hole calls for witness and response; it appeals to the support of the community. But its haunting message is not settled in narrative morals or in funeral rites. As I will argue, the responsibility for such a message is passed on precisely by means of its own inadequacy and, indeed, failure.
 
In this sense, then, the story of Lillie’s near-death is an allegory, a parable of the origin of community, the WELL’s very source. As allegory, moreover, it organizes nagging doubts and questions that make each community member, like young Lillie, the transmitter of primal enigmas of life, death, community and identity. The WELL as forum is a gathering around the dark center of those unanswered questions. Such primal scenes tend to resolve themselves in pious claims to sacrifice and losses redeemed, and this is the moral message that irresistibly concludes Rheingold’s chapter. As in all allegories, such answers lend a consoling order to something that fails to maintain a coherent structure. Allegory attempts to cover over discrepancies that lie at the origin, and in so doing, its answers fall short of responsibility to those motivating gaps. Jay’s posting is rife with inarticulate moments in which vital questions of death, mediation and community are at stake. What is conveyed in such inarticulate relays is the non-point source of allegory, a poison or pollution that, outside the economy of sin, grounds communication in an inescapably viral mode. How, then, to respond to such relays without falling in with the pieties of community morals and their inevitable symptoms, the violent disavowal of “sin”? Responsibility should be sought less in moral choices than in the relays of deferral and failed responses that pass on like a virus the lack of structure at the heart of community. Paradoxically, then, responsibility must remain inarticulate, to the extent that it passes on the lack of structure to which it answers.¹⁰ To respond is not to put a question to rest, but to be haunted by that question and to ensure its survival.
 
In the life and death struggles we have examined, survival inevitably bears the marks of community morality. Moreover, this morality of survival can easily accommodate even the amorality of necropolitics. And yet another notion of survival can avoid the tragic dimension of the life and death struggle. Derrida advances the notion of survival in such terms, as a feature of life that escapes the fateful binary couple of life and death. Survival, like deferral, is an originary dimension of existence, in which whatever exists is bound to negation. That negation is not simply opposed to life, but intertwined with it, to the point of calling life itself into question. Survival, then, is “a complication of the opposition life/death,” a spectral prosthesis of life, its inevitable deferral or mediation (Learning 51). This mediation of life entails for Derrida an ethics of hospitality to the ghost, in which the ghost is not the fearsome figment of moral tales, but the spectral manifestation of the subject’s paradoxically vital finitude. In what follows, I pursue the implications of this radical ethics in readings of media communities. The ethics and responsibility of mediated life require that we listen to a different ghost haunting our stories of death and survival: the spectral trace of community in the deferrals and disjunctions of the moral fable.
 

II.

I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another. I might have usurped, that is, in fact killed.
 

Primo Levi

 
The stakes of a postmodern ethics of survival are dramatically staged in a set of recent horror films that echo in an uncanny way the mediatic theme of the haunted well. Among the most terrifying and haunting films of our time, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) and its American remakes The Ring (2002) and The Ring Two (2005) deliver a new kind of ghost: a vengeful presence whose means of persecution are television and videotape. A young girl who has died at the bottom of a well sends a cryptic video message whose viewers are condemned to die seven days after seeing it. The terrifying effect of the films is compounded by the duplication of the means of haunting by the viewing experience itself; in front of the TV set, the viewer of The Ring occupies the place of the victim stricken with death. In this way, the viewer’s own television becomes a haunted medium. This shared horror, moreover, relays what is perhaps the most disturbing feature of the narrative: the delegation of killing by one viewer to another. As we learn by the film’s end, only those who duplicate and spread the fatal message are spared its punishment. The fatal videotape thus spawns a viral logic of death.¹¹
 
The last word in cinematic terror, Ringu and its sequels suggest a postmodern allegory of the viewership of death. The viewer of the films is not merely in a position of metaphoric or analogical substitution with the fictional viewer of the fatal message; rather, he or she repeats, in allegorical fashion, a fatal error of viewing, and this error is what is passed on by the survivor in the viral duplication of the message. The survivor does not solve the riddle of the enigmatic message but merely repeats it; to delegate death is to survive one’s own incomprehension and pass it on to another. In this way, The Ring‘s horror narrative captures graphically a necropolitical logic of televisual viewership in the age of interactive communications, file sharing, and viral video. Like Pulse, One Missed Call and Shutter, among other films, The Ring taps into technological fears that have accompanied the internet revolution, channeling the dark side of Facebook and YouTube, and making its viewer the receiver of unknown online threats and the broadcaster of the curse he or she would ward off. The Ring‘s haunted message is emblematic of viral video in the age of web-based interactivity.
 
This new media environment and its haunting features are the implicit context of The Ring, which however conveys its televisual haunting through a wide array of media. The film features not only TV and videotape, but also telephone, photography, microfilm, drawings, and rayographs. The primary medium of the haunting message is videotape, rather than the more contemporary DVD; in this way, the film reinforces the idea that there is an uncanny materiality to the medium of the haunting message. Likewise, the first photos we see in the film are anachronistic Polaroids. This materiality is crucial to the film’s motifs of the embodiment of the specter and the passage from an intangible to a tangible realm. Moreover, these recently outdated media reinforce The Ring‘s effective use of early film as conveyor of the ghost. The haunting video message is silent and largely in black and white, its images seeming to derive from a fairly distant past. Montage, jump cuts, and static camera positions evoke the early pioneers of the moving image, while disturbing shots of animated objects suggest Surrealist film. Further, the closing shot of the haunted well can be taken for a still photograph; it is only late in The Ring that this image discloses its horrifying truth, as the ghost of the dead girl emerges from the lip of the well. The horrifying appearance of the girl confirms the narrative’s building suspense; uncanny premonitions and mounting clues foretell her murderous intent. The image of the well, however, speaks to a primal visual uncanny. In breaking with the static photographic image, the girl’s emergence seemingly recapitulates the birth of cinema. The static image becomes one of movement, and the viewer’s horror at this emerging specter is grafted onto the visual delusion, shared by all film viewers, that still images are animated, and animated images are alive. In the film’s most terrifying moment, the girl’s emergence from the TV set itself confirms this delusion, but only in the mode of horror: what reveals itself is neither alive nor dead, but a spectral entity that defies either state. The TV screen becomes the equivalent of the edge of the well; what emerges from the screen is the truth of the viewer’s delusion. And yet, as we will see, this emergence bears the marks of a different encounter between viewer and image; as Ariella Azoulay puts it, “One needs to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it” (14).
 
This passage across the screen seems to place the viewer in a position akin to that of early cinema viewers, confronted with the astonishing modern spectacle of animated images. In one of the Lumières’s first films, a train approaching the screen was seen as bearing down on the viewers’ space itself. Accounts of these early screenings lead us to believe that the spectators mistook the image for reality, that they actually feared a collision with the cinematic train. However, as Akira Lippit points out, there is reason to doubt this account of naïve belief and misperception, which may in fact serve to disavow one’s own delusions and the uncanny “shadow optics” we share with those viewers. Lippit argues that it is not so much the emerging train that was feared as the illusion of deep space that seems to lie beyond the screen: “what awaits the spectator at the projected point of collision is an imaginary depth, a volume that opens onto the spectator from the other side of the screen” (65). In this light, one might say that the fear of an emerging specter in The Ring masks a more unsettling fear, that of one’s absorption by the deep space of the image. “The spectator is swallowed by the image, as if it were an oral cavity, as if the image, in this instant, revealed an interiority, vast and terrible” (65). For Lippit, this deep space is a figure of the unconscious, of the self’s interiority dimly sensed as invisible and bottomless. “Cinema generates a spectacle of the unconscious,” Lippit says, “rendering its viewers unconscious spectators” (63).
 
This invocation of a space that swallows the viewer is strikingly apt in the case of The Ring; the cursed message turns the TV set into a well, and the viewer is doomed to fall, like the girl herself, into its gruesome space. The Ring thus reawakens primal terrors of early cinema, and turns the TV set–the familiar domestic “tube”–into a threatening well, opening an uncanny portal in the heart of the home. Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny'” reminds us that the home (heim) is always haunted by the monstrous and unfamiliar; indeed, at the point of deepest privacy, the home inverts into its other, heimlich into unheimlich. As Freud shows, this ambiguity lies within the term “uncanny” itself which, at a certain point, becomes indistinguishable from its opposite. In a strange semantic slippage, privacy and intimacy tend to converge with secrecy and mystery; the most intimate is also the most alien. Welling up from the depths, the unheimlich is “like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again” (198). The image of a “buried spring” reprises Freud’s favored metaphors for the unconscious and the return of the repressed: what is cast into the unconscious is buried alive, and always insists on returning from below. The image of a buried spring resonates with that of a well, which is, after all, an artificial spring buried underground. In The Ring, we discover that the well lies directly beneath the cabin floor. It is this hole that threatens to swallow each viewer, once the haunting video is played at home on a private TV set.¹²
 
For Freud, the uncanny and its monstrous effects ultimately call for therapeutic cure; the patient is called on to recognize that what appears as alien and frightening is only the product of an alienating repression. This psychoanalytic insight agrees with a moral dimension common to ghost stories, and which derive from the folklore of many cultural traditions. People wrongly killed return to haunt not only their killers, but a larger complicit community. To exorcise the vengeful spirit requires a labor of sleuthing and a confrontation with a buried past. Like such narratives, The Ring seems to conclude with exorcism once the girl’s murder is fully brought to light. We learn that the girl was killed by her mother who dropped her into the well, though she survived for seven days in her premature grave. Accordingly, seven days of life are allotted to the viewers of her message. It is at this point, however, that the narrative defies the logic of redemption, cure, and exorcism. The dead girl is never avenged, but insists instead that her haunting be perpetuated. The videotape is more than a message from the dead, it is a viral agent of killing that spares no innocents. The narrative of exorcism and redemption thus gives way to that of the curse.
 
This mixture of the logic of redemption with that of the curse is a feature of some of the most haunting ghost stories, and what results is a complication that defies both psychoanalytic cure and moral resolution. The passing on of the ghost story becomes a modality of the curse, reinforcing the impression that as readers caught in an abyssal structure, attempting to interpret a series of passed-on messages, we may ourselves inherit it. Such haunting seriality opens Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, with its initial scene of assembled guests, an exchange of tales, and the relating of the ghost story passed from the governess to a pair of narrators, one framing the other. In a masterful reading of The Turn of the Screw, Shoshana Felman tracks the infectious “ghost-effect” of James’s story in the critical literature soon after its publication. Two camps dominate this body of writing: those who subscribe to the occult happenings in the tale, and those who ascribe to the narrating governess some form of hysteria or madness. These camps reflect two inextricable facets of the ambiguous narrative, and in this way the text perpetuates itself in the symptoms of its readers. Of particular interest to Felman is how suspicious readers, those who doubt the occult version of the story’s events, inadvertently find themselves “duplicating and repeating the governess’s gesture” (“Henry James” 219). If such readers, the supposedly enlightened “non-dupes,” would blame the governess herself, rather than the ghosts, for the killing of young Miles at the end of the story, duplicating her gesture would amount to a repeating, or at least seconding, of that murder. “We are forced to participate in the scandal,” Felman claims (199). This fatal participation is noted by one of the story’s first critics, who complains that “one has been assisting in an outrage upon the holiest and sweetest fountain of human innocence, and helping to debauch–at least by helplessly standing by–the pure and trusting nature of children” (198). Tellingly, the critic’s plaint invokes the image of a pure source that has been sullied; the innocent children, metaphorized by that source, are debauched by the author and his guilty readers. An odd equivocation mars this righteous diatribe, however, since the reader is cast as both “helping” and “helpless.” Here, at the very source of goodness, and confronted with “the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature,” the reader’s implication in the story’s evil doings is curiously ambivalent, and virtually hysterical. However, a pathologizing diagnosis–whether of the governess or of the story’s critics–skirts too quickly over the story’s contaminating ambivalence. This ambivalence may instead converge in the lure and promise of a singular source of evil, one that the text defies, defers, and denies at every step. The quest for this source ends only in the repeated confrontation with a divided point of origin. Dupe of the text, the reader can only repeat its dizzying duplicities. The unparalleled atmosphere of haunting in The Turn of the Screw lies, then, not so much in its imagery, psychological conflict, or narrative drama as it does in its textual ghost-effects, whereby any statement or act is accompanied by its alternate meaning, its immediate self-duplication as other than itself. For Felman, this makes the text eminently allegorical, understood as the mirroring, in the act of reading, of the narrative’s inadequation with what it claims to relate.
 
In James’s story, as in The Ring, seriality, duplication and repetition are at the heart of the narrative. Both stories pass on a curse that condemns the reader or viewer to “duplicating and repeating,” as Felman says, the guilty acts at the heart of the story, and each defies the reader’s attempt to sleuth out the crime and its causes. Felman is not, of course, content to merely assent to the text’s contaminating force. However, unlike readers who are bent on solving the mystery and closing the book on the scandal, she resists the desire to assign a single meaning or cause to the governess’s story. In this way she avoids the moralizing plaints of the offended readers, as well as the pathologizing judgments of vulgar Freudians. The discourse of sin and morality give way in her analysis to the recognition of a common and shared error. Attuned to the haunting duplicity of narrative, this practice of reading informs an ethical practice of interpretation Felman has developed in her more recent Testimony. Testimonies of crime, torture and suffering are seen as orienting the reader toward a truth that is not a mere referential datum, but a discourse that is inherently duplicitous, and which must be repeated, duplicated and disseminated by the reader. Responsibility thus lies not simply in faithful recording but in bearing witness to a truth that is never simply referential. Indeed, as she argues, it is the very duplicity of the “truth” that allows for its duplication, and thus its communication to others.
 
Ross Chambers draws on Felman’s Testimony in his reading of Laurie Lynd’s R.S.V.P. (1991), a short film dealing with a death from AIDS. Before his death, Andy makes a request to a radio show to broadcast a song of Berlioz, “Le spectre de la rose,” which, based on a poem by Gautier, is itself about death and survival. The song is broadcast after Andy’s passing and thus becomes a message from beyond the grave to his lover Sid who, hearing it on the radio, records it on his stereo. This leads Sid to contact Andy’s sister by phone, who tells Andy’s parents to listen to the radio broadcast as it plays later that day, in their time zone. Chambers insists on the mediatic relays, delays and repetitions that mark the transmission of the haunting message: answering machines, telephones, and radio assure the afterlife of Andy’s message, and allow for a final reconciliation between Sid and Andy’s homophobic parents. Chambers reads this process of delay and relay as the death-work that sanctions any discursive act. Deferral passes on the message, but at the cost of its author’s singular énoncé; the énonciation that survives its author does so at the cost of its author’s singular intent and control. “A message survives,” Chambers says, “but subject to an effect of deferral that prevents it from becoming ‘the’ message that remains forever potential” (17). From this results an ethics of “responsiveness,” as Chambers says, which is aware both of the loss of the original message and of the inadequacy of the response, and is caught up in “a relay of inadequacy” (18). “Our inadequate responses thus take the form of deferral, as the passing on of the message, relay-fashion, and each time in a modified form. Each retransmitted message will be in some sense continuous with the message to which it responds but also, and inescapably, discontinuous with it” (23–4).
 
R.S.V.P., like The Ring, concerns a message from the dead, one that is broadcast and retransmitted through multiple media. But Chambers’s model of ethical responsiveness is hard to square with The Ring‘s horror narrative. The moral dilemma The Ring‘s protagonist confronts is whether, in order to save her son, she should have him duplicate the videotape as well. In choosing to do so, she makes the boy into yet another source of the tape’s murderous intent. This moral dilemma is heightened by the implication of the protagonist’s own latent violence in the transmission of the message, a plot element in The Ring that departs from the original Ringu; her first victim is her own ex-husband, against whom she manifestly harbors resentment, and possibly an unconscious urge to kill. In this way the mother herself, not unlike the dead girl, is a femme fatale.¹³The Ring does not fully resolve this contamination of the heroine, though two versions of feminine power separate off into the monstrous and the (more or less) respectable. The young boy, for his part, has telepathic qualities that not only channel the dead girl’s thoughts but seem to identify him with her dangerous powers.
 
In this way, the duplicators of the message do not merely reproduce a source, but disseminate it. Indeed, that dissemination calls into question the well as source and origin. Fittingly enough, a well is precisely an artificial source, tapping a natural one. The Ring‘s terrors and its moral dilemmas plunge the viewer into an abyssal field of dangers without simple origin; even as it insists on the haunting source of our fears, The Ring haunts us with the idea of a viral message beyond the logic of duplication and representation. We might then speak, using the vocabulary of pollution, of a non-point source of the virus. The viral video belongs to a regime of simulation and virtuality according to which reproduction occurs in the absence of any original source.¹⁴ This is not to dispense with the moral dimension of the story, which graphically confronts the viewer with her or his tainted responsibility. At the same time, by tampering with the source, the viral logic of The Ring takes us beyond the comfortable distinctions of pollution and innocence, betrayal and fidelity, and even life and death. The Ring is a postmodern allegory of ethics in an age of simulation and virtuality.
 
The “RSVP” of The Ring is not an appeal for recognition and response, but rather a demand that the viewer pass on the curse on pain of death. Moreover, one cannot decide whether this demand is motivated or not by a righteous cause; the girl may have been cruelly murdered, and even abused by the scientists studying her telepathic abilities, but her insatiable vengeance points as well to some irredeemable evil. It would seem, then, that there are few points of comparison between R.S.V.P.‘s message of tolerance and The Ring‘s sensationalistic horror. But I would argue that The Ring raises the stakes of R.S.V.P. by making its passed-on messages not only communicative relays but a contaminating force; an ethics of responsiveness is to be sought not merely in inadequacy but in an inherited curse. In this way, an ethics of viewing, rendered nearly moot by The Ring‘s terrifying premise, is made to confront a necropolitics of viewership in the age of the internet and globalization. This may help shed light on a persistent problem of moral discourse on the passive spectatorship of catastrophe. Writing on the televised spectacle of death in Sarajevo, Tom Keenan argues that to assume that the image of suffering speaks for itself is paradoxically to condemn it to silence. As Keenan shows, a common belief holds that the image of another’s suffering is enough to spur viewers to action; and yet, the viewer is insistently paralyzed by such scenes, as if by the evil eye (“Publicity” 110).¹⁵ What constrains moral discourse here, as in Felman’s Testimony, is the premise of an unmediated truth that can inform the public sphere. The binary correlative of the self-evident image is the equally pervasive notion of the deceptive image, inheritor of a long tradition of the image as mere illusion. Jacques Rancière has submitted the latter to an extensive critique, arguing that the image is always a “sentence-image,” object of a creative work of interpretation. In each case, ethical and political critique allows for interpretation by opening up room for error. In the horror film, this error is terror; the unconscious viewer is the viral agent of something “crucial enough to pass along,” as Carol Clover says (95).¹⁶ Clover shows that horror compulsively displays the phantasmatic lability of desire and gender; what is “uninterruptible” and “crucial enough to pass along” in the infectious thrill of horror is the persistent misreading of a violence both feared and desired in the obscure theater of primal fantasy. This viral and compulsive feature of horror is undeniably popular, and The Ring has established itself as a successful franchise in the genre. Indeed, I would argue, it is popular to the extent that it taps into a common error and shared enigma. Here viral, like infectious, carries a double meaning, as has emerged in colloquial parlance; what is viral is both popular and threatening to the community. Similarly, Rancière points to “the disruptive power of community” contained in the violence of the dialectical image (57). To promote an ethical viewership would not be to dispel the curse of the viral, but instead to follow the trace of its popular contagion, and to infect the public sphere with another death-work, one that contests the necropolitical.
 
To pursue this ambiguous virality is to read against the grain of The Ring‘s overt message that compels its viewer to assume the position of a sociopathic survivor. It is this seemingly inescapable compulsion that defines the necropolitical force of the viral video. The spectator is and must remain a survivor; accordingly, others must be eliminated. Moreover, the evil viral force mitigates the moral crime of passing on the curse, since one cannot be guilty of the curse itself, but only of circulating it. Further, the film locks the work of sleuthing and interpretation into this vicious cycle. To solve the mystery of the video is not to lay the ghost to rest or to settle scores, but only to submit inevitably to the logic of survival. According to the logic of the video, there is no other interpretation; one has no choice but to survive, killing in good conscience, or at most with a nagging sense of responsibility for a crime that, nonetheless, is never one’s own. The viewer is pressed into service by a terrorizing dictate, whose self-evidence is akin to the tautological force of ideology, one that conveys no other message than the necropolitics of survival. It is significant that the protagonist’s choice to survive is bound to the survival of her child. This allows for a saving alibi in the film, for if it is selfish and amoral to choose one’s life over another’s, to condemn another to save one’s child is less so. But the mother-bond, an arbitrary narrative choice of the film, is merely the film’s ultimate alibi, serving to naturalize the protagonist’s sociopathological acts as inevitable. A family morality is grounded in the film in a natural imperative, but not without conflating, at a certain point, the contrary options of killing and saving.
 
In our earlier examples, we have seen that the imperative of survival perpetuates economic imperatives by negating the possibility of self-sacrifice and disavowing murder. Similarly, what is strictly foreclosed by The Ring is the option of self-sacrifice. It is true that both of the girl’s parents commit suicide; on the other hand, it may be that in doing so they merely submit to the girl’s sinister force. Either way, the family relationship seems to have no bearing on the video itself, which is addressed to unknown innocent others. In this way, The Ring compels us to deny the option of self-sacrifice, which is cast unambiguously as the (impossible) choice of suicide. However, one may read suicide here as an exorbitant and paranoid denial of more ordinary political and ecological sacrifices, sacrifices invoked yet dispelled as impossible. Within the horror film’s paranoid economy, The Ring conflates “survival” with abundance and profit; to live within one’s means would amount to dying. The Ring thus confirms the theory of necropolitics, but only by grounding itself in a hyperbolic supernatural premise. If this premise seems to occlude the properly political implications of the story, it sheds light on the paranoid and fantasmatic order of the necropolitical itself. The Ring‘s necropolitical double injunction comes not from a sovereign power with which one identifies, but from an ineffable otherness that invades the home, and to which one submits. In this, the monstrous otherness would seem to be the double of the threatening others that contest one’s privilege to life and security. As a threat to one’s life, in other words, the evil figure of the girl is the alibi of the threatening others, out there and everywhere, on whose death one’s life depends. Paradoxically, then, she demands death, and her own first of all. Her inexplicable evil dictates death because she is herself the spectral manifestation of what we have relegated to the world’s zones of death. This phantasmatic misrecognition of the monster resembles that which enables the racist to see in the other someone less than human or marked for death; these misrecognized others are put to death in all innocence by people who, as Hannah Arendt says of murdering colonists, “somehow were not aware that they had committed murder” (qtd. Mbembe 24).¹⁷
 
The Ring captures the phantasmatic features of our modern mediascape, and speaks eloquently of the fears and repressions that define the phantom public sphere. Might we say, then, that by confronting the viewer with the price of his own survival, the film implicitly calls that survival into question? Would this be the moral message of the film, one we should heed in spite of our reflexes of terror? I have suggested as much, but would argue further that the claim the film has over its viewer, its monstrous appeal, defies a simple reversal of values and indeed challenges the notions of both morality and message. The most potent features of The Ring are not only the images of the cursed video itself, but also the inhuman, enigmatic insect-like sounds that accompany them. At the heart of The Ring is a message that haunts us, not simply because of its implicit threat, but rather because it remains enigmatic and opaque. And though we are interpellated by horror, we remain unconscious spectators in the face of the message from the well, misreading the film, passing over its enigma and passing it on as a curse. The disturbing sounds that accompany the cursed images–a repeated faint squeaking or muted screech–are most suggestive of this enigmatic dimension of the film.¹⁸ Here the film does not deliver a message or a clue, but only a sound that disturbs. Moreover, the sound may not even derive from the ghost herself, since it resembles the kind of faint “noise” passed on in the process of re-recording and duplication–what in French are called parasites. This sound also lends a horrifying quality to the scrambled white noise that precedes and ends the video transmission; in a moment of horror, the mother realizes her son is condemned to die when she comes upon him staring at the white noise of the video he has just finished watching. The most terrifying aspect of the film does not, then, derive from the other world, but only from the process of passing on the video. This “ghost in the machine” is and remains perfectly opaque, a signifier without a content, the zero degree of symbolic exchange.¹⁹
 
It is tempting to see this aspect of the film as conveying what Jean Laplanche calls the “enigmatic signifier.” To explore the unconscious dimension of an artwork, clinical case, or social pathology is, in Laplanchian terms, to uncover the trace of the subject’s primary encounter with the unconscious of the other. This encounter is that of a child with an adult and his or her compromised signals; the seduction of the child by the adult is the fundamental given of this primal scene of traumatic encounter (Otherness 93). Laplanchian theory allows us to refine the psychological dimension of the stories we are examining here, and to bring out their shared compulsive features: an oneiric world symbolized by the underworld; childhood innocence betrayed by sin, evil and death; and a message that defies reason and is passed on from one person to another. And while this psychological framework may not seem to illuminate the necropolitics of globalism, our horror stories show us that community is persistently figured in lurid terms richly evocative of primal seduction. Here we find the wellspring of the ambivalence expressed in the contraries of killing and saving, in the governess’s terrorizing inquisition, and in the mediatic community’s dubious fascination with children in danger. Every girl in a well seems to revive Alice’s marvelous and disturbing fall down the rabbit-hole, a journey into a netherworld of illicit desires, extravagant fears, and latent pedophilia.
 
Laplanche’s “enigmatic signifier,” deriving from the unconscious of the other, is not the index of a deep meaning the subject can ever hope to recover. At best, the subject can only interpret a signifier that was itself received in translation. Passed on as a mystery, and received as a translation of that mystery, the enigmatic signifier holds out no promise of a return to the source. This surely does not defeat the purpose of interpretation, though it does set a limit to the passionate quest for the source of one’s fears, fantasies, and suspect desires. As Laplanche argues, the quest for the origin of a fantasy always risks repeating a fantasy of origins (“Fantasy” 24–25). We have seen how some readers of The Turn of the Screw fall into a similar vicious circle by opting either for a narrative of sin or for a supernatural premise. An ethics of reading, however, works with a non-point source of sin and evil, which one translates as best as one can, passing on a contaminated message. Responsibility to the other must bend, then, to the necessity of betrayal and infidelity in a shared error that provides the basis for an ethics beyond morality. We have read The Ring as an allegory of such contaminated messages; the narrative of horror and death, as well as its necropolitical implications, spring from an insight, however compromised, into a viral error of viewing.
 
The Ring dramatizes the stakes of a postmodern ethics of viewing, in which responsibility is figured not as the choice of a moral subject but as the response to the enigmatic call of the other, a response, as Emmanuel Levinas has it, that turns the respondent into the “hostage” of the other, compelled to answer against his will. Drawing on Levinas, Tom Keenan argues that ethics is incomplete to the extent that it does not call into question the will and autonomy of the self, purported agent of moral acts directed at a separate other, object of knowledge and compassion. “Our responsibilities, somehow in excess of our knowledge if not simply opposed to it, are to the other, to the undetermined other, and our vigilance consists in the care with which we attend to the noise that precedes our question, the mark or trace to which we respond at the beginning” (Fables, 11). Keenan emphasizes that this other is not simply someone else, but also “something else,” an “undetermined other,” often a “ghost.” In this reframing of ethics, the self responds to the call of the other in terms evocative of the horror film: accused, persecuted, implicated in an other who calls one’s own existence into question. Keenan quotes from Levinas: “I have not done anything and I have always been under accusation: persecuted. The ipseity … is a hostage. The word I means here I am, answering for everything and everyone” (20). Indeed, the self who is called on is in a sense called up by a question that precedes it. Further, that self is not a singular entity but a mere placeholder for an open address. “The call,” Keenan says, “exposes me, as anyone, to an unincorporable alterity that has no interest in me as anything other than as a placeholder, as a singular substitute” (23). This post-idealist ethics radicalizes the commitment to the other by enmeshing self and other in absolute “proximity,” but at the cost, precisely, of the moral compass that habitually orients our sense of responsibility.
 
Such comparisons between Levinas’s traumatizing other and the ghost of The Ring may seem perverse, given that the horror film encourages not responsibility but murderous self-interest. Levinas, moreover, states clearly that self-preservation is no justification for murder. Judith Butler points to this aspect of Levinas as an admirable pacifism, but she also subjects his ethics to a thoughtful critique that brings out a certain violence that serves as the ground of Levinas’s own ethical imperative. Further, Butler points out that politics interferes with ethics in a public sphere that manages and exploits the face of the other. Reading with and against Levinas, Butler insists that the ethical cannot be divorced from politics; Levinas’s “face” of the other, index of sheer alterity, is made to confront those broadcast by the dominant media. As Butler says, “We cannot, under contemporary conditions of representation, hear the agonized cry or be compelled or commanded by the face. We have been turned away from the face, sometimes through the very image of the face, one that is meant to convey the inhuman, the already dead, that which is not precariousness and cannot, therefore, be killed; this is the face that we are nevertheless asked to kill” (Precarious 150). Butler’s point is to oppose an ethics to the necropolitics of these conditions of representation. By the same token, however, ethics must confront the political conditions of its agency.²⁰ This political-ethical conjuncture is one that troubles Levinas’s own positions, notably his Zionism, but it also seems to infect his more abstract formulations of ethical non-violence, which pose the stubborn dilemma of a non-violence predicated on a primary urge to kill. As Butler says, “the non-violence that Levinas seems to promote does not come from a peaceful place, but rather from a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence” (137). Though this tension seems to vitiate the prospects of ethics, it avoids the abstract claims of moral purity and innocence. Indeed, ethics gains by claiming violence as its own motive force: “The struggle against violence,” Butler says, “accepts that violence is one’s own possibility” (Frames 171). This tension within radical ethics lies at the heart of The Ring as well. The Ring answers to two aspects of the media-image that Butler hopes to turn in an ethical direction. One is the dimension of sound, cast in terms of an address that is bound to fail; the second is that of the “critical image,” which “must not only fail to capture its referent, but show this failing” (Precarious 146). The critical image captures nothing, yet captivates the viewer, who is exposed in her or his precariousness to an alterity that defies representation. I would suggest that The Ring, and especially its cursed video, contains both aspects of Butler’s sound-image. Inevitably, we turn away from or are terrified by the video, but this is itself the ground on which we meet the specter: “chasing it away only so as to chase after it,” as Derrida says, in a duplicitous act of conjuration and an always failed encounter with its enigmatic trace (Specters 140).²¹
 
A haunting message, then, is viral because enigmatic; to pass it on is a symbolic act that, however, exposes the tenuousness of community and of symbolic exchange itself. We have followed the traces of this virality in our stories of haunted wells and in The Ring‘s infectious premise. A final example here will refine what is at stake in this haunting virality. In his late work, Derrida advances a theory of immunity and auto-immunity, which emerges in the course of a discussion of religion, conceived as a practice oriented toward the holy, or heilig, which Derrida glosses as meaning unscathed, immune, safe and sound. Community at its most metaphysical is forged in a shared faith in transcendent immunity. At a certain level of analysis, this metaphysical bid is merely a compensatory illusion, which goes some way toward explaining religion’s sacred terrors, but also the terrorism and “radical evil” that concern Derrida in his essay. Derrida, however, displaces the metaphysical gambit of the afterlife to advance a theory of survival, one that implicates the life of community in an inevitable death-work. Community thus combines the contradictory features of immunity and auto-immunity, its self-preservation always simultaneously self-destructive. “There is no opposition, fundamentally, between ‘social bond’ and ‘social unravelling’. A certain interruptive unraveling is the condition of the ‘social bond’, the very respiration of all ‘community'” (“Faith” 64).²² Derrida’s deconstruction of this opposition is not, of course, a complacent acquiescence to society’s failings or to the sociopathology of The Ring; nor is it an accommodation to the notion of a phantom public sphere. Rather, the phantom is linked to one’s prosthetic survival–exemplarily in writing, as Derrida has often argued, but here in terms of automation and teletechnoscientific machines–a survival that is claimed for the purpose of immunity, but whose technical means are usually denied, repressed, and disavowed. Immunity is thus paired with auto-immunity, in the ambiguous pact of an “enemy of life in the service of life” (48).
 
An insistent motif in Derrida’s essay is that of the source, here defined as always split and divided, “two sources in one”: a source haunted by its double, indeed by its duplication and dissemination. “The same unique source divides itself mechanically, automatically, and sets itself reactively in opposition to itself” (28). Against this reactive logic, Derrida asserts that the two sources do not oppose but rather “contaminate” each other (29). Here, at the wellspring of community, its very re-source, there can be no immunity from contamination. The viral and the ghost derive from this haunted place, where self is bound to otherness, identity to mediation, community to teletechnological dislocation. While the sense of a contaminated source often spurs technophobia, fears of contagion, necropolitics, and wars of religion, it also attests to an “auto-co-immunity” that defies the vain claims to immunity, self-defense, and aggression. A secret tradition derives from this source, a “spectral tradition,” Derrida says, always haunted by its uncanny other (51). This tradition provides another means to ground community, to reckon with the phantom, and to accommodate viral contagion. “Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no community <is possible> that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and in this view of some sort of invisible and spectral sur-vival” (51). We have traced a similar spectral tradition in our history of media communities and their haunted sources; what is “crucial enough to pass along” from each instance of the well is a haunting auto-immunity that defies the script of terror and the necropolitical imperative.
 

III.

I do not know how long I sat peering down that well.
 

H.G. Wells

 
On December 30, 2006, three years after he was pulled from the “spider hole” where he had been hiding, Saddam Hussein was put to death. The execution was recorded on a cell phone and quickly went viral on the web; for weeks it was one of the most popular videos on YouTube. “Welcome to the sordid world of the execution chamber, brought to you by the YouTube generation,” said Amnesty International (Huggler). While Amnesty’s response to the flawed trial and execution of Hussein was morally principled, its righteous and sarcastic targeting of YouTube is somewhat less so. Indeed, Amnesty’s indignation scarcely hides its scapegoating reflex, which would blame social networking and file-sharing youngsters for the events they merely witness. And in a familiar turn, fears of internet crime, perversion and indecency are attributed to a generation of seemingly monstrous youths. These lapses on the part of the world’s preeminent moral watchdog signal a crisis, not only of the morality of online spectatorship, but also of the discourse of morality itself.
 
The YouTube execution video seems to realize the terrible premise of The Ring. A horrifying message of death is transmitted virally by seemingly amoral subjects, infecting the larger world, if not with death itself, then with the off-limits world of capital punishment. In so doing, it also makes explicit The Ring‘s necropolitical implications. The privilege of wired youths is brutally manifested as the corollary of a vengeful and opportunistic neocolonial massacre in Iraq. It is no doubt chilling to imagine that some of the video’s viewers may have enjoyed the spectacle. If so, one may assume that those who did were the hapless consumers of media manipulation that equated Hussein with Bin Laden, and thereby with evil itself. In these terms, such morally crippled viewers would be not so much guilty parties as unwitting victims of a demonizing media, agent of the state, that forges a national community with the fictional resources of terror, horror, and delusion. As children, they may submit more readily, yet surely less accountably, than as adults who accede to that ideology. The YouTube execution video is the late progeny of CNN, the monster from Midland, and the phantom public is repeatedly conjured to rally in wonder and horror at the spectacle of its secret necropolitics.
 
Amnesty’s moral lapse betrays a desire to assign blame to a particular party, even one as amorphous as a “generation.” In so doing, it passes over the complexity of the file-sharing site as venue for multiple and contradictory political interests. It is notable, for instance, that internet file-sharing allowed for massive dissemination of the controversial images from Abu Ghraib. Similarly, during the demonstrations that followed the Iranian elections in 2009, video clips of a young woman’s dying moments went viral on the web, promoted by CNN in many links and stories.²³ YouTube constitutes less a forum than the switchboard of a global public sphere, a multitude that is centripetal and centrifugal, its popularity variously pulled into the orbit of corporate power and escaping the dictates of the market, morality, and law. Here again, virality is highly ambiguous, connoting both the subversive promise of popular agency and the cynicism of marketing, which cheerfully adopts the language of disease to hawk its wares. Inevitably, then, even viral popularity is the object of manipulation. One programmer, selling his services to companies avid to monopolize the site, gloats at the host of techniques he employs to orchestrate artificial virality; in a technique called “strategic tagging,” he succeeds in “leading viewers down the rabbit hole” (Greenberg).” Cynical as it is, the hacker’s metaphor is strikingly apt: every viewer becomes a young Alice accidentally fallen into a world of primal fears and fantasies. From the live telecast from the San Marino well, to Midland, Wood’s Hole, and YouTube, media communities converge in the insistent figure of a young girl in danger. The cynicism of the YouTube hacker is a fitting rejoinder to the hypocrisy of its television and cable precedents. Despite corporate inroads on the site, YouTube, unlike television and cable, remains a broadcast site without a center. Its videos derive not from a single source or well but from global non-point sources of virality. And it is precisely this non-point source of internet “pollution” that seems to exasperate Amnesty and drive its moral accusation.
 
World-wide wells? In 1895, the futurist H.G. Wells offers such a vision in The Time Machine, a moral fable of the dangers of technology and of cultural decline. The fears and monstrosities evoked by YouTube’s excesses seem anticipated in Wells’s wells. Having voyaged far into a degenerate human future, Wells’s Time Traveler notices that the landscape of England is studded with mysterious wells that lead to a monstrous underworld. He learns to his horror that a devolved race of humans lives underground, climbing at night from the innumerable wells to prey on the happy race of the Eloi. The monstrous Morlocks, whom he at first mistakes for ghosts, are the victims of a necropolitical division of man into laborers and capitalists, and though they devolve underground, they retain a physical and mechanical advantage over their former masters. Wells’s story is a cautionary tale of political oppression, evoking as well the haunting psychic terms of Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny.‘” Futurist, moralist, and fictional inventor of the atomic bomb, Wells chose to sign with his own name the dark passage to the haunting world of the necropolitical other. Ironically, however, today Wells’s vision serves instead to rally a panicked world against that enemy. In Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), the battle against the alien species is made to echo with colonial war in the Arab and Muslim world, and in this way, the hysterical tone of the Cold War is updated to evoke the polarizing fears of the “clash of civilizations.”²⁴ The beginning of the film invokes a familiar image: in the city square, a Norman Rockwell small-town community, the townfolk gather around a hole opened up in the earth. A phantom public, conjured by Hollywood, they are spectators of an imaginary other. Out of that hole, a monstrous machine emerges, and before it proceeds to vaporize the public, it blinks a giant eye at the fascinated onlookers.