![]() ![]() Yet city people see – and often seek – ghosts. Arguably, cities are sites of modernity, and urban lives have a caged bureaucracy and routine to them, imposed by the machinery of capitalist employment. Technology would burn away at our hauntings. People, he argued, would reside in the iron cage of reason and stop believing in things that weren’t rational, such as religion, magic and ghosts. The German sociologist Max Weber made a convincing case that, in times of enlightenment and industrialisation, modernity would lead to the disenchantment of society. The mind, he says, comes up with creative forms of resistance to cope with the pressures of modern life, and ghosts are one of them. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), he wrote that haunted places are the only places people can live in, as the human psyche is too entwined with memory and familiarity to let go of things past. As the French Jesuit philosopher Michel de Certeau wrote, cities are in a constant state of decay and transformation, demolition and rebuilding, and it is this repeated change that makes cities fertile grounds for hauntings. Our lives in cities are shaped by invisible hands, body-less voices and an eerie automation of infrastructure. Yet, when I speak of ghosts, I don’t just mean the horror-story variety. Most metropolises are overrun with ghosts from New York to London, Mumbai to Shanghai, a simple Google search throws up an encyclopaedia’s worth of results about urban legends based on things that go bump in the dark. London’s innumerable ghosts peek out of the minded gap, and are stepped over with little thought – and practised instinct. There is a phantasmagoric characteristic to this everyday sight. ![]() They step over the gap with little thought, but practised instinct. An ocean of people pour out of the carriages. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. A disembodied voice announces the name of the station to the passengers onboard. ![]()
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