Mark Fisher’s article categorizes the nature of eerie into two types: “a failure of absence” and “a failure of presence”. Both of the types include the sensation of unknown. However, what makes us feel the eerieness is not only what we do not know, but our speculation. In order word, I think eerieness is generated from what we think we know. Take Fisher’s example of a bird’s cry. We may know nothing about the bird, but we personify it with our human subjectivity, limited knowledge and culture. We always demonize the things that are unknown or exotic to us, thus the sensation of eerie is a combination of quasi-known and quasi-unknown.<\/p>\n
Similar to the example of the spirit phone, we do not yet know many things, if not nothing, about the afterlife, yet we try to use what we know a little bit more, science, to explain the unknown. That is the reason nowadays “ghost hunters” are still using auditory methods, such as “spirit phone” apps and spiritual recorders, to capture the proof of spirits. It is because our cultural concepts of the proof of spirits still maintain as that in Thomas Edison’s era. As one of the greatest inventors in the world, Thomas Edison and his theory of afterlife particles and phonograph are more like a cultural symbol of truth and solution to unknown than an actual scientific basis to supernatural phenomenon.<\/p>\n
Another element of the sensation of eerieness, according to Fisher, related to an unknown agency. Our concern of the presence of an agency (god, demons etc.) shows the fact that, although human has been explaining “eerie” events with scientific knowledge, at the end of the day, we have to accept our powerlessness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mark Fisher’s article categorizes the nature of eerie into two types: “a failure of absence” and “a failure of presence”. Both of the types include the sensation of unknown. However, what makes us feel the eerieness is not only what we do not know, but our speculation. In order word, I think eerieness is generated …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":213,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-b"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-bx","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":716,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions\/716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}