A Wound Designates a Subject
Name
Lum-lumeci-smact-arch-2025-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
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236.08 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
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fac4268faaa43abc932be20c3459fdd6
Author(s)
Lum, Luca E.
Advisor(s)
Green, Renée
Date Issued
May 2025
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
What haunts when haunting itself has been foreclosed? This thesis develops “ghostlessness” as a conceptual and aesthetic framework across my work in moving image, drawing, and writing. Ghostlessness refers to conditions that suppress haunting where it would otherwise emerge or be felt. Drawing from theoretical elaborations of hauntology, where the present is understood as structured by both suppressed pasts and unrealized futures, ghostlessness names the absence—or foreclosure—of that temporal disruption. It marks a contemporary condition in which systems oriented toward predictive governance and managed futurity preemptively neutralize rupture, sealing wounds before they can fester, reroute, or become sites of transformation. Through the works gathered here, I explore how ghostlessness functions not simply as absence but as affective and infrastructural suppression—rendering the spectral illegible, unaddressable, or unreal. Against this, my practice seeks to recapture the value of haunting in death-ridden, crisis-laden times where its presence is more prevalent than ever – hence its management, erasure, and suppression: ghostlessness.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
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