Spectro-Commodities

Kimzua and Empty Things

Mr. Tan, age fifty-six, describes seeing a suckling pig that has been offered in sacrifice to the Otherworld. It looks “the same but not the same.” Somehow, he puzzles, “you can tell that there is nothing behind the skin.” Such gifts of food and liquor are not touched while the joss sticks burn. When the flame sputters out, these are considered to have been consumed by the spirits, their flavor and nutritional value exhausted. They may be eaten afterward, but with the proviso that they are “empty” of the qualities of food, and they are often given to construction workers or domestic helpers. You may eat them, but you cannot consume them; a respondent warned me that they are tasteless and that “you will be hungry almost immediately after.” The object, now, has a purely formal existence. Value is considered to be emptied on the altar, awaiting a reciprocal investment of favor and luck from the spirits.

What Mr. Tan describes in the pig recalls a pair of kimzua (joss paper) shoes or a shirt—the proxy paper commodities that have evolved from large, hollow-framed effigies to a sophisticated market (online and offline) for printed objects. There is a thinness at the surface that one cannot quite place, the suggestion of missing internal substance. It is the visual hallmark of an object that is presumed to have entered the ghost-economy. This notion of commodity emptiness is a dominant trope of sacrificial items: ritual can imbue hollow forms with power or value or create them by taking away the substance of that which is materially present.

Kimzua are visually riotous and wildly diverse and sold throughout the island in specialist shops and market kiosks. One can purchase houses that often combine (in one exquisite corpse-like object) the homely Southeast Asian bungalow with a bank, an ATM, a KFC franchise, or a corporate office tower—or a French Hermès shirt in the pattern of a regional batik. These are burned alongside effigies of everything from perfume and shaving kits to nannies and maids to family dogs, aircraft, credit cards, bottles of liquor, and mahjong sets. Presumptions of the ghost’s desires typically involve bricolage: assemblages of seemingly irreconcilable objects, valuations, and ideas.

Kimzua is a variant of the Mandarin zhiza, a craft tradition that has served both funerary and celebratory purposes. The cremation of effigies is said to date back thousands of years, to strategies in the Northern Song dynasty for foiling grave robbers—and, perhaps apocryphally, to human sacrifice of retainers by wealthy nobles. Bamboo and joss paper are three-dimensionalized using methods similar to the construction of lanterns for seasonal festivals. This is laborious work, requiring the artisan to split stalks with a blunt, welded metal blade. These are combined into frames lashed with rattan and clad with colorful patterned sheets that represent, in various degrees of abstraction, materials and ornaments. Papers are also printed with numerological and geometrical symbols to increase the efficacy of the overall object in its journey to the ghost-world.

Kimzua includes structures for the dead and for funerary rituals that assist the passage to ancestral status: bridges and vehicles, as well as mansions that resemble fifteen- and twenty-story versions of traditional Chinese architecture.15 These cater for the journey to di yu, as well as an eternity (mostly) spent there. There remains, however, a very broad array of other comforts and necessities that has expanded continually in the last century—especially in the context of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. As noted in chapter 1, these are painstakingly constructed and built to order; their associations of spectral power have much to do with fearsome price tags in the tens of thousands. Historically, such costs were subsumed into large funerary budgets and often paid for with insurance and savings schemes.

More recently, however, the range of conventional kimzua has been complemented by cheaper, factory-printed paper goods. These are almost entirely China-made and shed the abstractions and traditional materials of the older artisanal process. These make use of high-resolution, large-format reproduction and easy access to online stock imagery. When they first entered the local markets, the majority mimicked small-scale consumables, and this remains the bulk of the product. Online sites list packages by type: necessities (like toiletries), staple and luxury-branded clothes, “sinful” sets of liquor and cigarettes, electronics, check books and debit cards, and Mitsubishi air-conditioning units. There are even cards and gambling items, which are perhaps less useful to gui-shen, who can predict and alter the future.

The past two decades have also seen a proliferation of miniaturized buildings and vehicles. These are far cheaper than the traditional items and thus can be burned more frequently and in greater profusion. Access to Adobe Photoshop has also, apparently, led to some experimentation in architectural design—the conventional Chinese design of zhiza has given way to a postmodern orgy that combines corporate modernism with a range of building styles and vernaculars. These also meld virtually any thinkable combination of functions. Banks and shops are particularly prevalent, as these can serve the dead in perpetuity. Cheap kimzua has mostly put the artisanal building trade out of business. One of the last producers in the grand style told me that he only supplies directly to temples and has closed his shop front to make a few items a year out of his flat.

The technological shift in paper goods has been closely attended by a transformation in their nature and aesthetic logic. Traditionally, specific joss papers were thought to have unique capacities to transfer materials and substances to the afterlife, depending on their color. Green paper, for example, was used to send cloth. Zhiza thus had a certain conventional materiality, and the mimetic character of effigies existed alongside a certain abstraction. That is, the logic of these objects was not entirely pictorial, depending also upon color, writing, and symbology. Zhong Yuan offering “packages” still contain these older items, which are more expensive due to the inherent cost of the joss material. The rise of printed Chinese simulacra, however, has introduced a very strong countercurrent of pure visuality. Ghost-objects now compete for verisimilitude, and photorealistic surfaces take the place of simple approximations and volumetric forms. In this transition, there has emerged an increasing association of the ghost with photographic resemblances.

This is demonstrated in what have become among the most popular of all ritual gifts: smartphones and tablets, such as Apple’s iPad. The iPhone for ghosts is a cardboard box with the familiar touch screen printed on front and metallic texture on its back and sides. While this is adapted from a product photograph on the company’s site, it has a model number far higher than those presently on the market—at the time of writing, the iPhone 25 was available. This follows the inflationary logic of ghost-offering, in which all numbers tend to increase. It likewise reflects the belief that those in hell are atemporal and thus exist, at least in part, in the future. The ghost-phone is thought to allow the ancestor or gui a means of communication within and beyond the spirit world (to haunt, in effect). In fact, the paper object is doubly effective: by virtue of its being set alight, it is already considered a mode of communication between worlds.

I have been given logical explanations for the appeal of such objects. In an echo of late Victorian beliefs, respondents described ghosts as existing “like waves,” oscillating in nonvisible parts of the spectrum. As such, they are attracted to technologies that radiate similarly, and in particular to artificial light and video screens. I have also heard a more pedestrian version: that the dead, like everyone else in Singapore and the modern world, seem to love novelties. In other accounts, this affinity appears more complex and evocative. The preferred iPhones and iPads are conduits, and ambivalently so: on one hand, they appeal to the consumer as an ostensibly unmediated connection to a world of images, spectacles, and experiences; on the other, the medium itself remains an object of desire. Gui are thought to prefer things that have this “empty” or referential quality. Tech devices present a world that, like the ghost’s, is reduced to a shadow play of appearances without substance. The hollow paper smartphone dramatizes this insubstantiality, just as it underscores the divorce of the ur-modern commodity’s form from its contents.

Affordable Chinese kimzua, like tech devices, draw their power from resemblance—from the traffic of pictures and desires. They reproduce a spectral “attitude” toward consumption: an endless parade of approximations. The ghost and the ghostly commodity, in their mirroring of each other and of advanced economy, gesture back to the logic of fetishism—not to Marx’s vision of occult obfuscation but to a phantasmagoria of longing, self-making, and ownership endlessly deferred. Interestingly, however, the dominance of these items has come up against a limit: the problem of value itself. The affordable house/bank/boutique has not entirely replaced the zhiza palace, owing to an effect that we will see in the next section. This is the role of expense itself in the remission of value to the dead. As discussed with respect to ghost-money, many still consider the worth and efficacy of burnt offerings to be derived from Singapore dollars paid and not from the appearance of the proxy itself. Thus promises of “proper” bamboo and joss paper houses are still made to ghosts who deliver on reciprocal exchanges. And these are still seen by many as the most effective bait for ghostly payouts.

Harry noted this practice with divination at the sites of road accidents in particular. A modest burning is made in situ, with promises of a larger gift if the divination proves correct (a performance bonus for the ghost, in effect). The former is used to divine the numbers, which are immediately put into circulation. However, “people do say, ‘OK, if I [win], I will come back with lots of offering, even a paper house.’” Owing to its careful construction and price, such a house is still seen as the most reliable protection in the netherworld—and the Singaporean emphasis on homeownership, as the baseline of personal success and security, is likely a contributing factor as well.

Believers related numerous versions of this exchange of a ghost-home for forms of luck. Mrs. Tan, for example, described purchasing both a zhiza house and altar space in the temple for her in-laws. Her husband’s brother and sister-in-law were not well loved in life, and proper observances had not been made on Qing Ming or death anniversaries. As a consequence, they had been seen haunting the outside of Mrs. Tan’s house. A friend had suggested burning a house and placing plaques for them in the temple, where further observances could be made. Mrs. Tan recalls,

We said we have no money. If you give us strike—4D, lah—then we’ll put you to the temple. And really, we struck! That day when [my husband] Tony buy for me my IC [identity card] number, then I have to go and buy. Then he said, “Hey I go and buy for you your IC number.” Then I go and buy, then two persons struck.16

Both of you struck?

Ah, second prize. Each person three thousand dollars. So, we put them into the temple.

How do you move them into the temple? You move them, you move the plaque?

Ask people to make [plaques], then put them [in the temple]. Then they’ve got a place to stay already. They won’t come and disturb you.

They also spent a thousand dollars on a modest, three-story paper-and-bamboo building. This decision grew from concerns about the separation of the shen after death, and an anxiety to provide multiple “places” for the dead, to cover all the bases. On a similar occasion, Mrs. Tan and her husband proposed a reciprocal exchange with her husband’s grandparents. She told them that if they struck 4D, they would buy a large paper house for them to use. She recalls, “Then on seventh month, first day, we strike!” Her husband won S$13,000, and they sacrificed a paper house costing S$5,600.17 In this narrative, it is important to note two things. First, the 4D payout was ostensibly achieved relatively soon after the offer of reciprocity was made. Second, the winning event occurred on the first day of the seventh month, or Ghost Month. This was thus understood by Mrs. Tan to confirm her actions as having been the right thing to do—bringing comfort to her dead relative while making some money in a moral way.

What emerges here is an unsettled tension between two understandings. In more traditional accounts, as we have seen, numinous power still derives at least partially from real-world value. Though inputs of Singapore dollars may be irrationally amplified, they are still considered crucial to the production of surplus. This is being increasingly challenged by a new, predominantly representational logic whereby value originates in resemblance. This recalls the analogical structures of what Marcel Mauss termed “sympathetic” magic, in which objects that look similar are assumed to be causally linked.18 This emergent approach has obvious advantages, as the ratio of expenditure to profit is far lower. It also aligns neatly with a growing emphasis on the visual in the production of wealth, via digital products and spectacular commodities.

At the same time, there are familiar factors of social distinction that influence these trends. As described by Pierre Bourdieu—and as reflected in Singaporean (and global) consumption more generally—kimzua purchases increasingly signal choices of identity among increasingly variegated and specialized proto-commodities.19 The fact that the dead may have “lifestyles” simply underscores their being imagined as social beings. Among paper houses, there are “traditional,” “postindustrial,” and “minimal” versions for sale. These can be assembled a la carte, with choices of furniture, art, and carpets (mid-century modern furniture, such as Eames recliners, has a clear fan base). Taipei and Hong Kong, in particular, are sources for “hipster” kimzua items available from e-shops, including sleek, minimalist paper homes and modern cheongsams like those worn by actress Maggie Cheung in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000). Expensive, imported paper goods are often justified by the good taste of departed “haute” consumers. Numerous respondents, at least, expressed discomfort with off-the-shelf objects in “cheena” (“crass Chinese”) style.20

We see here revived tensions between standardization and bespoke design, where mass goods have been increasingly replaced (as elsewhere in Singapore) by an ethic of niche marketing. Xuan, a university student who worked as an apprentice to one of the nation’s last remaining zhiza craftsmen, noted that her employer became tired of constant requests for customization. He complained that “everyone wants a paper house like their actual home, or their dog, or their helper.”21 Though tailored forms eased the “boredom” of churning out standardized houses and cars, the master quickly realized that his economic survival depended on repetition. This change in tastes contributed, in part, to his eventual decision to retire.

This transformative tendency exists alongside another. As shown in the previous chapter, the medium of paper allows for contradictory aspects of cash and commodity to converge, and to assume characteristics of speculative finance. In the newer Chinese kimzua items, everyday architectures merge with sites of production and value-creation—hence the allure of paper condo buildings that contain their own offices, ATMs, and luxury boutiques. Or of paper banks, which in theory allow the dead to continually draw on funds. While the single printed object is finite, the open-ended pictorial nature of the ghost-economy implies that printing a Visa or Mastercard may multiply the worth of the offering indefinitely. These are a sort of meta-money; like Mephistopheles’s mint, they push into the realm of the infinite. By the same token, this fundamentally alters the traditional temporal character of gift exchange from an isolated instance to a kind of perpetually generating mechanism. The ghost continues to receive and to give. This has the flavor of venture capital, of credit, of “passive” income. At the same time, it recalls observations by Fei Xiaotong about concerns, within Chinese cultures, to avoid closing reciprocal cycles.22 Being “even” results in the closure of social obligations and, with it, the withering of circuits for value’s unquiet motion.

Ghost-Auctions: Haunted Investment and Blessed Surplus

The Zhong Yuan auction dramatizes a process that is nearly perfectly opposed to kimzua and food sacrifices. Here we find a logic more akin to the haunted bric-a-brac that is discovered at the outset of many ghost stories or construction “incidents.” Where burnt offerings are characterized by an emptiness—a formalism that is recuperated by usefulness in di yu—Singaporean conventions also allow for spiritual investment into prosaic things, and the elevation of these to a condition of supernal “fullness.”

As Tong notes, these popular events offer inexpensive commodities to eager bidders, fetching far more than their typical market prices. The surplus is due to the belief that these have been “blessed by the spirits and are thus more efficacious in fulfilling their functions.”23 Schoolbags and exercise books are believed to help the buyer’s child with the Primary School Leaving Examination and other stressful challenges.24 Culinary items bring satiety and health. Business paraphernalia, like calculators and stationery, supercharge one’s commercial enterprises. A variety of toys offer protection and well-being to children of various ages and serve in effect as numinous minders. More recently, lower-end phones from Huawei and Samsung allow a teen user to cultivate online status as a social media “influencer” and to ward against cyberbullying. Here, as ever, the spirits’ gifts are imagined in terms of exponential potency and variations on the theme of “luck” and “prosperity.”

Rather spectacularly, total proceeds on items at a single event regularly surpass S$100,000 and often climb into the millions. While the effectiveness of the goods is clearly a draw, larger auctions also provide a highly conspicuous venue to associate oneself with otherworldly prosperity through generous bidding. These occur across the lunar month, at banquets to which important members of the community, including local business leaders and members of parliament, are invited. They form a major revenue stream of the ghost-economy, as a complement to yin zhi and kimzua.

Renee, a young architect, noted that enthusiasm for these auctions still runs high among the “boomer” generation. Each year, her father and his friends “will bid for this ornament at auction, that’s supposed to bring you good luck.” She understood that the money goes to the temple but was surprised that older folks were most covetous of objects that have no apparent use. In fact, many of the expensive lots are mere trinkets and ornaments, and prices appear to increase in inverse proportion to functionality. High rollers are known to pay hundreds of thousands for an urn or figurine that is cheaply made and chiefly ornamental.25 Renee noted that her father often bought “an amulet, or a small statue.” This isn’t owned so much as rented; he buys the right to put it in the family home or office for a year before donating it back to the temple, along with his bid in cash. The most prized lot, a hei jin (literally, “black gold”), has no material worth at all. It is an ornamented lump of coal, said by some to contain trapped spirits, which bring unspecified wealth to its owner. It is purchased for six figures and is burned one year later so that “the ghosts may be released.”26 By this account, the hei jin traps spiritual flows; it is a perfect congealment that is nothing other than value itself.

The organizing of an auction need not be overseen by a temple, a medium, or some other religious authority—although, by convention, it will form part of a larger sequence of activities involving burning, as well as the offering of food and joss sticks. It is expected that part of the proceeds will go to some religious cause. Johnny pointed out that “the temple can organize it, or a hawker center, or a whole neighborhood can organize it.”

It can be any bunch of people?

Yes. A few of them get together, set up a lot of tables. . . . They have a committee among themselves. And these are not official committees, not registered and that. So every day, they collect fifty cents, a dollar. Collect, collect, so just before the seventh month they pool together money. And they use the money, they go buy offerings. And then, they have dinner as well. And during the dinner, they auction off all those. At the auction they say hundred dollars or so, next year they have to return the hundred dollars. The higher bid, got to return the money. The money goes in the pool again, must pay again before the seventh month.

As Johnny noted, the amounts wagered by the bidder are not immediately due. Rather, any tender for a given item is a form of credit that must be paid just prior to the next year’s Ghost Month, when the next auction is to be held. In the meantime, however, the commodity is allowed to produce prosperity for the buyer. It is, in effect, a form of credit within the ghost-economy, as well as a bond of reciprocity between the lender and the temple. This does not need any underlying security; it is assumed that any smart buyer will be too afraid to default. The auctions are known to be highly profitable. Harry explained,

They will do them at carparks, then they have dinner outside. Some, not all. When they pray, that’s when they auction things. Whoever has donated will be invited. There are members, members of the group, in addition to committee members. So, every month they will collect some money [similar to a subscription]. Thirty dollars a month, and that. That’s why a lot of people are involved. A lot of charity organizations—National Kidney Foundation and all want in. For example, even these [community centers (CCs)], before the dinner, they have to apply for a permit from the MPs. So the CCs, some of the money goes to them. That’s why the national charities get involved.

So the charities and community centers will offer something?

Yeah, they will say, “I will issue a permit for you, to hold the dinner.” They say, then, please, auction this among the members. And the money goes straight away to the organization—National Kidney Foundation, or whatever it is. It’s not small money. You know how many sites there are? Even if it’s a few thousand dollars from one side, it’s a lot of money, you know. The Buddhist free clinics, community building fund, other building funds. There’s money, everyone jumps in.

The ghost-auction thus creates an intersection between ghost-economies, charities, and state institutions like the CCs—those hubs of activity in public housing estates. In the arrangement described by Johnny and Harry, the CCs will host the event, together with a nonprofit group or local fund. It will begin with lavish burnings, followed by a banquet and auction. One portion of the proceeds benefits the operating budgets of the participating institutions, and another will serve as seed money for the following year.

The auctioned items are known to be blessed by the spirits at the moment a successful bid is recognized.27 But, as with hell notes and other sacrificial paper, this investiture does not occur through the mediation of a religious authority. Instead, it is the mere act of purchasing the item at an inflated price, and thus providing for charities and Zhong Yuan activities, that is assumed to be the origin of its power. Participants plainly stated that there is nothing special about the goods themselves. Their utter ordinariness is an open fact. This is even true of that seemingly mysterious congealment, the hei jin. Many dismissed as metaphor the idea that it “contains” ghosts, saying that it is simply what it appears to be: a decorated briquette. As Harry observed, “it’s charcoal. Just a normal piece.”

“The temple doesn’t do anything to it at all?” I asked.

“No, that one you can buy anywhere. I mean, they decorate it to look nice. You can buy it yourself at the temple at Waterloo Street. Can find in a lot of shops there. Maybe it cost a hundred dollars. But the person bids a thousand dollars. That’s how they generate money and luck.”

In fact, the banality of the object is indispensable to the ritual. It is this, set against the power to command large sums, that is expressed in the hei jin.28 In this alchemy of the ghost-economy, coal is turned into “gold.” But, as with yin zhi and luck, this is not seen as a symbolic act; participants are very clear about the real-world efficacy of such objects. Mr. Seng, highest bidder at a ghost-auction in 2008, laughed when he explained that many people wanted to deal with his import business because they knew that a haunted object was in his possession. Its positive influence, as with good and ill luck more generally, is assumed to be socially contagious. At the same time, accounts sometimes involve a logic of negation, to the effect that “things could have been much worse” without the ghostly commodity. Like the proverbial stick that repels tigers, the schoolbag or amulet is seen as having saved one from unhappy events that did not occur. The simple fact that such assumptions are unprovable appears, in practice, to close off a certain amount of doubt; good things are credited to the sacred purchase, while bad ones are dismissed as facts of life.

The logic of value-magic asserts itself repeatedly as the auction proceeds, and appraisal of the merchandise veers increasingly upward. Participants gazump one another with ever-larger tenders, beyond all proportion.29 By all accounts, however, this mode of consumption is itself considered generative for buyer, seller, and ghosts alike—like the burning of yin zhi or a paper iPhone, it sets in play a sequence of compounding gains for all involved. This is because surplus, in the guise of overpayment, is understood as the motivating essence of reciprocal spectro-exchange. For this reason, the bid itself is the sacred act.

The commodity is central to such traffic; as with hell notes, it serves as an interchange where multiple forms of value are arbitrated: credit, state tender, ghost-money, and luck. These are serially vested in its “empty” interior, and a specific understanding of their intercourse is socially cemented at the fall of the gavel. It is an almost bewilderingly complex and indirect transaction that begins when the buyer offers to pay an irrational amount for a given lot. This is merely promised and is not understood as an outright exchange of dollars for merchandise. Rather, these funds—to be paid one year hence—are seen to reimburse a part of the previous seasons’ earnings, which have already been spent on a sacrifice of yin zhi and hell notes to lure spirits to the present event and to transfer value to them. This influx empowers hungry gui nearby, who express appreciation by returning some of their renewed vigor into the commodity. Depending on the price, this will provide varying degrees of prosperity and security for its possessor for the next twelve months. In this convolution, the backpack or calculator is not merely a pretext. It is an indispensable conduit without which the fort-da of speculation would be impossible. Its ascension from ordinariness to spectral efficacy is instant but relies on a recursive temporality of credit that enfolds past and future revenue into a common moment, a time “out of joint.”

In the auction, the old formula of fetishism—with which we began—would appear to be absolutely exposed, via a ritual exaggeration. The otherworldly powers of those worldly goods seem quite literally “theological” in character, and they are priced accordingly. By convention, they are presented upon a dais swathed in red fabric, in the grand manner of Taoist gods. To see this event as merely an outsize performance of the glamour of the commodity, however, would be to fundamentally misread it. The objects here are understood by all to be empty, or nearly so. They are merely temporary repositories, their powers on loan. Their overt paltriness is, as noted, essential to the dramaturgy. Rather, what is deified on the altar is value itself, as a cosmic force of enormous potentiality.

This understanding, shared by all present, reflects the specific vision of value-dynamics encountered in the previous chapter. What is temporarily invested in the commodity, that curious substance, does not originate in the exertion of human labor; rather, it is an inherent property of the universe. It is metaphysical. Humans cannot make it, but we may amplify it through monetary operations—through buying and selling, in secular and ritual modes. It is an independently real, capillary force that does not “begin” but circulates endlessly and may be channeled to any destination. Living people and ghosts serve merely as signalmen on its tracks, assisting the passage among beings, inanimate things, and environments. For this reason, Bataille’s “accursed share” is neither destroyed nor truly alienated here. While some redistribution does occur via auctions—notably in their charitable function—it does so within a capitalist imaginary of limitless enrichment. The conception of a positive-sum economy implies that these can be both religious events and sites of nakedly pecuniary interest, without contradiction. Large bids, like large denominations, represent a faith in the tendency of wealth to expand, which here also assumes deeply religious connotations.

This strange mediumship of the commodity—its role as an interchange for real and numinous monetary flux—exerts some unexpected effects. First, as we have seen from the preceding examples, haunted things are not typically subject to devaluation. On the contrary, they retain value, and even produce it, after their sale. So long as they are inveigled by gui—or by ancestors or gods—possessions can continue to realize surplus, and enable huat life, until they are finally discarded or complete their contractual term. The key innovation here is that the product itself becomes an ongoing site of production. Its role is consummated not in the moment of purchase but in a lively and ongoing agency. The spectral commodity produces profit for the seller and also for the buyer, who becomes, by virtue of the sale, a “lucky partner.” Importantly, the worth of the haunted merchandise is not inherent but is derived from the ghost and the real-world assets that it protects. The coal briquette defends the buyer’s capital. The “magical” schoolbag is not dear of its own accord (it is an often shoddy mass product) but rather because of its ability to safeguard the enormous potential of educational capital in the school system. As noted, the poverty of the object is essential to its spiritual power.

Second, as mentioned earlier, spectro-commodities operate in a manner that opposes the hoary Marxian model of fetishism. The “occult” object is, paradoxically, characterized by social transparency: its value arises from the relations of humans and ghosts, not from any “objective” characteristic of its own, real or imagined. As such, it fails the test of concealment. Ghost-economies are structured around gift and obligation between people, living and dead. At no point do they appear as traffic among things themselves; in this sense, the auction plays a role quite contrary to the ahistorical, anonymizing market.30 Commercial wares act as mere circuitry—rather than embodying an uncanny “fullness,” it is their emptiness that is operative.

Last, we can see in the auction how the influence of the ghost collapses the typical relation between the twin aspects of the commodity, use-value and exchange-value. In the conventional formulation, these are independent and measured by different criteria.31 Utility is a qualitative affordance, whereas market rates are quantitative. Although any salable item must satisfy some desire or need, function remains only as a kind of tenuous thread. There is no such schism within the spectral commodity. The more one pays, the more extraordinarily effective the object is thought to become. And the reverse is likewise true: the uncommonly powerful object is nearly always a source of enrichment. As use-values become magically augmented, even “useless” things perform uncommon practical service—not least in the further production of wealth. This explains the logic behind paying nearly S$100,000 for an urn that is ugly, poorly made, and purely ornamental. This is not Adornian irrationalism. What we see here is a recuperation of that most unheimlich aspect of the material world under capital: the divorce of two modes of valuation and the alienation that results. The discourse of haunted goods returns to a form of holism. Given the extraordinary emphasis on property and possession—in Singapore as elsewhere—it seems altogether fitting that everyday consumables would be reenvisioned as the vehicles of a phantasmagoric reconciliation. Through the ghost, Marx’s weary “hieroglyph” is cast as something redemptive, promiscuously generative, and consequential to a cosmic degree.

Ghostly possessions, like spirit money, serve to imagine economy as a medium of agency, social relation, and betterment. In the theater of offerings and auctions, the commodity runs wild. Freed from the shackles of earthly rationality, it assumes the hybrid and hyperbolic forms of kimzua and—as with hell notes—merges with the speculative processes that, within Singapore’s spectral practices, often stand for capital in toto. Mere paper can initiate flows of enormous value and utility, while cheap tat, sold at a premium, promises passive wealth. Here, also, Chinese religion offers a vision of agency that extends beyond the circumscriptions of the subject. As we will see with housing and development, also, its practitioners go to work on the world through the commodity as a lever—domesticating chance, shaping futures, directing unseen currents of health, safety, and prosperity. In this conception, anything that can be owned can provide access to the material-energetic substance of life in full.

But this is not the only possible account of ghosts and goods. In passing, and by way of closure, we may note another discursive mode in which the spectral plays a rather different—far more traditionally melancholic—role. This provides a complement to the gleeful embrace of commodity culture and perhaps gives voice to an ambivalence about the role of objects at the center of Singapore’s contemporary.

As described in the preface, uncanny events are often reported to begin with the discovery of a lost or discarded memento, some rusted bauble found in a drawer or amid the rubble of a construction site. This is unearthed, touched, or removed, instigating a series of unsettling or violent manifestations. Retroactively, often via the deduction of a medium or Malay bomoh, the ghost is said to have been upset by contact of the living with its “property.” The often-trivial concerns of gui frequently fix upon a world of social detritus—a devalued reflection, à la Marx’s camera obscura of the glamorous objects and fantasies that populate consumer culture. Old watches, broken cameras, and tortoiseshell combs encrypt within themselves the failed utopian aspirations that are the essence of the commodity as hieroglyph: the “trash” at the heart of Walter Benjamin’s writing that, in the words of Max Pensky, serves “as markers for a continuum of unfulfilled utopian expectation.”32 It is precisely such everyday social and physical detritus that, like the corpse of the commodity, is frequently reanimated in the haunting. As Benjamin predicted, the return of such objects holds the potential to trouble the regime of the new—to pull back the curtain and reveal the infernal stagecraft of capital’s “creative” destruction.

To this end, the ghost appears to be beholden to the commodity in a kind of fraught double relation. Certainly there is the delirium and liberation of alternate economies, of the kind that we have just seen. But this figure is associated also with another netherworld, of social and commercial debris lost to the phantasmagoria of novelty: an archive of dead things. Such objects are not remembered in a properly historical sense; they are perhaps too mundane. But the ghost insists that they are still property. While enraptured with novelties, the ghost acts, perhaps paradoxically, to defy obsolescence: old ejecta of the market are re-presented in novel, mysterious, and dangerous guises. In a clearly different register, the Benjaminian jetsam of hauntings may offer a contemplative or heuristic mechanism, a kind of cry made without clear or satisfying explanation. In both registers, the spectral commodity would open a different window onto a mad and “mist-enveloped” situation.