Disappearance as such can never be approached with any type of clarity. Rather, it is persistently articulated in terms of what disappears and how. Some things just disappear, with a touch of magic they dematerialize. But the fate they suffer beyond the point of missing is a mode that remains to be understood. We tend to mull over objects that have by all appearances vanished and tell tales of people lost at sea or wastelands, but things and people only disappear when we don’t know where they are. This might seem evident but what it means is that much similar to when things need to be lost before they are found do things need to be lost before we attribute them with the status of disappeared. Disappearance ensues some time after lost, when attempts to retrieve or fathom how it or a person disappeared have failed. Donald Crowhurst was lost to us before he disappeared and so was Amelia Earhart as well as D.B Cooper by way of being a ‘pseudonym,’ for instance. This ultimately veils disappearance in an obscure mystery that, with regards to people, makes up the eerie distinction between the decisive ‘dead’ and, as it were, ‘assumed dead’—alluding to the fact that we are unaware of the person’s true fate—passing on or voluntarily escaping.
But even though this book is centred on disappearance, it is not an attestation of the proverbial longing to vanish and never be found—a suspicion directed towards anyone who under whatever circumstances seemingly disappears, as well as whoever writes about it. Instead, it attempts to explore the enigmatic structure that haunts the matter, its bewildering perimeters and many layers, through an elucidative collection of fragments relating to the subject of disappearance. The fragments intertwine, create links in their in-between, and although sometimes disparate they, in their collision, engage in notions of absence, presence and the vulnerability of interacting with systems and information. Whilst the collection comprises references to several modes of disappearance, its inherent concern is centred on bureaucracy, surveillance, presence, and place. Place, of course, is in this instance an ambiguous term, entailing a variety of settings since we never know exactly from where things and people disappear, and it therefore comes to imply something other than just location. It becomes linked with the control of conditions, both in terms of bureaucratic systems and natural settings.