Spectral Self-Recording: Occult Communication and Science in the Twentieth-Century
History of Science
Final Report Abstract
The work completed in the last year of our project pointed towards three major advances in the study of media and the occult: Namely, our studies have cast light on transnational scope of occultism’s impact on media and technology, the enduring influence of occultism in postwar theories of communication from Gregory Bateson to Friedrich Kittler, and its persistence in terms of a global society of control in which technologies of communication converge with technologies of worldmaking. These points constitute a surprising finding counter to what the major literature in this area has emphasized and point towards the potential for new questions, including: Was the role of occultism in transnational networks (e. g. nineteenth-century spiritualism) simply a result of a pre-existing network of internationalism, or did the “marginal” and “interstitial” nature of occult knowledge provide a vehicle for cross national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries? The findings of a persistent interest in occult ideas in post-World War II media and technologies suggests a renewed concern in the major interest early theorists of computing, such as Norbert Wiener and Alan Turing, showed in issues such as fetishism and mind-reading. The role of occultism in the history and theory of digital media merits further investigation. For instance, as the globally unified character of media technologies makes them constitutive of what is understood as the world, it becomes exigent to investigate how digital media is already involved in a kind of cosmology (both in its more traditional, religious version and in its more recent articulation by contemporary physics). Along similar lines, it would be useful to investigate how concerns that emerge from a globally mediatized totality, such as those of surveillance and sousveillance, or of control and escape, are entwined with the ideas and history of occultist knowledge production.
