Haunted Data

Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

Lisa Blackman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350047068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Haunted Data explores the concepts that are at work in our complex relationships with data. Our engagement with data – big or small – is never as simplistic or straightforward as might first appear. Indeed, Blackman argues that our relationship with data is haunted with errors, dead ends, ghostly figures, and misunderstandings that challenge core assumptions about the nature of thought, consciousness, mind, cognition, affect, communication, control and rationality, both human and non-human. Using contemporary controversies from 'weird science' including the field of priming and its uncanny relations to animal telepathy, as well as artificial intelligences and their curious relation to psychic research ('clairvoyant computers'), Blackman shows how some of the current crises in science in these areas reveal more than scientists are willing or even able to acknowledge. In addition to proposing a new theory of how we might engage with data, Haunted Data also provides a nuanced survey of the historical context to contemporary debates, going back to the 19th Century origins of modern computation and science to explain the ubiquity and oddness of our data relations. Drawing from radical philosophies of science, feminist science studies, queer theory, cultural studies, and the field of affect studies, the book develops a manifesto for how artists, philosophers and scientists might engage creatively and critically with science within the context of digital communication.

Part One

Priming and Networked Affect: Data Mediation and Media Contagions

1

Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future

Introduction: Weird science

Is it possible to see into the future or even for the future to retroactively influence the past? Can experimental subjects be primed to walk to a lift more slowly after being shown words associated with ageing on a scrambled language task?¹ How do we make sense of the experimental evidence, which suggests that both of these questions can be answered affirmatively? These questions are related to experiments written up in two journal articles, considered classic studies, which cross cognitive science, anomalistic psychology and psychic research (Bargh, Chen and Burrows, 1996; Bem, 2011). In different ways the studies also remediate debates within affect theories, new materialisms and speculative philosophies in the humanities. They invite a refractive method, which reads and stages texts, events, human and non-human actors and agencies, objects, entities and practices through one another (Barad, 2010). One of the studies and the controversies that ensued speak to current debates about data and computation and the question of what one analyses when data is a central focus of study and analysis. Last but not least, they both provide a springboard for addressing a topical question: how can we perform critical research in the context of the computational turn and what implications does this have for studies of the media and mediation?

Both of the articles provide starting points for the argument of this book. They have both been highly cited and have captured the attention of the broadcast media in different ways. They have both had impact and have after-lives on the internet and across social media. Readers will be able to find hyperlinks to these articles, which extend across space and time, and lead to an encounter with a range of strange related entities: horses that can type or tell the time, clairvoyant computers, entangled minds (human and non-human), non-local consciousness, so-called mad scientists, and entities and practices, which are deemed impossible, improbable or the product of irrational belief systems. Both articles have become part of unfolding controversies across social and broadcast media and have in different ways become ‘media events’. They have left contagious trails composed of montages of hyperlinks, some of which have been assembled into accepted versions of events, and others that have been rendered insufficient, nonsensical and have been redacted or exist below the radar. These ghostly links sometimes open to detours and dead ends and often to submerged and displaced actors and agents. The articles and the controversies surrounding them concern puzzling phenomena and connect to some of the most vexed questions concerning life, matter, nature, the universe and sometimes to everything!

Both of the controversies challenge some of the inherited beliefs readers might have about what it means to be human, an organism, a subject and to have and be a body. We might think of ourselves as primarily, or striving to be, unified, bounded and whole with clear and distinct boundaries between self and other. We might recognize of course that others influence us in a myriad of ways, and that relationality is perhaps a better concept for describing the richness and potentiality of what it means to be embodied. But what when relationality extends to forms of experience, practices, entities and phenomena that suggest more of a radical indeterminacy and contingency that questions any distinct sense of boundary between self and other, inside and outside, mind and body, material and immaterial, human and technical, past and present, psychic and somatic and the affective and cognitive?

The experiences and phenomena that are the subject of the controversies are often described as having an ‘alien phenomenology’. What I am calling the ‘John Bargh priming controversy’ opens up the question of where mind should be located when taken out of a distinctly human bounded subject. The ‘Feeling the Future controversy’ for how to approach modes of perception and sensation that are ‘extra-sensory’, or that challenge the limits of current modes of sensing and relating. These include modes of perception and sensing that appear to be distributed and extend across time and space, and which break down any clear causal and linear relationship between past, present and future – what we might call ‘alien time’. They involve non-linear and entangled practices of memory and forgetting, which challenge any sense of psychological autonomy and bounded consciousness. This includes challenges to any assumed bifurcation of the human and technical, present and absent, mind and matter, the corporeal and the incorporeal, and the popular and the scientific.

In different ways both controversies challenge a key set of colonial cultural beliefs and theories of mind, which have assumed that psychological capacities are properties of clearly bounded, autonomous subjects that are subject to bifurcations between subject and object, material and immaterial, and biological and cultural. The phenomena that are the subject of the different controversies bypass reason or rationality or disclose how limited these concepts are for describing what it means to have and be a body. Both controversies also raise important questions about the limits of the scientific method as it operates in its most positivist mode. They introduce the ‘wonder’ back into what it might mean to conduct experiments with experiences that are considered odd, strange, anomalous, uncanny and unsettling, and which regularly appear as the subject matter of psychology as it intersects with weird science.

‘Weird science’ is a broad term, which captures all manner of sciences of oddities, exceptions and anomalies. It is a term often used to refer to phenomena, practices, experiences and entities, which have been associated or linked with the paranormal or supernatural. As a field it refers to science, which concerns itself with unexplained mysteries, oddities, ‘strange stuff’ or challenges to established thinking. This might include the area of anomalous psychology, or the ‘psychology of anomalous experience’, formerly known as parapsychology. This sub-discipline of psychology aligns a diverse range of phenomena and experiences, including mediumship, electronic voice phenomena, magical beliefs, lucid dreaming, deathbed visions, miracle cures, paranormal beliefs, false memory, telepathy, near-death states, haunted experiences, hypnosis, the placebo effect and so forth. It is framed as a study of extraordinary or exceptional phenomena, but is not restricted to those experiences which might be delineated as paranormal.

These phenomena are often framed and constituted through the cognitive and neuropsychology of perception and belief. Both controversies speak to the vexed question of what it means to enter into suggestive relations with another human or non-human. They both disclose how little we understand processes, practices and registers of experience, which challenge rationality, control, will and autonomous thought. Mark Fisher (2017) invites us to consider the affective pull o r intensity of the ‘weird’ in his book, The Weird and the Eerie. He asks, ‘What is the weird? When we say something is weird, what kind of feeling are we pointing to?’ He goes on to say,

I want to argue the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least that it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories, which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate. (Fisher 2017: 15)

Weird is often linked to the supernatural but he suggests that this does not exhaust the kinds of phenomena and experiences that might be designated weird. Fisher’s focus is on weird fiction or what he also calls ‘writers of the weird’ (particularly exploring the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and George Orwell). He also suggests that the affect of the weird is linked to a fascination with the unknown, where ‘the weird cannot only repel, it must also compel our attention’ (p. 17). The weird involves an interplay between this world and others and evokes ‘a flavour of the beyond’ (p. 21) or invokes a break with something. This might include normality, the past, Euclidian time and space for example.

Within legitimate or straight science ‘weird’ phenomena, such as ‘alien phenomenologies’ retain such a fascination and evocation. They primarily appear as abnormal perceptions, signs of psychopathology or puzzling curiosities that challenge foundational assumptions and normative values and expectations. They include a diverse range of suggestive, contagious and imitative phenomena that suggest we can be moved to action, to feeling, to thought, to belief in ways we little understand or comprehend. They relate to other unusual experiences, such as possession, thought control, altered states of mind and body, and the sense of futures speaking in the present. They are sometimes associated with the paranormal and the occult but have always retained a fascination in popular culture, film, art, literature, psychoanalysis and entertainment. They are the subject of psychology, psychiatry, cognitive science, neuroscience, anthropology and sociology, as well as providing a range of concepts, explanatory structures, heuristics and imaginaries for exploring the ontological indeterminacy of what it means to be human.

Governing through the affective

Both controversies also involve two distinct ways of imagining and governing conduct, behaviour, thought and feeling. The first, which will form the subject of Part 1 of the book, is linked to the concept of priming. Priming relates to a range of strategies and techniques of psychological governance, or psychomediation, which have been taken up in nudge behavioural economics, popularized in the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Taylor and Sunstein (2009). Priming refers to the management and control of conduct, behaviour, thought and feeling, which can be shaped and produced via techniques taken to work primarily through non-conscious registers of experience. It relates to the use of techniques of indirect suggestion to influence conduct and induce behaviour and to stimulate change and transformation. Nudge has been an important dimension of how citizens in neo-liberal countries have been moved to action by governments attempting to shape behaviour beyond a subject’s conscious reflection and control. According to the philosopher Gary Gutting (2015), although priming is part of a scientific tradition that crosses cognitive science, behavioural economics and political science, the approach popularized by the authors of Nudge chimes more with common sense than established science in this area. Perhaps the invocation of common sense to describe nudge is another example of how little we understand priming, although we might be able to identify moments where subjects might be said to have been primed.

Priming is already controversial as it unseats the rational cogito from its Cartesian throne and draws limits around the concept of free will. It discloses how much of our thinking, action and reaction occur in registers which exist below or beyond conscious, cognitive control. As a mode of power or governance it is more akin to post-hypnotic suggestion than to power operating in registers that are conscious, cognitive and rational; the latter is usually associated with the neo-liberal subject of agency and choice. Priming covers a broad range of techniques used by advertisers and marketers to shape consumer behaviour, but also appears as a set of psychologized explanations of how practices, such as racisms, are taken to be produced, maintained, shaped and rehearsed. The following example will illustrate what is at stake for the reader.

In an article published in The Washington Post ² titled ‘Racial Prejudice Is Driving Opposition to Paying College Athletes. Here’s the Evidence’, the article recounts the controversies surrounding how college athletes are treated within the American university system. The revenue that athletes bring to colleges through merchandise, subscription fees for broadcasting sports events, concessions and licensing fees adds up to a very lucrative business. However this far outweighs the grants that are given to athletes, where money only usually very minimally covers tuition and maintenance. Why is this the case? The article suggests that this is primarily due to racial prejudice and that most blacks want college athletes to be paid properly while most whites don’t. In order to authenticate this statement the article validates a survey carried out that links this to pre-existing racial prejudice by conducting an experiment. The experiment is a typical priming experiment where white respondents were asked their view on whether college athletes should be properly paid, while showing ‘one group pictures of young black men with stereotypical African American first and last names. We showed another group no pictures at all.’ They go on to demonstrate within the parameters of the experiment that ‘whites who were primed by seeing pictures of young black men were significantly more likely to say they opposed paying college athletes’.

As readers can see from this experiment, priming is a broad term, which covers processes and practices, which are taken to emanate from non-conscious registers of experience that can be triggered, stimulated, modulated, amplified, extended and shaped through particular technologies of material-semiotic-affective association – in this case, images of black men, taken to have stereotypical African American first and last names. However, this is ultimately a very psychologized explanation rooted in the concept of racial prejudice, which is not adequate for exploring and examining how and why racism exists as an institutional structure of inequality and oppression. Ultimately, as we will see in Chapter 3, priming is a limited concept due to the assumptions and ontologies surrounding mind, cognition, will and affect, which have shaped modern psychology. It is haunted by what is disavowed and returns in the priming controversy. This includes already existing controversies surrounding how to understand the basis of these psychological forms of governance, management and control. This includes the need for more innovative propositions, which bring the humanities more into the frame.³

Part 2 of the book, ‘Feeling Futures/Mediating Futures’, turns to a rather different set of strategies and techniques for governing through the affective materialized within the second controversy, ‘Feeling the Future’. This controversy is part of a broader set of cultural imaginaries and discourses, which are entangled with new strategies of power based on future shaping and anticipation, which attempt to govern through rather non-linear and distributed psychologies of time. This includes techniques and practices of pre-emption, foresight, foreseeing and premediation. These techniques are what I call ‘strategic imaginaries’, which are manifest and becoming instantiated in computing (particularly programming and software development), biology and the neurosciences, practices of mediation within the context of communication technologies (see Grusin, 2010; Hansen, 2015), business strategy, finance capitalism, and in the conduct of war, terrorism, politics and public health responses to global threats (such as the Ebola crisis of 2014).

They underpin and are shaping the development of future technologies, some of which are based on quantum mechanics and theories of quantum entanglement. Examples of these include quantum teleportation and quantum cryptology, and algorithms which attempt to change the past within open systems, sometimes called programming in the subjunctive (including retroactive update). These are algorithms which attempt to change computational pasts and are therefore seen to step sideways in time. One might also add that all of these imaginaries and the strategies that they are entangled and produced by are rather queer. Algorithms that can bend, telescope or subv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science
• Part One Priming and Networked Affect: Data Mediation and Media Contagions
• Part Two Feeling Futures: Mediating Futures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright