Spectral Self-Recording: Occult Communication and Science in the Twentieth-Century

在漫长的19世纪，自动记录仪器成为科学文化中真理和客观性的主要仲裁者。在自然科学、工程甚至神秘学中，自动仪器将异常和不稳定的现象转化为客观的痕迹，以便进行理性的分析和检查。从生理学到神秘学，自我书写的工具能够客观地记录人类感知前沿的转瞬即逝的现象。在我们研究的第一阶段，我们展示了自写工具的兴起如何在科学和神秘团体中产生知识，并塑造了其在“霸权”和“非霸权”文化中的流通。在我们项目的第二阶段，我们扩展了这一分析，以考虑信息和统计技术如何融入并改变与19世纪自写工具相关的认知文化。科学家们对统计学中的“图形方法”和电子通信技术中有关的神秘现象和光谱现象的扩散感到不安，这些技术用于克服机械自动记录仪产生的异常现象。这种理解神秘现象的新策略与所谓的“控制社会”的“控制社会”的兴起以及原始数字和电子媒体的兴起相吻合，其中流通、模式、信息和代码开始主导对无法解释的痕迹的管理和解释。虽然这种方法解决了与图形方法相关的许多问题，但我们认为，它也引发了“光谱认识论”，将萦绕、缺席和非理性的形象置于20世纪媒体文化的核心。我们着重于四个案例研究来记录这一转变：(1)19世纪晚期哲学家威廉·詹姆斯和查尔斯·桑德斯·皮尔斯对问卷调查和统计分析的运用，以解释精神现象；(2)格雷戈里·贝森对疯狂的控制研究；(3)国际科学家对地外交流的探索；(4)语言学家康斯坦丁·拉迪夫对电子交流中的鬼魂信息的研究。这些案例研究了旨在解决19世纪科学缺陷的统计和信息技术如何将新形式的非理性和困扰纳入现代传播文化的核心。我们的研究结果是对现代数据和通信文化中不断变化的技术配置如何塑造科学和神秘知识的生产和监管的新描述。

In the long nineteenth-century self-recording instruments emerged as the leading arbiters of truth and objectivity in scientific cultures. In the natural sciences, engineering, and even the occult, automatic instruments translated aberrant and erratic phenomena into objective traces for rational analysis and inspection. From physiology to the occult, self-writing instruments enabled the objective registration of fleeting phenomena at the frontiers of human perception. In the first phase of our research we demonstrated how the rise of self-writing instruments produced knowledge in scientific and occult communities and shaped its circulation across "hegemonic" and "nonhegemonic" cultures.In the second phase of our project we extend this analysis to consider how informational and statistical technologies subsumed and transformed epistemic cultures associated with self-writing instruments of the nineteenth-century. Scientists disturbed by the proliferation of occult and spectral manifestations associated in the "graphical method" found in statistics and electrical communications techniques for overcoming the aberrant manifestations produced by mechanical self-recorders. This new strategy for understanding occult phenomena coincides with the rise of what's been termed the "control society" of the "society of control" as well as the rise of protodigital and electronic media, wherein circulation, patterns, information, and code came to dominate the management and interpretation of inexplicable traces. While this approach solved many problems associated with the graphical method, we maintain that it also gave rise to "spectral epistemologies" that lodged figures of haunting, absence, and irrationality at the core of twentiethcentury media cultures. We focus on four case studies for documenting this transition: (1) the latenineteenth- century deployment of questionnaires and statistical analysis by philosophers William James and Charles Sanders Peirce to explain psychic phenomena, (2) Gregory Bateson's cybernetic studies of madness, (3) international scientists' search for extra-terrestrial communication, and (4) linguist Konstantin Raudive's studies of ghost-messages in electronic communications. These case studies how the same statistical and informational technologies meant to address the shortcomings of nineteenth-century sciences also incorporated new forms of irrationality and haunting into the heart of modern communication cultures. The result of our study is a new account of how changing technical configurations shape the production and regulation of scientific and occult knowledge in modern cultures of data and communications.