Unknowability 2
“Modern spiritualists” was the name that mid-nineteenth century clairvoyants and spirit mediums chose for themselves. It was a wonderfully paradoxical one, for how could categorically messy esoteric practices be reconciled with Western modernity’s hygienic, disenchanted gaze on the world?
The question of life after death is the implacable bone of contention between modern spiritualists and everyone else who called themselves moderns—and one that in the twenty-first century doesn’t have the same heft as it did when spiritualism in its heyday appropriated the philosophical conversation between being and knowing. In this way spiritualists have always seen themselves as ‘investigators,’ not as missionaries who conformed to particular theologies: what by straight science is considered epistemological transgression and kinkiness is from the spiritualist side understood to be the production of phenomena and seeking to provide proof of spirit afterlife, as good positivisits should.
You can argue that mediumism revolves around unknowability, in the simple sense that there is no evidence about what, if anything, awaits us after death. Besides, it is an open question whether mediums were really in touch with the spirits; strictly speaking, considering all the fraud they were also up to, we don’t even know if they themselves were convinced of this. But unknowability not only reads against the grain of spiritualist conviction. If you allow for the uncertainty in the assumption that we do not possess authorised ways of knowing about life after death, it is the sceptical and agnostic ones who might be surprised to arrive in an afterlife or other-than-life full of action. We (on this side) just do not know. On the mundane side of things, it must be said that we support unknowability because it is intolerable to the entrenched Christian-capitalist molds of social life, mocking as it does the old patriarchal institutional-corporate hold on the world as a realm of the possible that consists of so many purported certainties. The reduction inherent to this world view is, in many ways, unspeakable.
Through its characteristic mixed message of scientific concepts and religious sentiment, spiritualism brought with it ideas of living differently. As Avery F. Gordon puts it, ‘Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are locate.’ If the composition of human ontology turns out to be utterly different than assumed, then this being-otherwise might introduce fissures in the social contract, too, and nibble away at consent to be governed. You get the feeling that the first question of the séance that started the reflective play of query and response between this world and the next—“who is there?”—was a preliminary for another, no less urgent one: “could all of this be different?”
… This epistemological kinkiness and potential unruliness extend into cybernetics. This was a branch of research that is now defunct, but generally was the twentieth century forerunner of computer science and the digital realm that we now inhabit (as such it came with all sorts of Cold War era politics on all sides of the Iron Curtain, but also with all sorts of wonderful speculation because cyberneticians did not know what was a computer). Cybernetics also made for an ontology of unknowability, which in this case is premised on temporality: information systems activated by feedback circuits are built to be adaptable to future, and hence unknown, input.
Coming at cybernetics from the Other side, as we do now, shows a proximity between the former and the souled matter of Symbolism. A symbolist understanding of cybernetics appears in the way that theoretical cybernetics (as outlined by Norbert Wiener and Stafford Beer, among others) deliberately collapsed dichotomies of nature and culture, electronic circuit and animal nervous system, idea and matter, yes, even of magic and science. Cybernetics’ neural and environmental analogies to computational systems oppose managerial cybernetics and its Cartesian erasure of embodiment. In this de-differentiated light, the artificial mind of cybernetics was not an abstract thinker, but a performing organ in a living system; an ecology within other ecologies. Which brings us back to the modern spiritualists and their unconstitutional contempt for the modern regime’s hierarchised binaries as crystallised in their unworried extension of life into death.
The point being? Point being, among other things, that unknowability can be invaluable (or generatively non-valuable), to allow for something else to happen at the limits of what can be processed and fed back through machines and ontologies that work to bend what exists away from future becoming.
Avery F. Gordon. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, 22.
