Overexposing The Unexplained
For a while now, I’ve been compiling thoughts for a lengthy post on how the thing I knew in the 1970s as The Unexplained — a popular genre, mainly in publishing, that encompassed the paranormal, including cryptozoology, UFOs and all points weird — has changed over the years from being a publishers’ category to operating as a alternative information market. For an illustrated glimpse at the popular cultural context of The Unexplained, see Absolute Elsewhere (where I lifted the title picture from).
I’m posting my brief notes on the subject now, having just read The Moss Grows Green On The Dark Side of The Moon: The Selling of The Paranormal In Popular Culture, the latest post on Intangible Materiality, which is sometimes brilliant, always engaging and never less than thought-provoking. I want to join in this discussion about where we’re heading with the paranormal.
Intangible Materiality says:
“Perhaps the popularization of the paranormal is in effect what keeps it safely ensconced away from prying eyes. The popular culture in effect is defining it’s paradigms through mass merchandising in a self referential feedback loop which, for the most part, may have nothing to do with what is being looked at.”
Here are my thoughts so far.
Unexplained mysteries are still with us: just direct your favourite browser and you’ll find more accounts on more sites than I can be bothered to list here. Despite the marketing techniques of popular publishers and the niching effect of the internet, the monolithic The Unexplained of the 1970s has remained, more or less, a single field of inquiry, albeit promoted under different names, embracing many specialist branches and lines of research and promoted by various interested groups and individuals. Unexplained discourses still work by writers repeating what others have asserted previously. Nevertheless, the mysterious world seems to have changed utterly.
Wandlebury
What happened to The Unexplained? Well, largely it’s become The Explained. Sometime between the late-70s and the early-90s, the form of The Unexplained dealing mainly with the paranormal was elbowed out of the way by combined theories of everything, the study of which evolved through repetition and was focused most successfully in popular culture through generic syntheses in the separate narratives of The X-Files, David Icke’s personal journey and Graham Hancock’s adventuring into para-archaeology. I stress these were not the first to try to combine previous versions of The Unexplained or the paranormal. George Hunt Williamson’s Secret Places of the Lion (1977[1958]) is a notable work of synthesis from the Golden Age of The Unexplained.
On the walls inside Royston Cave
Political conspiracy, once considered alongside other unexplained mysteries due to the enduring popularity of alternate narratives about various high-profile public killings, has become a separate genre. To a great extent, political conspiracy has overtaken the paranormal as the main site of interest. That wouldn’t have seemed possible in the 1970s, when it looked as though spirituality rather than materialism would be the new area of social contest.
The new conspiracy-led version of The Unexplained is a portmanteau para-investigative practice that seeks a unifying model to encompass recovered spiritualities, hidden histories and political conspiracies. As an anti-ideological mode, it supersedes both Left and Right, based on the obvious truth that interested, powerful individuals and organisations ultimately control policy through funding or withholding funds behind the scenes.
Conspiracy Theory, as popularised by The X-Files and reworked by David Icke, was a synthetic, even syncretic, mode of thought and practice that created the narrative space for a sparky combination of previously disparate strands of hidden or forgotten knowledge — the occult, spiritualism, time travel, political conspiracies, etc.
What we know as conspiracy theories are not theories so much as populist versions of rolling news narratives. These versions do not present the final sum total of hidden knowledge, despite what many marketing-aware self-publicists — whether New Age, free-thinking or otherwise disengaged from mainstream media — would have you believe.
Narrative amuck
At this point I should say that I regard David Icke, the most influential if not the most original free thinker among the recent conspiracists — certainly the genre’s most vocal and entertaining exponent— as an intellectual descendent of the likes of Charles Fourier, just off the top of my head, or better still, Menocchio, and as such a most useful macro-minded contributor to increasingly micro discussions about politics, identity and spirituality.
The populist one-stop-shop approach of the current milieu of The Unexplained, including conspiracism, encourages free thinking and research and it always encourages consumption — as was always the case with The Unexplained of yesteryear — as its proponents’ fall back on repetition to promote their ‘new’ products. When Icke took the mantle of Grand Unexplainer, the repetition that had always been present when yet another popular paperback on The Unexplained was published had finally been assimilated, in the Burrovian sense, and installed as a counter-traditional genre.
The twilight counter-traditions analysed by James Webb in The Occult Underground (1974) and The Occult Establishment (1976) were reanimated and deployed as anti-ideological activism to counter aspirational, materialist neo-liberalism in an age of conservative capitalist revolution. Feeding back into the loop of marketing and consumption, this stifling of multiple narrative strands, with their compression into an alternative true tradition, presents itself as a suppression and realisation of The Enlightenment — just like Situationism! — when it’s just playing it over again.
The churning narrative of political conspiracy is partly the mistrustful creative mind of the people at work. But public theorising is a part of the original conspiracy as much as it is a moral response or a series of personal awakenings or collective creative acts. Conspiracy is a self-regenerating counterintelligence forum. In working the theories, we are engaging in and possibly working — definitely perpetuating — multiple intelligence operations. While we’re counting bullets, planes, cameras, we’re continuing to make things worse not better.
Similarly, while we’re comparing UFO appearances with images all over the place, or comparing our chakra awakenings with those of others in various communities of feeling, we’re otherwise engaged and continuing to regard rather than heed experiences.
Crop oval, Herts., 1678
I’m all for counterknowledge — it’s particularly galling that I christened this new term for The Unexplained in my notebooks some years before someone as dull as Damian Thompson invented it and published a miserable book with that title — if it challenges the assumptions and common sense fallacies of ‘proper’ knowledge. As Doreen Massey says in For Space (2005), if societies foster too keenly knowledge hierarchies dominated by ‘hard’ science and intellectualism, they run the risk of making static “the lived or the intuitive”. We ignore the individualist dynamic of gut feeling at our collective peril.
The current version of The Unexplained presents itself as an immediate, responsive, discursive and reflexive mode of thought. That’s part of its attraction and a great part of its unattractiveness to those involved in promoting knowledge hierarchies.
In its self-imposed role as the Feeling Person’s Guide to Contemporary Confusion, in other territories, including medical science, physics and the status of individual perceptions of right, for instance, The Unexplained gets into an all-in bout with the publicity arms of corporatism and intellectual property and with the self-proclaimed anti-irrationalists.
Since they eschew the norms of science, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and refuse to engage in the game of hierarchical intellectualism, the Unexplainers show clearly that a professional ‘Skeptic’, like James Randi or a proud religious rationalist like ‘Fucking’ Damian Thompson, for example, are simply reactive intellectual nonentities whose egos drive them to align themselves with the things they aspire to. Their thin voices rail against irrationality and they speak of aiding progress against the forces of regression. Presumably, they’ll claim responsibility for protecting human life and civilisation if the intellectual core of humanity does not implode before they die. (And what if it does?) In any case, they do nothing to promote intellectual progress, preferring instead to seek to stabilise convention for its own sake.
A brilliant magician
Such folk as Thompson and Randi are neither good nor bad scientists, because they do not produce testable hypotheses, nor are they effective researchers, because they don’t offer substantive original thoughts on what they’ve encountered. They ridicule their targets or the subjects of their discourse. They do not engage. They hate what they cannot become. It’s pleasing to think that, in this regard, they are products and producers of exactly the kind of quasi-intellectual repetition they deplore.
In this context, it’s clear that whatever we’re calling The Unexplained now stirs the self-righteous to anger. So there must be something to it.
That’s all she wrote.
21st century ghost hunting
The last word goes to Intangible Materiality on the progression of the paranormal from the quick buck hack-work of the pulp publishing era to the quick buck hack-work of the communication age:
“One cannot help but wonder […] how so many profound insights into the paranormal were wrested from oneself prior to the advent of global commercialization of what was once considered, a valued and at times, sacred quest as evidenced by a Siberian Shaman or for that matter, a John Dee.
[…]
Well we have evolved from tabloid coverage to infotainment without having gone anywhere at all.”
Posted by Neil
on February 27, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Tags: Consciousnesses, Counterculture, Graham Hancock, Individualism, The Unexplained
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:23 am
“it’s particularly galling that I christened this new term for The Unexplained in my notebooks some years before someone as dull as Damian Thompson invented it and published a miserable book with that title” - And thusly did Mr P out himself as a chrono-fascist! It’s particularly galling that someone so gifted in the fields of precognition and appropriation should consider it productive to invoke such dated and reactionary models of attribution and chronology in one such tiny sentence! Shame!
Apart from that I am enjoying the article thus far… And congrats on coining the neologue “Burrovian” - I have awaited its mintage…
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:34 am
Okay - I have now read TFA once and reckon you are on the button (above niggle notwithstanding). Have you considered combining the two CK posts into a monster review for serious publication? For that matter, I have surveyed the current glut of atheist/rationalist/reductionist bullshittage and find it lacking at best and fundamentalist at worst. I’m convinced there is a gap in the market for a full length work along the lines above. I think “Neil Palmer’s World of The Explained” is a good title. Whether the relevant marketing dept will get behind it is another matter.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Thansk, S.
On your first comment, ucharacteristically I’m unwilling to apologise. Slippage — and sloppage — is probably the happiest [p]art of my discourse. Anyway, among many other complaints ongoing, like you I take issue with those who seek to protect linear time as their rightful property (traditionally, culturally, ideologically, etc.).
On the second one, I agree with you about this expanding area of publishing. It’s interesting, though, to see The [’Rationalist’] Explained emerge as a middlebrow genre in its own right — perhaps the new pulp for the new middle class — on the shelves nearby those holding the books on The [’Irrationalist’] Explained. However, I’m trying to keep my monstrous discussions entirely open and untied to any one subject. When I’ve finished one last, rather weary, post I’m compiling on Thompson’s threadbare new-pulp milieu, I plan to put him out of mind for good and all.
Generally, using the term “Counterknowledge” unproblematically and interchangeably with The Unexplained, with past counter cultures in mind, is the least enervating way of letting go the intellectualist anger and spite of cultural scientists such as Thompson.
N
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:57 pm
I always thought of The Unexplained as a kind of intuitive objectification of the mostly-not-there-ness of things as per Heidegger. So it becomes a kind of poem or joke in which we can carry un-knowledge. It’s not going to tell you much about anything, and stands for the cancelled share; not the obscene, the forbidden, the hidden, but what Doug Oliver called ‘the darkness of kind’. Rather like the invention of zero it makes some operations of speculative thought possible and I wonder if it may long hence turn out to have been a placeholder term like phlogiston.
Important not to lose sight of the quotidian venalities of for example homeopathy however which is nothing more than a scam virus that works the utility margin of pattern recognition, passing off regression to the mean as the forcing of the hand of chance. That’s what the Ipsissimus whispered to me in a kitchen in Lancaster in 1987: “Random events cluster.”
I only ever had one actual generic The Unexplained experience which was a UFO sighting in about 2001 - you were there - on Fiona’s balcony, looking east across town in summer dusk saw two white lights slowly appear one above the other at about say 20 and 30 degrees above the horizon, travel slowly south about four seconds i.e. towards the sea then slowly fade. Weather balloon, headlamps, whatever, it stands for the unknowable portion of that and every evening.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:40 am
I think you’re near the point when likening it to the unknowable.
I’ve never looked into homeopathy. However, anything that exercises the self-righteous is good. For instance, check out this blog post on Counterknowledge.com.
You’ll notice that Damian Thompson offers his scientific two pennorth without reading to the end of the article he’s talking about. So much for his swearing at me in exasperation for not reading his book before reviewing it.
I include my reply, which as of 1038hrs UK time is unmoderated:
“If you’d undertaken some serious scientific research, Mr. Thompson, and scrolled down a little further, you’d have found this update on Cheikhouna, the first patient with the fever:
“Updates on the day’s other patients….
Cheikhouna, the Touba taxi-driver, who arrived at 8.30am with what I suspected as acute viral pneumonia, came to see me daily over the next week and continued on Arsenicum 1M bd. His breathing had improved immeasurably, with the only remaining symptom being the painless expectoration of vast amounts of mucous first thing on rising. This was definitely a sign of gradual cure, since the colour became progressively lighter and the consistency less gluey as the days went by, plus he was eating well and his energy levels were high. So high, in fact, that I had to almost physically restrain him from jumping straight back into his car and embarking on the 350-mile journey home. Eight days later, however, I did finally agree that he was in a fit state to drive. The next morning, returning from the well with a bucket of water in each hand, the sound of an insistent car horn just behind nearly made me drop the lot! Thinking I was about to be run over, I dodged quickly out of the way as a bright green taxi ambled past, the driver maniacally waving, grinning and beeping as his carload of passengers looked bemusedly on. Yep, it was Cheikhouna — the same man who just a week earlier had practically crawled into the clinic on his hands and knees. I dropped my buckets, waved and grinned back, then watched him zoom off into the distance like the Dukes of Hazzard, leaving a trail of dust behind him…”
I you need any help with further intensive research projects, just let me know.
Just for the record, I’m no homeopath, prefering health living to lifestyle ‘cures’ and generic industrial-strength drugs when I’m feeling ill.
All the best
Neil Palmer
Feastofpalmer.com
Whether homeopathy ‘works’, lets heed people’s experiences…