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Archive for the ‘The Unexplained’ Category

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.

Leth

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.

Roys

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.

Confused duck

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
5 comments | Permalink

Open letter to Damian Thompson on reading a bit of his wretched new book

Dear Damian

I was flipping through Counterknowledge: how we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history in Waterstones, Trafalgar Square, earlier today, quickly but carefully and with a slight intention to buy, but since reading up on your oeuvre I’ve put off paying for it until I can pick up a used copy. I’d hate to encourage you.

I find it anything but astonishing that a person of faith takes the trouble to publish a book damning all but the big narratives of culture and science. This sort of thing happens all the time. And it’s anything but startling to see someone bandy the word ‘reason’ around and adduce science simply in an attempt to scatter the opposition and pre-emptively shut up those who don’t hold the same tenets of faith that they do, who don’t presume to start from Enlightenment reason — anything but — and who don’t base their knowledge on the last word in science.

It would be more interesting to take the argument to the opposition by examining the ideological ground on which they stand, if it’s apparent, and put aside for a book’s space the preconceptions borne of dualism, under which reason automatically, naturally and without prejudice cannot help but oppose wild unreason. If it seems to you that there are enough “What ifs” without you adding to their number, perhaps you’re missing the point of scientific inquiry. What if the straight median line of progress through reason running through the idea of God, slave-owning democracies, hierarchical meritocracies, the dispassionate science of economics, and all the rest of it, touches affective narrative waymarkers either sides of the line in its inexorable linearity, rather than existing simply as a forward-moving thing ever-present and immanent?

With science being, as you imply, a relentless ongoing process of inquiry with no knowledge gap untested, leaving only reason in its indisputable wake, and since history is just the one full, true story, leaving no one ignorant of its veracity, surely we are, as you contend, replete with precisely the positive knowledge we require. However, you don’t start from such a positive position. You argue that we should not tolerate counterknowledge and must destroy it because it is non-knowledge. In fact, you go further and suggest that counterknowledge is worse than ignorance because it purposefully seeks to negate knowledge’s true other. It is precisely the beyondness and independence of that anti-ignorance strategy that makes it so attractive to freethinkers and so dangerous from your point of view.

What could it be in counterknowledge that so unites sceptics and true believers?

Reason

And what of those dangerous people who benefit from the progression of true knowledge but insist on negating its reasonable provenance? I denounce your attempt to divide a world of thinking people into those who’ve failed to embrace reason/science and those who remain true to the one true story you narrate. Yours is a mean–spirited, ugly, divisive sort of discourse.

Although I’m with you in detesting the New Age and conspiracism knowledge markets, I can’t go that extra mile with you and label all unincorporated counterknowledge as moribund. Why? I’m not certain that all known counterfactuals — not to mention the unknown ones — have been disproved or illuminated by scientists or that one history, the true one you’re advancing in opposition to the ‘fake’ ones you mention — not even the history of science or the story of God — is capable of describing all the truth of human experience now and in the past.

Do I accept ‘reason’ and ‘Enlightenment’ as facts? No, because I’ve read widely. Do I accept that science is a dispassionate search for true facts, a thing apart? No, because fallible humans make it. Do I accept that history can be faked? Yes, because all stories are part fiction, even the true ones. Do I accept there is danger in people reconsidering history, science or culture in the light of their own experience? No, because that’s exactly how those things are made. Can I conceive of a turning point in human affairs at which ‘reason’ supported by faith-in-ritual — including faith in rituals of knowledge acquisition and transmission — triumphs over counteractive heterogeneity and productive, interactive experiential differences, whether reasonable? Yes, I’m afraid I can. And that is why I’m not supporting you by buying your book.

Thanks for doing me and the reading/thinking public the courtesy of being accessible to criticism. I wish more writers would do the same.

All the best

Neil Palmer

Feastofpalmer.com

Edit: I wrote this to post in the contact form linked to on http://www.damianthompson.net/. But the web form does not work, so I’ve posted it here. And I retract the last paragraph.

Posted by Neil on January 8, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Tags: Counterculture, Individualism, The Unexplained, hauntiquarianism
11 comments | Permalink

Doo-Wop Shambhala

Originally a B-side to “The Lonely One”, Sheriff and The Ravel’s “Shombalor” (1959, Vee-Jay Records, 306) is a massive slab of on-the-spot mic poetry, otherwise known as Doo-Wop. A different spelling of “Shombolar” was used on Songs The Cramps Taught Us, Volume One (2001). It’s possible that the song name printed on the original Vee-Jay record label was a mis-spelling of what the group called their tune: it certainly sounds like “shombolar” when they sing it. I’m sticking with The Cramps’ revisionist version of “Shombolar”.

I’m guessing that Sheriff and The Ravels were a black group, because that’s the Doo Wop demography if not its constituency, and I’d say they were from Chicago, because Vee-Jay was based there. But I don’t know for sure. They’ve a heavy, steady rockabilly sound — probably why The Cramps dug the disc — anchored on slap bass, rim-shot drums, treble guitar and, I think, a tinkle of piano in the background. Beyond the bass undertones, the vocals including the lead are mid-range and don’t venture into the outer space tones of, say, The Four Seasons’ Frankie Valli. The guitar intro, flamenco-ing octaves up and down in double-quick time, is worth the price of admission.

I first heard “Shombolar” on Songs The Cramps Taught Us, Volume One and it immediately jumped ahead of The Chips‘ “Rubber Biscuit” (1956, Josie Records, Josie 803) in my mind’s ear. “Shombolar”, like “Rubber Biscuit”, has running through it echoes of reform school marching rhymes (see the Wikipedia entry for The Chips). It’s “Go left, right, left, right” refrain and the lines, “I love left foot stomp and-a right foot drag, ‘n-a / Hey it’s good to march!” add a layer of reflexive sharpness to the song’s expression of culture and make the cultural link between Doo Wop and the criminal justice system even more explicit than The Chips’ rhythmic-linguistic allusions do. “Shombolar” is as much a prison song as Sam Cooke’s later and more famous tune, “Chain Gang” (1960, RCA Victor, 47-7783).

Either way of spelling/pronouncing “Shombalor” is similar enough to Shambhala, the mythopoeical predecessor to the fictional Shangri-la, to merit mention. Maybe there was a girl with an ebonic phonetic moniker involved. This usage may even be a popular memory trace of the 1930s and 40s fictional comic book and radio crime fighter, The Shadow, who was trained in mystical Shamballah. Even though The Shadow radio programme went off air in 1954, there is evidence that his influence persisted in rockin’ n’ rollin’ minds. Link Wray used The Shadow’s sinister moralising catchphrase, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” at the start of his instrumental “The Shadow Knows” (1964, Swan Records, S-4171). Or perhaps members of the vocal group came across Shambhala in contemporaneous references to the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet and into India on 31 March 1959, which was all over the news, and incorporated it as a motif in their new tune.

Check The Hound’s archive for “Shombolar”: hear this howlin’ rave and die! Alternatively, Songs the Cramps Taught Us, Volume One is still available from all good record shops. You can even get “Shombalor” legitimately for the first time outside of the vintage record racks, since it was reissued on the Vee-Jay Definitive Collection LP in August 2007. I imagine that the sleeve notes on the latter would provide a much needed supplement to this speculative post.

In an attempt to enhance your listening experience, I’ve transcribed the words as I hear them. I’d be happy to accept plausible suggestions for alterations.

“Shombolar”

Go left, right, left right
Go left, right, left right
Go left, right, left right
Go left, right, left right