Paranormal and the Politics of Truth

Jeremy Northcote

Description

This book is based on the author's ten-year research into the politics of belief surrounding paranormal ideas. Through a detailed examination of the participants, issues, strategies and underlying factors that constitute the contemporary paranormal debate, the book explores the struggle surrounding the status of paranormal phenomena. It examines, on the one hand, how the principal arbiters of religious and scientific truths - the Church and the academic establishment - reject paranormal ideas as "occult" and "pseudo-scientific", and how, on the other hand, paranormal enthusiasts attempt to resist such labels and instead establish paranormal ideas as legitimate knowledge.The author contends that the paranormal debate is the outcome of wider discursive processes that are concerned with the construction and negotiation of truth in Western society generally. More specifically, the debate is seen as an aspect of the "boundary work" that defines the contours of religious and scientific orthodoxy.The book paves new ground in understanding the nature of belief relating to a topic that has long held fascination to academics and lay people alike - paranormal ideas. It develops a discursive framework for understanding a contemporary social phenomenon, hence placing the study at the cutting edge of ethnographic development that seeks to integrate discursive perspectives with empirical accounts of sociological phenomena. Most importantly, the study is intended to contribute to the debate surrounding communicative action, by outlining a discursive perspective on the negotiation of ideational differences that goes beyond the incommensurability theories that have dominated the sociology of communication and knowledge.

Sujets

• Occult

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845404109
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title page
The Paranormal and the Politics of Truth
A Sociological Account
Jeremy Northcote



Copyright page
Copyright © Jeremy Northcote, 2007
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by
Imprint Academic, Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com



Dedication
Dedicated to the memory of
Simon Harvey-Wilson
a fellow seeker on the great journey of life



Preface
Topics such as psychic powers, flying saucers and ghosts have become popular in the media and with the general public in recent years. This book is a sociological examination of the controversies that surround paranormal topics. I trace the development of these controversies from the medieval Church’s crusade against the occult and Enlightenment intellectuals’ condemnation of pseudoscience, to the disputes that collectively constitute the contemporary paranormal debate.
A major aim of this book is to provide a sociological account of the processes that underlie this debate. Through a detailed examination of the participants, issues, strategies and underlying factors that constitute the politics of disputes over the paranormal, I show how the debate is inextricably bound to wider discursive formations that underlie Western thinking generally. These discursive formations constitute the “truths” that define knowledge of ourselves, of the reality that we experience, and the values that guide us. I also show how participants involved in such disputes serve as vehicles for the expression and proliferation of these wider discourses, and how the debate as a whole functions in terms of processes of wider sociocultural continuity and change.
The intention of this book is to help the reader understand why certain phenomena - and those who study them - come to be viewed as deviant. There is, however, no attempt to persuade the reader to accept one version of reality over another, for this would be to serve as an agent of the discourses that define the ideological positions of the paranormal debate. What this book ultimately hopes to achieve is to assist in nullifying the destructive politics of truth that continually thwarts a healthy debate on this matter - or indeed any controversial topic - through the achievement of such an understanding. Having said that, overcoming such a negative form of politics is, as this book demonstrates, no easy matter.



Glossary
Bracketing
The suspension of certain truth-claims (at least for the duration of discussion).
Civil Dialogue
Dialogue that is conducted in a respectful, fair-minded manner.
Democratic Dialogue
A participatory form of dialogue in which anyone who wishes to become involved can do so.
Discourse
The tacit assumptions or “truths” that underlie our understandings of self, society, and reality generally. (Not to be confused with its alternative definition as ‘a mode of dialogue between people,’ as understood by those who study “discourse analysis”).
Epistemology
A set of ideas regarding the foundations of knowledge.
Emic
The participant’s perspective.
Etic
The analyst’s perspective.
Ideology
A set of ideas concerning how people think and act in relation to the social world. (Not to be confused with the more specific, hegemonic connotations implied by Marxists when they use the term)
Ontology
A set of understandings on the nature of reality, also referred to as a “cosmology.”
Pan-narrative
A discursive “blueprint” that relates two or more discourses to one another in a relationship of contiguity or opposition.
Paradigm
A framework for investigating and interpreting reality
Paranormal
A category of alleged phenomena that are held to operate beyond the normal understandings of reality and the universe.
Paranormal Debate
A set of disputes concerning the existence of paranormal-type phenomena.
Paranormal Scene
The setting where people pursue their interest in paranormal topics, including participation in debates and other dealings with fellow participants.
Politics of Truth
A term coined by Foucault, which refers to the discursively based “power” struggles that surround the production of ideas, even at the level of everyday interaction.
Positive Dialogue
Dialogue that is productive, civil and democratic in nature.
Productive Dialogue
Dialogue where participants cooperatively endeavour to achieve mutual understanding.
Reflexivity
The practice of subjecting one’s own truth-claims to critical examination.
Schema
A framework for viewing relationships between objects, people or phenomena.
Worldview
The view or image that an individual subjectively forms of his/her world.



Introduction
It was on a winter night, and I and a friend (we were both fifteen years old) were lugging some crates of wild rabbits - jack rabbits - out of the town in which I was born. We released them and we started to walk back the couple of miles to the town, and by this time the snow was very dense, very heavy - it was almost a blizzard condition, very cold. And out of this heavy veil of snow came two red lights drifting toward us. They just passed right overhead, and disappeared into the snowfall going north. We stood there stunned, watching. There was not a sound, absolutely not a sound. These lights were very low, maybe no more than fifty to one hundred feet above us. It was no aircraft - no pilot would have been able to fly that low in those kind of conditions.
Paranormal writer Curt Sutherly was vividly describing an experience he had as a lad. It was October 1996, and we were seated on a comfortable lounge in the lobby of the Sheraton hotel in St Paul/Minneapolis with a national UFO conference in full swing below. I was nearing the end of a five-month research trip, in which I had travelled half way around the world from my home in Australia to experience first-hand the paranormal enthusiast scene in Europe and the United States. I had only just met Curt at the conference, but we had got chatting and I perceived him to be an intelligent person with a genuine nature - not someone whose word you would normally take lightly.
But strange lights flying low and silently overhead? Could it have been a low flying glider, or a plane whose engines could not be heard through the blizzard? Perhaps it was a new ultra-secret stealth military aircraft? Perhaps Curt Sutherly did not experience anything at all, and was simply making the story up? Perhaps it was all a hallucination, or a misperception? Or maybe it was what most people at the conference would have me believe - a spaceship from another planet or an apparition from another dimension!
From all the stories that I have heard over the years, from paranormal enthusiasts all over the world, the same fundamental question keeps emerging: do strange phenomena abound that have thus far eluded the mainstream intellectuals and authorities who tend to define what is possible and real in our universe? It is a question that people sometimes ask me when they hear about my research interest in the paranormal scene. It is a question, in fact, that I have often asked myself. Having been raised by parents with an avid interest in such matters, I have had a quiet interest in matters of the paranormal since my teenage years. But with the exception of a solitary yet intense mystical experience in my early 20s - the significance of which remains unclear to me to this day - I must confess that my cautious disposition (ingrained in me from years of academic study) has left me undecided, perhaps slightly sceptical, of paranormal claims.
As a social analyst, however, I cannot pretend to know the answer to the question of whether the paranormal is real or not. I find it intriguing, however, that there are so many people who do claim to know the answer, with access to little more supportive or countervailing evidence or personal experiences than what you or I have available. What is more, people tend to differ widely in their views on the matter, and are often prepared to defend their viewpoints vigorously against those who would disagree. It is such disputes, carried out in various forums throughout Western society, and what I will collectively refer to as the “paranormal debate”, that will be explored in this book.
One hypothesis that I seriously considered when I first began studying the paranormal debate back in 1996 was that the paranormal debate serves as an open forum for a productive discussion of fundamental ontological, epistemological and ideological issues, perhaps resembling what some analysts have labelled a “micro-public sphere.” Social analyst L.A. Kauffman writes:
There are, today, tiny-to-middling public spheres for hobbyists and enthusiasts of all kinds, for believers in this or that creed or this or that cause - small networks of public interaction marked by a level of vibrancy and engagement wholly lacking in the ... Public Sphere (1995:155).
Ideally, such discussions in “micro-public spheres” are carried out in a manner unencumbered by bias or restrictions on freedom of speech. They also possess the other qualities defined by social theorist Jurgen Habermas’ model of the “ideal speech situation”, such as a bracketing of the disputed issues and the exclusion of all motives “except that of the cooperative search for tr