Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral

Exploring how technological apparatuses "capture" invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology. Contents Figures Acknowledgments Introduction On the Materiality of Unseen Things Part I Bodily Semantics, Metaphor, and Mediation Chapter 1 Organicism and Psychical Research Where Mediums and Mushrooms Meet Chapter 2. Semantics of the Suffering: Torture Technologies and Mediumship in Buenos Aires Chapter 3 Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam Chapter 4. Broken Words: Tools of Oracular Articulacy in Afro-Cuban Divination Part II Orders of Sound, Sight, and Measurement Chapter 5. Radioaficionados and UFOs: The Social Life of Radios in Chile Chapter 6. Hospitality and Proof: Human Mediums, Technical Media, and Controversial Knowledge in Ghost-Hunting Practices in the United States Chapter 7. Picturing the Unseen: Polaroid Practice and the Re-enchantment of the Western World Part III Mattering Invisible Powers Chapter 8. Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil Chapter 9. Ontological Opportunism: Reanimating the Inanimate in Physics and Science Communication at CERN Chapter 10. Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda: Manifestation and Materialization in Angola Conclusion. Mediation and Variable Communications Index "Exploring how technological apparatuses "capture" invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology"-- Provided by publisher